A meeting with Giorgio Ursini Uršič, theatre critic who lives and works in Sarajevo, Sorinel Ghetau, director of Oxfam Italy for international cooperation in the Balkans, and Tomi Janezic, theatre director (Serbian National Theatre).

In collaboration with Oxfam Italy

In the Balkans, the twentieth century was a time of new start-outs. And it is symptomatic that one short century – there on the Adriatic (a sort of inland lake in our historical memory) – began and ended in Sarajevo: a pistol shot became a long cycle of dramatic wars.
That was the twentieth century!
A century of new start-outs, for after the shot in Sarajevo had toppled the world into its first global war, the West tried to start again from scratch – yet it always ended up entangled in horrors, conflicts, differences without further soluble. Until the last war, which destroyed the illusion of irregular socialism and which many saw as the final act of a disintegration commencing with the fall of the Hapsburg empire. And we had to set out once more from there: from the bloody ruins of shattered illusions: both the Empire’s aristocratic/enlightened illusion and Tito’s popular/bureaucratic one. New starts: that is the keynote of the lesson that reaches us today from ex-Yugoslavia.
Giorgio Ursini Uršic