You are currently browsing the daily archive for August 26th, 2008.
…about the savage brigandry of the Balkans are given a new lease on life after news like this:
“Romanian Town Under Siege After Mob Murder
Beta News Agency reports that “up to 600 police and gendarmes” are out in the streets of Craiova after the murder of Ion Parvu, a criminal gang leader.
Previously, Parvu won EUR 50,000 playing with a man identified as Catalin Mavriche.
But doubts that he cheated caused a brawl. Parvu then produced a sword to cut Mavriche’s face, after which he fired a shot from a revolver into Parvu’s head, killing him.”
“Parvu then produced a sword to cut Mavriche’s face”, Robert Kaplan and Rebecca West combined couldn’t outdo that.
The Bob Marley statue in Banatski Sokolac
I got no less than three different emails about this yesterday, so I guess it deserves some attention: The tiny northern Serbian town of Banatski Sokolac unveiled the first statue of BOB MARLEY to ever stand on European soil. Serbian and Croatians joined to dedicate the statue to “peace and tolerance”, which Marley reportedly promoted through his music. The base reads “Bob Marley, Freedom Fighter Armed with a Guitar”.
“This is fabulous. Serbia is now registered on the charts of modern culture with this statue of the ‘apostle of tolerance.’ I am very happy,” a 26 year old from Novi Sad told the AFP.
The Bruce Lee statue in Mostar
There is a bizarre tendency in post-war ex-Yugoslavia to memorialize pop figures as representatives of peace and multi-ethnic tolerance. In 2005, Mostar, one of the most divided communities in Bosnia today, unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Bruce Lee. According to the BBC, Bruce Lee is seen as “a symbol against ethnic division”.
The cult of fictional personalities deepens: When a spate of floods and landslides in the Serbian village of Zitiste led its residents to believe the village was cursed, the villagers erected a statue of Rocky Balboa in hopes of ending their run of bad luck.
