Banja Luka, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a rather complex city that is supposed to be ethnically clean. What was it like growing up in the Borik neighborhood and witnessing the violent evictions of non-Serbs in the early 1990s? Sonja Lakić tells a story through the eyes of apartments and Yugoslav modernist housing, zooming in on the post-Yugoslav Homo Faber inhabiting the post-Yugoslav city.
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In this piece, I get to tell my own (post-)Yugoslav (housing) story, both an emotional ecology and a eulogy of the Yugoslav collective housing in my hometown of Banja Luka, where I did not choose to settle, but about which I am still quite curious.
We, the tenants: a glimpse of Yugoslav collective housing
In the 1980s, my paternal grandfather, the retired major of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) – who made sure to establish his own persona by engraving the latter inscription in a tiny plate attached to the entrance door of his apartment – swapped the spacious apartment that JNA provided him with for two smaller units. This step of no importance for the Yugoslav mankind was a giant leap for my parents and I: this is how we got to be the tenants of the 1970s marvel of Yugoslav modernism – the neighbourhood of Borik.
We made ourselves at home in a four-story apartment building that the locals called a ‘lamela,’ settling into a rather modern and bright apartment that was officially classified as a two-bedroom apartment. Aside from the fact that we had only one real bedroom – the living room served as a dormitory when necessary – our family home was of ingenious, textbook design, meticulously divided into two different so-called day and night zones.
We lived our Brotherhood and Unity tale with around twenty other families, easily blending with each other: nobody was born (or raised) to stand out anyways. We were a bunch of decent people, rather polite and law-abiding Yugoslavs who were always there for each other, while acting in accordance with ‘kućni red’ (the rules of the house). Accordingly, we never ever made noise on workdays from 2pm until 5pm. Inside our apartments, we all did what the State encouraged us to do – we enjoyed individuality hence the consumerist-driven freedom, buying furniture and equipping our homes according to personal preferences.
To be honest, my mother’s personal aesthetic set us apart from other families we were surrounded by: my parents radically challenged the original architectural design of our apartment, making it unlike any other. They changed the original color of the windows and doors, repainted the radiators, covered the walls with different colored drawings, mirrors or cork panels, and finally embarked on do-it-yourself projects and building things. These included a rather avant-garde wardrobe and the conversion of a dining room into an extra bedroom.
As proud owners of the famous Yugoslavian passport, my parents often traveled abroad and introduced us to foreign goods such as Hungarian buttercream ‘vajkrem’ or waterproof wallpaper bought in Trieste. My mother also had the opportunity to buy things ‘na rate’ (in monthly installments), which made us the only family to own the famous Cento Gradi, the steam cleaner that our neighbors, who often borrowed it, called Gradimir. This made us typical Yugoslavs, described by Patrick Hyder Patterson as those who establish themselves as “Homo consumens yugoslavicus – the savvy seekers of the Good Life.”
The days of our Yugoslav life – as I discovered before starting elementary school – were slightly dysfunctional. First, there was the aforementioned disobedience of my parents; second, my best friend’s parents glazed their balcony and turned it into additional storage space. In addition, our neighbor J. was using the common area of the building in a completely new, and therefore against the rules, way – she wrapped herself in tons of plastic bags and gym clothes and ran up and down the stairs to lose weight (which she did, and became everyone’s hero). Finally, G., a teenage girl in love, performed the greatest escape of all time, sliding down several pieces of bedding she had tied to herself and landing from the third-floor balcony directly into the arms of her beloved boyfriend.
These glitches in the perfect Yugoslav collective housing matrix – as I will learn decades later, reading one of my favorite books of all times – were a particular form of thinking against societal conventions and quite harmless “glimpses of disorder, nothing more.” I translate(d) them as glimmers of hope, as in people making a choice hence deciding to be(come) whoever they are supposed to be.
Of life quakes: the metamorphoses of the homeland
In the early 1990s, it was not only G.’s relationship that came to an abrupt end: my homeland also fell apart. I vividly remember the moment when I understood that something was seriously wrong: looking at my elementary school report book, I noticed a radical change in my beloved teacher’s handwriting. Instead of using the Latin alphabet, she was writing in Cyrillic for the first time.
Originally built to be earthquake-resistant, our ‘lamela’ suffered significant life quakes and the lives of all Yugoslavs changed overnight. Our neighbors left abruptly, sometimes without even saying goodbye. Those who stayed tried to stay together. New people moved in. Male figures disappeared almost completely from our daily lives: they were away on (someone else’s) business. Some never returned. We, the people of central heating, hot water and electricity, which suddenly became history, had to improvise a lot, often inventing all sorts of things, such as kerosene lamps. An important addition to the life of an average family was a stove, which almost no one knew how to operate; truth be told, we were not a people of fire and chimneys.
In this period of radical metamorphoses of all kinds, I expanded my personal vocabulary, enriching it with words like ‘izbjeglice’ (refugees) and ‘deložacije.’ When I heard a school friend of mine pronounce ‘deložacije’ out loud while bragging about an apartment she was going to move into with her parents, I admired her for being super intelligent and beat myself up for being rather stupid and having no idea what she was talking about. I wished neither of us ever had to find out.
‘Deložacije’ was a synonym for the 1993 amendments to the Law on Housing Relations and, precisely, the newly introduced policy of ‘rationalization.’ Although the Law originally introduced it as a rather benign non-obligatory process of apartment swapping, ‘rationalization’ took on the form of (massive) evictions that often unfolded with no precise criteria and without previously obtaining any personal consent, targeting tenants of the non-Serb ethnicity, as well as the elderly and vulnerable Serbs. Those considered unsuitable were replaced with those considered of a better fit – namely then-considered elites and those that the Law recognized as a priority, such as internally displaced people and refugees, war participants, casualties, and handicapped persons. I still remember Doctor H. from across the street calling for help from his balcony.
Still, counting my blessings, I was privileged not to be exposed to direct war action. Most nights I slept in my own bed. Not everyone was so lucky. Speaking of luck, humanitarian aid originally intended for U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam in the 1970s exposed me to cool, exotic foods like peanut butter. The thing tasted so good, considering the expiration date.
At home, in the post-Yugoslav city: homeowners in brief
Oh, the places we went to during the post-war years (that include pretty much every second from the 1995-signed Dayton Peace Agreement to the present day)! Technically, we traveled without moving, waking up in a whole new world characterized by practices such as ‘šverc’ (smuggling) and ‘korupcija’ (corruption). Most of the ordinary decent people discovered new kinds of shopping ‘na teku,’ paying for their groceries if/when they had money to do so, and by what was written in ‘teka’ itself – a notebook usually kept under the counter of small neighborhood shops. For us, the tenants, our life cycle came to an end in the early 2000s, after the privatization of housing was completed. We ceased to exist and were reborn at the same moment, assuming the new identity of homeowners.
The only rule of the post-Yugoslav homeowner is: one does not talk about them as homeowners (as in, average property owners). This is a distinct species. Always in tune with their needs and/or aesthetics, post-Yugoslav homeowners go against the original architect-prescribed design, constantly providing all sorts of spaces with new meaning and significance. They alter their apartments and appropriate courtyards, passages, building entrances, and hallways, following their own moral compass, being rather ignorant of the conventions of the society they inhabit. The post-Yugoslav homeowners are the post-Yugoslav Homo Faber, the mastermind behind what I call the phenomenon of the balconology that first and foremost translates as the emblem of the post-Yugoslav city, i.e. illegally glazed balconies.
The post-Yugoslav Homo Faber is the ambassador of specific do-it-yourself culture also known as informality. They are the great minds that think alike “the resident architects,” who, as Esra Akcan suggests, write new architectural history that is, similarly to their homes, constantly in the making. (It took me thirty-five years and dozens of inner partition walls that my parents demolished to understand that they belonged to this species exactly.) These world-makers, who are responsible for the afterlife of Yugoslav modernism, are the epitome of the new post-Yugoslav practice of housing, which revolves around a specific form of self-care, in which one grows at home in oneself, in defiance of the official architectural program. They not only make and remake the post-Yugoslav city – they are the city itself.
The post-Yugoslav city of Homo Faber, creator, and curator of their own lives, the book in the making, one nation, under balconology, zero responsibility, glimmers of hope and homes for all.
Oh, the stories I cannot wait to tell!
Note from the editors: Last September, Palgrave Macmillan published the book “The Everydayness of Cities in Transition: Micro Approaches to Material and Social Dimensions of Change” that Sonja Lakić co-edited with Patrícia Pereira and Graça Índias Cordeiro. Lakić describes this book as a get-together of researchers who shed light on true colours of cities shining through; this is, at least, what she attempted to do in the chapter that she dedicated to the post-Yugoslav city. In this reading of the holy trinity of her curiosity, i.e. Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Niš (Serbia) and Podgorica (Montenegro), she describes the post-Yugoslav city as “the heteropolis,” a home of specific melancholy, and somewhat a mutant that has still not reached whatever the final destination is.