The year is already two days old, and I'm only just getting round to writing a New Year post... Busy, busy...

Can I say, first up, that I'm now a bit over all the celebrating, and am looking forward to things getting back to normal? Is it OK to say that? Or is that really bad...?

We've had a very pleasant Christmas and New Year, don't get me wrong.

But all the loud music and random fireworks and over-excited children and closed shops are beginning to wear on me.

Yes, I admit it. I'm getting old.

Actually, I don't think that's it. I remember feeling the same way in New Zealand, when the country disappeared into its six-week summer/beach/Christmas weird-time, and you just longed for the point in January when it would come out again.

OK, so I've got that out of my system... Let's rewind to New Year's Eve, when we went out to join in with the festivities in the centre of Bar.

Most interesting was the concert, given by Lepa Brena, "the most famous Yugoslav singer of the 1980s, the Yugoslav Madonna if you will..." I'll come back to her in a minute, but the music was good. It reminded our untutored ears of Turkish music, but we know too little about Balkans art to make any sensible commentary.


Fireworks had been going off spasmodically ever since we arrived. Come midnight, there was a countdown, but no official display of pyrotechnics. A large proportion of the attendees seemed to have brought fireworks of their own, however, and they barrelled them off with gay abandon. One came skittering along the pavement at one point, so you definitely had to keep your eyes open.

Anarchic, but undeniably celebratory!

I'd really hoped for bells... This part of Europe is so good at bells, and bells at the turn of the year are so inspiring. But no bells.

We watched the fireworks for a while, and then wended our way home.

OK, now back to Lepa Brena. She's been controversial in her day, firstly for projecting an image that some judged too sexualized, and secondly for not saying the things about the 1990s war that were expected of her. At that point, sociologist Zlatan Delic describes her situation like this: "Lepa Brena was stripped of her country, her megastar status, and her audiences, who either fled the region or became divided by the brutal ethnic conflict. Suddenly, the singer became synonymous with the past, and she was politically discredited because, as a prominent public figure, she did not speak publicly against the wars.”

But she came back. Which is in itself a good motif for a new year.

And her theme is the underlying unity of what used to be Yugoslavia. She said in an interview in 2008: "If someone has the right to declare themselves as a Croat or a Serb, I have the right to declare myself as a Yugoslav. I am neither a Croatian nor a Serbian woman, I am a Yugoslav woman. Yugoslavia was special in many ways. I admit, I am Yugonostalgic."

Yugonostalgia. That's a thing. It refers to a fondness for the old system, and in some cases it implies melancholy or longing. But it also encompasses young people, who are more concerned with taking a good look at the positives and negatives of the period when Yugoslavia was one country. According to sociologist Larisa Kurtovic, quoted by article author Jessica Bateman: "There’s a great deal of appreciation for the socialist period, and it’s associated with economic growth and vast improvements in the standards of living."

Bateman herself recalls visiting the grave of Josip Broz Tito in Belgrade, in company with a steady stream of people who had come to mark the former leader's birthday. An 18-year-old speaks to her of his interest in the Tito period: "It was a great time. Everyone loved each other." Others she meets talk of the strength of the old Yugoslav passport, which contrasts with the current requirement for visas to enter most countries.

Some of this is reflected in the results of a poll carried out in 2017, which found that 81 per cent of respondents in Serbia believed the breakup of Yugoslavia had been bad for their country (in Bosnia, the figure was 77 per cent, and in Slovenia 45 per cent -- but in Kosovo, unsurprisingly, just 10 per cent).

We've come across a fair number of monuments to Tito in recent weeks:




It all reminds me a little of the nostalgia for Suharto that we witnessed in Indonesia.

Anyway, yesterday -- New Year's Day, aka Day 37 of our journey -- was overcast and gloomy. We'd hoped to visit Old Bar, which is a bit outside town, but given the weather, the uncertainty of public-holiday transport, and the unknown degree of pedestrian-friendliness that we'd encounter on the road if we walked, we decided just to repeat our sea walk of yesterday:





Today we went by rail to Podgorica (more on that in a separate post). Our train, very cutely, was still in party mode (and may well be the one providing the 0200 service that the authorities sensibly put in place for the duration of the festivities).



So, we've had a start to the year that is very different from the way 2023 opened. But I hope the energy and the interest levels will carry on into subsequent weeks and months.