Football: Partizan against Red Star: Belgrade city derby divides Serbia

While a stream murmurs through the gentle landscape around Aleksandrovac, we sit with the village policeman Goran in the Ceca sports bar and sip our first plum schnapps, drunk with joy. Here in central Serbia this is not an industrially produced drink. It is nothing more and nothing less than: the local liquor specialists’ answer to everything bad in the world. And in Serbia, as is well known, it ends with football and begins with the Neanderthal, who split his neighbor’s skull with a solid club as he feasted on the wild raspberries in front of the house cave.

Today, just one new roundabout is enough to drive people completely crazy, says Goran with a smile. One of these has been decorating the entrance to Aleksandrovac for six months – and has since led to numerous accidents among residents of the city and neighboring communities. Already in the first half hour after the opening of the brand new roundabout (and previously completely unknown in this area, a traffic-controlling construction miracle) the first serious injuries were reported because all road users became dizzy while merging and they speared each other onto their bonnets at full speed.

Is this still motorsport, or is it bordering on serious bodily harm, philosophizes village bull Goran, looking at the telly in the bar where, in slow motion, Partizan gets a goal from city rivals Red Star Belgrade. God’s mangiest dog, f*** your mother, shouts Goran as the convinced Grobari (Partizan fan, called gravedigger).

Yes, football, an eternal source of joy and strife. The small wine town of Aleksandrovac is also divided into Partizan and Red Star. There is hardly a house wall that is not decorated with cheap sayings and every traffic sign is crying out to be covered with stickers by restless lunatics. The fans are particularly busy working at the only pedestrian traffic light. It was ceremoniously installed twenty years ago by a group of Belgrade politicians to manifest the new era’s attack on the semi-rural town. Unfortunately, or thank God (opinions differ greatly here), there was only one traffic light, which was installed on the arterial road in a completely pointless manner so that every visitor to the town could admire this great achievement in detail.

For the first ten years, the traffic lights changed at a rate that only politicians from Belgrade could understand: from green to yellow or red for 24 hours. For ten years it has only flashed yellow. After two elderly mothers were knocked down there by adolescent ne’er-do-wells, no one dares to cross the street in this place of death anymore.

In any case, the metal arm of the traffic light has stickers all the way to the top. When we leave the last pub at dark hour, we immediately put our stickers on at the traffic light, which flashes beautifully in constant yellow, under the expert guidance of the village bull, and put an end to Red Star in terms of stickers.