Slava

Uh, very good.

Went out to a monastery today for their, uh, Slava, their feast day.

And, uh, obviously go, go to Saint, uh, Sava's sometime during the trip, of which I've been there many times before.

But you can't not go to Saint Sava's when you're here in Belgrade, and just go to meet some friends at my usual location at the Hotel Moskva, and, uh, just drinking coffee and rakia and seeing who comes by.

You know, it was quite a performance.

And I connected the celebration in December to Slava.

Slava is an annual feast honoring a family's patron saint.

It's deeply embedded in Serbian ethnic identity, and it has been inscribed as such on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

So as my grandpa was called Nikola, of course, that I was often during '90s asked, uh, which, uh, saint patron's day my family, uh, does celebrate.

We didn't celebrate it when I was, uh, already in the elementary school.

My grandpa died when I was the first year of the elementary school.

He died in '97, and I definitely thought that we don't celebrate Slava anymore because he's not alive.