Salt Tears for Dalmatia in the Heart of Belgrade

“All I have left are reserve seats,” the ticket officer in the Sava Centar told me about a half-hour before the “More, More” (Sea, Sea) concert, where some eminent Croatian singers and two vocal ensembles were scheduled to perform.

After seeing a much older and altogether different audience at a Bosnian folk evening some weeks back, I was puzzled by the sight of hundreds of relatively young people taking their seats in high expectation.

To a Dalmatian, klapa (male choir) singing is sacred. This is for when the fishermen come home from the sea and visit the local cantina in the evening. Divided into groups of four or five men, they sing of heartache, their song echoed by the coarse walls of a wine-perfumed konoba (cantina).

It would have been more understandable if members of the older generation, full of seaside holiday nostalgia and identifying that with the moment when they first kissed some youth at an odmaraliste (vacation area), had reacted so emotionally.

But how was it that people just little over my age had filled Belgrade’s Sava Centar Hall with sparkles of expectation and long, passionate applause? By the third klapa song, when they said, “Now, we're going to sing something from the Sibenik region,” the girls next to me were almost trembling.

These young people, in fact, are the offspring of people who had fled the war-torn seaside and hinterland around Sibenik. Their parents, full of love and pride for their home of white rock and blue skies, had passed on their love of klapska pisma (klapa song) to their children.

I could easily imagine that to those children, growing up in the hermetic atmosphere of 1990s Belgrade, stories and tunes of Dalmatia were fairytales of the better world that their parents had lived in.

On Sunday, that world felt closer than ever. With every song being received with emotions I’d never seen before at a concert, it was clear this was a special night.

Whatever bitterness the audience had carried through their wartime lives, they embraced these sons of their native soil with dignity and openness. Occasionally, moments before a song started, they shouted the names of their native towns and villages at which the performers onstage smiled warmly.

The musicians were a little uneasy with this sea of sentiment in the beginning but as the night unveiled, their voices grew stronger and more determined as the applause grew.

“Dobra vecer Beograde” - Good evening Belgrade - the leader of one klapa said. He paused, as his voice broke. He gave audience a long look and continued: “You can hardly imagine how it feels for us to be here.”

These men, guardians of the purest expression of Croatian maritime spirit, had come to a place that in the 1990s was a symbol to many Croats of Serbia’s attempt to rob them of their chief jewels. It would be difficult to imagine a better place for catharsis.

Not long ago, as I was doing a feature on a very special club on Ada Ciganlija, I was talking to the owner. I found out that he had come to Belgrade from the port city of Zadar just before the war. Despite his lack of desire to talk about reconciliation processes, I dared ask if he would bring a klapa to his club, where musicians perform at weekends.

At first, he just said “OK”, rather routinely, and we continued talking. As we said goodbye, he turned towards the cabin, but after a few steps he stopped and waited for a second or two. Then he turned around, came back to me and said with the joy of a child who had just discovered his much-loved toy was not lost after all: “You know, the klapa idea... Let's do it.”