Serbs Again Try For Record-Breaking Sausage

The small village of Turija, some 30 km north of Vojvodina’s capital Novi Sad, lives for their international sausage festival in the last week of February, when each year they try to break the world record and make a sausage at least a centimetre longer than the year before.

This year the sausage vying for its place in the Guinness Book of Records will be 2,025 metres long. It took 24 pigs to produce the 2,023 metre long sausage that took the crown two years ago.

The people of Turija say only the Chinese were "healthy competition” to them, but the nearest they got was when they produced a 600-metre long sausage.

“The next year we made a sausage twice as long and since than no one came even close,” Tomislav Milinkov said.

Kobasicijada, the Serbian name for the festival, was established spontaneously in 1984 when a group of hunters started competing in who would make the best sausages. They decided to make a festival out of it, and hosted it the next year in a local inn, “Kafana Beograd”.

Since then, they used the earnings from the festival for charity, subsidising the village kindergarten, library, school and church, or supporting orphans and children with special needs. Since 2004, the village even organises lectures on breeding pigs to help out sausage lovers with ambitions.

The sausage and the new record will be presented on Saturday.

(Reporting by Ljilja Cvekic)