After the success of the bachelorette party, Ana asked Kirke and me if we wanted to go to the wedding too. Originally, Kirke and I had planned to spend the day sightseeing, while Hanna was busy with Ana – but you can’t say no to an invitation to a Serbian wedding. That’s just too great an opportunity to pass up. So we dived into our bags and dug out the nicest dresses we could find (in my case, a flowery thing not remotely fit for a wedding, but what can you do? I was backpacking. I would be the shabbiest dressed girl at the party), put up our hair and jumped into a taxi.
The celebrations started at noon in Ana’s parent’s apartment in Novi Beograd. The small rooms were completely filled up with relatives and friends eating cold meats and drinking rakija, dressed in shine and glitter. Ana’s dress was incredible, all lace and pearls, big enough to fill up an entire room.
When Bosco, Ana’s future husband, arrived, all girls gathered in Ana’s old bedroom, while both Ana’s brother and sister blocked the door. According to tradition, Bosco had to pay both of Ana’s siblings, as a kind of reversed dowry, before he could take his bride. Nowadays, the money that is offered is only small change, but back in the day, I guess it used to be done seriously. When Bosco finally got through the door, Ana was hiding behind all us girls. It was very much a game. So when he finally reached her, there were kisses and hugs and photos taken with a number of different constellations of people.
Out on the street, a small brass band had started playing, and we were told to follow the crowd outside.
There, everyone started dancing on the street, to the music of the brass band, while people in the houses around us looked out their windows.
It was a hot day, and bottles of water were passed around.
From the dance party in the street, all of us somehow made it to the church, a cute little thing just a couple of blocks from Ana’s parent’s house.
From the inside, though, it was a beautiful temple, with dark paintings in the ceiling and on the walls. There are no chairs in an orthodox church, at least not in the Serbian ones, so all the guests gathered around the walls, while Ana and Bosco walked up to the priest in front of the altar. Then started a long and, to my very untrained eye, complicated sequence of rituals, to the constant singing dialogue between the priest and the chanter. At one point, Ana and Bosco walked around in the temple holding candles, and then two huge crowns were placed on their heads. At no point did I hear any of them saying ‘I do’, but that might just be because I didn’t understand a word of what was said and sung during the ceremony.
When the ceremony was over, and some additional photographing had been done, everyone gathered outside the church and the couple walked out, while people threw coins at them (as if it was confetti – seriously inconvenient if one of them was hit in the face). The bouquet was thrown and some more photos taken, and then everyone packed themselves up into cars again and started heading to the wedding reception.
At the reception, everything was decorated in white and lilac, with balloons hanging from the ceiling. There was a live band that played all through the night, we were served three courses of savory dishes, lots of meat, and the alcohol just kept on coming.
For desert, there was seven different cakes – and really good ones too, filled with chocolate mousse and berries and vanilla cream. At one point, a civil wedding officiant arrived and preformed the civil wedding ceremony too, and this time I did hear them say ‘I do’ to each other (even though the rest of the words were lost on me).
And there was dancing. Lots of dancing. The volume of the live music in the rooms was extremely high – so high, in fact, that I had to wear my ear-plugs. We got a lot of attention, being foreigners and all, and occasionally on the dance floor men grabbed us, wanted to dance with us, spoke Serbian to us. I couldn’t handle the attention, all these drunk men making such obvious passes at me, it made me really uncomfortable. But Kirke found a really cool dance partner, a guy almost as theatrical and dramatic in his dancing style as she is – and they completely dominated the dance floor.
Another thing that kind of complicated the night was the fact that people were smoking inside. They do that a lot in the Balkans, smoke in trains and restaurants and at wedding receptions. And I’ve never really had trouble with that before, but here for some reason, I got a really bad reaction to that smoke-filled air. My eyes itched and watered, so much that I even started crying, and my nose started running. So every now and then, I had to go outside, to clear my eyes and get a break from the loud music. Usually, Hanna came with me. Kirke was busy dancing with her perfect partner.
There were photographers walking around, taking photos of everyone. At first, I thought they had been hired by Ana and Bosco – but when two girls started walking around the reception rooms, handing out photos to the guests, demanding money for them, I realized that the photographers actually belonged to the establishment where the reception was being held. Kind of a strange way to handle the whole wedding photo thing, if you ask me. And the photos were not cheap, either. We bought a couple, but by no means all that had been printed of us, and I though what a huge waste of photo paper. After that, I was a lot more careful with when to pose in front of the camera.
Better to take the photos ourselves.
Due to Kirke not wanting to stop dancing with her perfect partner, we were three of the last ones to leave the wedding. Bosco arranged for us to get a ride with a family friend of his, a really nice man who on his free time traveled around the world with his son, going to football matches. He had been everywhere, even to Sweden.
When we finally reached the apartment, it was past one. We all crashed into bed, happy and completely exhausted. The wedding had been going on for more than 12 hours. 12 hours of intense dancing, eating, drinking and posing for photos. They really are extreme things, Serbian weddings. But most importantly, incredibly fun!
Katja Malmborg 