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Insights Discovery

It's amazing how different people react to the same thing. Consider the famous question, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" What do you see inside such glass when you spot it on the table? The water or the air? This is, of course, not a school-grade sort of question. Actually, there is no right or wrong answer here. There's no definite reason to consider anyone thinking that the glass is half full to be overly optimistic or those who see the emptiness of the glass to be unreasonably realistic. It is just a point of view and nothing more. But it tells a bit about your character, or how Carl Jung, a well-known Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, defined it—your personality type.

The point of inquiries like this one is simply in the fact that if we ask ourselves enough questions, they would have the potential to unveil our personality type fully, or to a high degree of accuracy. However, we would need to be careful in both selecting the questions and defining all resulting personality types. There are numerous personality tests within psychology, and of those based on Carl Jung's study, the most comprehensive is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assigns you a value from four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is producing a four-letter test result. For example, if your test is resulting in a dominance of introversion combined with intuition while you are basically a thinking person with perceiving trait, you would be assigned an "INTP" personality type.


Perhaps most of the psychology in relation to personality types is based on Jung's "Analytical Psychology", the phrase he coined in 1912 when he published "Psychology of the Unconscious", his breakthrough study, which firstly relates to his split-up with Sigmund Freud after six years of collaborating in the field. In this book, he establishes for the first time that his new theory focused on the collective unconscious instead of Freud's conception of libido and the importance of sexual development. When he first read it, Freud muttered the word "heresy" and felt that Jung had "lost his way" from that point on. Perhaps, just like with the 'glass half filled or half empty', this dispute between the two extraordinary men from the history of psychology has no definite winner or loser. They might both be right, depending on the point of view. After all, the human mind is driven by a still mysterious engine we keep trying to fully understand.

However, what's interesting in regard to the Freud-Jung dispute is what Jung said some years after the split-up. According to Jung, the main difference between him and Freud was their personality types being introvert and extravert, respectively. Their attitude types were pretty much opposite, as the first type was persuaded by the voice of their inner self, while the second found their interest inexorably drawn to external things. In his book 'Psychological Types', published in 1921, he said that "since we all swerve rather more towards one side or the other, we naturally tend to understand everything in terms of our own type".


But, if we get back to the personality test, the most obvious question is, what would its application be? Other than in medical/psychiatric practice, I mean. Of course, we all know ourselves well, so there's no point in some test telling us what we really are. We already know that. If you have been friends with somebody for a long time, surely there is no need for any test to tell you the obvious about what you have already learned about your friend from the experience. Clearly, and maybe the only use of such a test would be to learn about the personality of someone whom you don't really know well. However, the test, by its nature, is extremely personal, and it naturally raises a wave of privacy issues that are in most countries protected by the law, especially after previous decades of the expansion of the internet.

Keeping in mind everything we know so far, what's left and where one such test could be more than useful is, no doubt, all kinds of business environments. The offices are, by definition, filled with lots of colleagues, and the advent of knowing everyone's personality type would benefit communication between people and enhance productivity significantly. Providing, of course, that employers and employees are fine with sharing their personality test results with each other.


Finally, at the end, we come to the titled personality test that was created exclusively as a business application. Based on Dr. Yolanda Jacobi's interpretation of Carl Jung's theory of psychological type, along with other theories from psychology, 'Insights Discovery' is a simple and accessible four-color model designed to help us better understand ourselves and others. If you check the above picture, the basic colors are divided between introversion/extraversion (vertically) and thinking/feeling (horizontally). The test itself is a 25-frame questionnaire of 100 word pairs, which, when completed, produces the Insights Discovery Personal Profile. Of course, no person is entirely described by one of the colors alone. After all, we are all a mix of different traits that we display differently based on different occasions, environments, moods, etc. Hence, Insight Discovery offers a total of eight personality types, which are shown in the center circle with four more types, which represent a blend of two colors.

Please find more details in the references below, as I won't go deeper into the science behind 'Insights Discovery' than this. However, if you decide to take the test, you will get a result printed in detail explaining your personality type on more than 20 pages, where you can find your key strengths but also potential weaknesses along with healthy tips for communication between types for both you and the others. What you also will get is a nice little colored Lego-like brick, which represents your colors. If assembled right, it shows your exact place on the Insights Discovery wheel, and it can do it for both your conscious and less conscious positions.

This little one below is mine.

 

Norse Valkyrie vs Slavic Vila

It is hard to pinpoint the exact period in human history when the religiosity we are all familiar with today emerged and started to form itself with all of the colorful myths, supernatural stories, vivid deities, and numerous superpowered entities. It happened probably at some point around 10,000 BC in the same period of time when humans slowly progressed from being pure hunters and gatherers into the next stage of civilization and started to build modern settlements with domesticated animals and cultivated plants. No doubt, religiosity, superstition, and spiritualism existed all the way from the beginning in history when our ancestors started to paint cave walls, but only the Neolithic revolution and the invention of agriculture gave us enough free time to start daydreaming and to think outside pure survival. If we compare all previous beliefs with vignettes, we can safely say that the evolution of religiosity after Neolithic revolution began to fill volumes of graphic novels.


According to the theory, slowly after the beginning of the Holocene period, the first large prehistoric population of Eurasia that spoke Proto-Indo-European languages was formed. They were the ancestor of Indo-European languages and the source of Proto-Indo-European mythology, from which all pagan religions arose in different areas of Europe and Asia. This is why we can easily compare different deities and see all the similarities they inherited from the proto-times. Take, for example, gods of lightning, thunder, and weather in general. The deity of these properties emerged in all different mythologies, and Norse Thor, Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Slavic Perun, Hindu Indra, Hurrian Tar, Hittite Tarḫunna, and many others were no doubt based on a Proto-Indo-European deity called Perkwunos.

The similarities do not end with the deities but also extend to other colorful characters from old myths. Last week I stumbled upon one amazing piece of art in Churchill Park at Kastellet citadel in Copenhagen. It was a 114-year-old sculpture of a Valkyrie by famous Norwegian artist Stephan Sinding. It was probably the best 3D/live-action street art I have ever seen before. It reflects everything about what Valkyrie really is in old Norse mythology. The word literally means "chooser of the slain", and it is portraying a female figure guiding the souls of deceased Nordic soldiers either to Fólkvangr, Freyja's afterlife, or to Valhalla, Odin's immortality hall. Old Norse literature describes valkyries either as purely supernatural or as human maidens with certain supernatural powers. Both types of beings were associated with honesty, splendor, and gold, but also with bloodshed and brutality in battle.


In South Slavic mythology, a similar being, vila, represents a female supernatural being who is sympathetic to people, but she could also be vengeful and brutal. She is depicted as an extremely beautiful girl with golden hair, dressed in long, flowing robes, and armed usually with bows and arrows. She exists on a liminal plane between nature and culture, between gods and humans, constantly travelling between one realm and the other to interact with the heroes and villains of the epics. Even though both Valkyries and Vilas developed in different religious environments, it is hard not to spot various similarities between the two. The whiteness and glowing quality of the vilas is mirrored in the description of the valkyries, and both figures are to be found in the sky in most of their depictions with connection to lightning and thunder.*

The warrior aspects of the Valkyrie are unquestionable; they are "vowed to war", and their role is primarily on the battlefield. The mythical Viles are similarly portrayed and often described as wearing armor with bows and arrows and envisioned as powerful, supernatural warriors. There are convincing resemblances in regard to the connection between Viles and Valkyries and heroes in the epics. Most often this relationship is a warrior bond, but this relationship can become both sexual and malicious. Just as a vila can manipulate heroes or villains to murder those of her choosing, so too the valkyries are reputed to play deadly games with the heroes with whom they associate.*


Although the nature of the valkyries' flight is portrayed as a magical ride on horseback, whereas the vile most often fly unmounted with the use of bird wings, it is not uncommon for the vile to ride horses or deer. Both, Viles and Valkyries, are often described as gathering in groups within the epics and referring to each other as sisters. It is fair to suggest that the Valkyrie and the Vila are rooted in the same figure; their differences lie only within the cultural differences between the Slavs and the Germanic peoples. Perhaps the most likely attestable age of the two figures lies back to the 6th century CE, when the south Slavic tribes were still located in the North of Europe.*

From there, we could push the date back even further to the time of Proto-Indo-European times, especially if we extend this comparison to apsarā, beings with similar traits from Indian religion and mythology. The various trios of birth-fate-death-associated women in Greek and Roman folklore also appear to originate from the same source. The direct ancestor of Valkyries is most likely Proto-Germanic walakuzjǭ, which stands for walaz (battle wound) +‎ kuzą (choice, decision).


Historical origins of Vilas include the various traditions, especially Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, English, and French folklore. The word "vilenski" was used as an adjective, meaning "enchanted", but also became a generic term for various enchanted creatures during the late Middle English period. Nevertheless, the proto-origin is no doubt the same as the Valkyrie's and South Slavic versions, especially in the Middle Ages. Serbia survived even Christianizing the old beliefs and ended in colorful epics and poems of the 14th century and later. Although, to be perfectly fair and precise, the mythological Vilas from the oldest myths and tales and the folklorized one in epics and poems are somewhat different in a way that folklore is centered on human affairs, heroes, and battles, and supernatural beings only serve as a side story, so to speak.

Always, when I am reading or writing about old myths and tales, I can't help but wonder what a comparison would be of a typical religious person from the old times and today. It seems to me that old stories were much more colorful and picturesque than the ones from the religious beliefs of a singular god. Even a small thing like a simple walk through the woods would be different for somebody in BC times for the simple fact that, from all they knew, not only natural plants and animals could be found there. For many, the forest behind the house could also be a magical gateway to the supernatural world, and even the smallest unexplained event of natural behavior (like a methane leak or weird animal demeanor) could be immediately linked to the supernatural. But this sounds like a nice topic for another story.


Image refs:
https://vrallart.com/artworks/milos-marko_i_vila/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Dadd...Yellow_Sands.jpg
https://www.saatchiart.com/...The-Valkyries

* A Treatise on the South Slavic Vila by Dorian Jurić 
https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/9407/1/fulltext.pdf
This article contains quotes/paraphrases from Dorian's theses

Goddess Zhiva (MPJ story):
https://www.mpj.one/2018/08/goddess-zhiva.html

Serbian Vampires (MPJ story):
https://www.mpj.one/2020/10/serbian-vampires.html

Fairies of Naissus (MPJ story):
https://www.mpj.one/2015/11/fairies-of-naissus.html

Refs
https://templeilluminatus.com/forum/topics/valkyrie?groupUrl=the-triple-goddess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie
https://www.worldhistory.org/Valkyrie/
http://www.mcurtis.net/legend-of-keres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vila_(fairy)
https://slavicmythologyandtales.wordpress.com/2020/08/15/vile-and-rusalki-part-2/
https://sr.m.wikipedia.org/sr-ec/ВилаРавијојла

 

In the Footsteps of Pino Lella

It doesn't happen often that after reading a book, you can compare most of the places and some of the portrayed characters with real sites and buildings along with real protagonists from the historical story. Actually, this never happened to me before, and after I'd reached the last cover of 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky', a novel written by Mark Sullivan, published in 2017, I saw the rare opportunity of visiting the city where it all happened and where all the sites still stand today. Not much later, and after my entire family read the novel or at least got familiar with the story, we packed our backpacks and hit the road. In the aftermath, the result is this blog post along with an embedded video story as a documentary of the half-day walking tour of Milan in Italy, where everything happened more than 70 years ago. In the spirit of a fair warning, I advise you to read the book first before watching the video since it might spoil the reading for you or to wait for an upcoming series or movie with Tom Holland in the lead role.


The novel is based on the true story of an Italian teenager, Pino Lella, who lived in Milan during the second world war and, within the last two years until the very end of WW2, helped many Jewish people escape to Switzerland over the Alps and, in the final year, acted as a spy for freedom fighters while being a personal driver for General Hans Leyers, Adolf Hitler’s left hand in northern Italy. Pino survived all the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation and deeply fell in love with Anna, a girl he met on the streets of Milan on the day of the first bombing of the city. He constantly dreamed about the future they would one day share.

This book tour would not be possible at all without fantastic Valeria Andreoli from BellaMilano, who guided us throughout Milan beautifully for almost five full hours! It was amazing to mix the real streets, all the buildings, the castle and the cathedral, hotels, the train station, and even the monumental cemetery with our vividly built images of all the places we already formed from the book and Mark Sullivan's amazing narrative.



Undoubtedly, spending three days in Milan for us provided lots of more opportunities for visiting the history back to the time all the way to Leonardo da Vinci. Around the year 1482, he moved to Milan to work for the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, as an engineer, sculptor, painter, and architect. Until 1499, when Milan was invaded by the French, he left behind the 'Last Supper', a famous mural painting of Jesus and the twelve apostles; many paintings, including 'The Virgin of the Rocks', Milan's Narvigly, the system of navigable canals to ferry people and merchandise in and out of the city, 'Leonardo`s horse', an uncompleted equestrian sculpture; and many more.

We were especially interested in Leonardo's engineering projects and his machines, models, and sketches displayed in 'Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia—Leonardo da Vinci' and within a new exhibition dedicated to this amazing man called 'Leonardo3' stationed in 'Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II', another Milan landmark from the 19th century. This second video log of Viktor's shows a glimpse of what we managed to visit and learn.



(Un)expectedly, at the end of our first visit to this great city, we have left with much more footage from what we initially planned to make with Pino Lella's and Leonardo's stories. All these are now packed in this third video embedded above, and if you like to see more of Valeria and stories hidden behind Leonardo's paintings, especially the ones he did in the Sforza Castle, if you want to learn what you need to do if you are in search of a good luck charm during your first visit to the legendary 19th-century shopping mall, or if you are eager to check out one great Italian restaurant along with a couple of more places we managed to visit, this is the video definitely worth clicking on.

As for us, I am more than sure that Milan definitely didn't see us wandering its streets for the last time. The rest of Italy too.

The book references:
https://bellamilanotours.com/footsteps-pino-lella/
https://marksullivanbooks.com/

Beneath a Scarlet Sky:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32487617-beneath-a-scarlet-sky (en)
https://www.newtoncompton.com/libro/lultimo-eroe-sopravvissuto (it)
https://www.knjizare-vulkan.rs/istorijski-roman/44294-pod-grimiznim-nebom (srb)

Museums:
https://www.museoscienza.org/en
http://www.leonardo3.net/en/
 

Fiction and Reality of Mount Olympus

I was very young when I visited Olympus for the first time. It happened during our yearly vacation in the region back then, in the eighties of the previous century. I vividly remember there was a dangerous dirt road with not much room for two vehicles to pass by, ending near one of the mountain homes with an embedded small tavern, which can really print on its portfolio that it was built on the top of gods' heavenly entrances. For some fairly strange reasons, Coca-Cola and souvlaki on the tavern's terrace felt really tasty, just as the pure and clean water from the water stream just next to it. Unfortunately, and despite all of my efforts, I couldn't see or find anything divine, out-of-worldly items, or even a glowing, shiny rock. There were no gods whatsoever. Or naked muses. Or beasts with snakes instead of hair. Or horses with wings. Or mighty heroes. Nothing. Well, I was only 10 years old. What did I know... Maybe that pair of hawks we saw flying around the highest rock across the tavern and screeching in high tones were actually Apollo and Artemis arguing about something.

On the other end, it might be that I visited Olympus during the gods' withdrawal. Way too early...


But, before I continue with the actual glimpse into modern Olympus fiction and short reviews of one hilarious book and one extraordinary comic, I think I need to write a word or two about the photo I embedded above, which might be interesting to read. This is in fact Mount Olympus (just like the highest peak shown from the air in the post header). The most famous mountain in the entire world. The mighty one. It is not the highest of them all—just slightly lower than 3K meters and not even the highest in the entire Balkans—but it was the one chosen by gods to build their own abode during the ancient times. Sitting just next to the Aegean Sea, it is the first sight you see when you travel from Thessaloniki to Athens in modern-day Greece. I took this image in 2010 from the beach in the sea resort of Leptokarya, described by Wikipedia as "the former seat of East Olympos municipality, which is part of the municipality of Dio-Olympos". During my countless visits to northern Greece in the past several decades, all of them during summer holidays, believe it or not, all of my Olympus photographs ended with a similar heavy stream of clouds above mountain peaks. It is like Olympus is always hidden in clouds for some weird meteorological reasons. Well, that was not entirely true, as I have seen Olympus naked on an occasion or two, but still, it was not often. It's like Olympus is attracting the clouds and capturing them to stay and hide its peaks.

This summer, almost forty years after my first excursion to the famous mountain, we took the perfect opportunity to board a tourist bus and venture their Olympian route, following new paved roads carrying people to the multiple resorts within the mountain base and visiting Olympus' main attractions. At least to the point where the road limits heavy buses from proceeding. The tour included the town of Litochoro, the famous Bath of Zeus, Agios Dionysios Monastery, and Old Panteleimon, a picturesque mountainous village on the slopes of the mountain. Surely seeing the sites with your own eyes has no alternative, and the next best thing is to check a couple of those travel guides and stories you can stumble on online, but as far as this post is concerned, I will leave it to my son Viktor to tell you all about it in his channel's video log we both filmed this August. If you find it pleasing, you know the YouTuber's drill—please like and subscribe... ;-)



The mountain definitely contains a beautiful charm of its own, but we all know that Olympus is best known for its part in Greek mythology, and with all its ancient fiction, it has inspired writers all over the world ever since. With some of them, the thin line between fiction and nonfiction is not really visible at once, but in the case of Michael G. Munz's amazing novel called 'Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure' one would say it is all about fiction and laugh-out-loud (LOL) moments. The gods in this comedy returned from their withdrawal after more than two thousand years with all of their entourage and got back to the active and mutual life with mortals. And they returned with a twist.

What is most interesting about the old Greek gods, compared to all of the modern religions of today, is that their godhood was not that estranged from their creation, like it is now the case with all of those Jerusalem monotheistic beliefs. Greek gods loved to mingle with mortals. And by mingle, you know what I mean, which is especially true with Zeus (probably Dionysis too). In fact, within the opening chapters of the novel, Apollo defined it best when he said that "gods are just like mortals, only... better." And that means with everything that we can use to describe ordinary people, including conspiracies, hatred, intelligence, stupidity, love, sex, affairs... It's like the Greek gods possess everything good and bad we mortals experience on a daily basis; only theirs is enhanced and powered off the charts. And of course, they could change appearances into hawks... and do other magical stuff. So, by establishing that, we can safely say that all the gods in "Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure" are more than just divine creatures. They are active characters in the story, and along with amazing Michael's narrative, which is playing with the reader on numerous occasions, it is something that gives this book, at least for me, the originality I have never experienced before. The humor is everywhere, especially in the narrative, which on many points requires a fair amount of the reader's geekery and knowledge of ancient mythology. I'll stop here with no further spoilers and only my warm recommendation.


As for the other media dealing with Olympian myths, there are numerous movies, among them "Clash of the Titans" and "Wrath of the Titans", with Perseus played by Sam Worthington and Liam Neeson as Zeus. They were not that bad movies at all, despite all my reservations, and best of all, the script of the second movie offers the answer to the ultimate question of how and why gods from Olympus ended their presence on Earth. Of course, Henry Cavill as Theseus in "Immortals" was also one of the visually great movies, with heavy usage of old Greek myths and Olympian gods in main roles.

On the other hand, the world of graphic novels never disappoints, and Rick Riordan's novels with Percy Jackson adventures recently, after debuting with two motion pictures, transferred into extraordinarily enjoyable comics. The world of demigods in the two graphic books so far looks very nice and, I have to admit, much more appealing than in movies. Perhaps because reading comics was my first love from early childhood and/or maybe because these two books were my first comics reading with the Kindle way of presenting graphic novels, but nevertheless, if you are into Olympian myths and love great fiction that emerged from old tales, my recommendation for Riordan's "Heroes of Olympus" series with "The Lost Hero" and "The Son of Neptune" goes without saying.



zViktor22 YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ

Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure
http://michaelgmunz.com/books/zeus/

The Lost Hero: The Graphic Novel
http://rickriordan.com/book/the-lost-hero-the-graphic-novel/
 

Goddess Zhiva

My great-great-grandfather was born in 1845, and he spent his entire life in the turmoil of the second half of the 19th century. Little is known about his life; after all, life in rural Serbian villages in past times wasn't really documented well, and literacy among the majority of people wasn't something our ancestors could be proud of. However, what was a major disadvantage for most people turned out to be a great opportunity for my great-great-grandfather. Besides being literate and educated, he was gifted with a human property only a few others possess. He owned a strong and melodic voice that would probably guarantee him at least a radio host job if he were born a century later. Anyhow, one of his tasks was to read newspapers, various dispatches, and communiques while standing in the center of the village square, surrounded by neighbors and people from nearby settlements. Soon enough, he earned valuable prominence in his family, and his children decided to devote our family name to him. Ever since then and after, more or less 100 years, our last name has been carrying my great-great-grandfather's, Zhiva.


Artistic presentation of Goddess Zhiva

But his name goes even further in the past. A millennium or two before my great-great-grandfather, this name belonged first to someone else entirely. Zhiva (Živa) was the name of the old Slavic goddess of life, fertility, and marriage, one of numerous terrestrial goddesses. It literally means "living, being, existing", and compared to other religions of the past, Zhiva was the goddess similar to Hera, Demeter, and Aphrodite of the ancient Olympians and very much alike goddess Sif from the old Norse mythology. Thanks to modern pop culture, especially comics and, in recent years, movie blockbusters, we are pretty familiar with the old beliefs of our ancestors in Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, but tremendous and equally colorful stories are hiding in old Slavic mythology as well. Like with our family name, in one way or another, old stories of ancient mythology survived all these years. And not just stories—the customs, celebrations, and rituals are very much alive even today, despite all the efforts from the new Christian religion that tried or are still trying to eliminate old paganism from people's minds.

Contrary to the old Greeks, Romans, or Scandinavians, who more or less occupied smaller territories, Slavs spread to vast areas of nowadays Asia and Eastern Europe. Numerous cultures and nations emerged from several migrations and gave birth to slightly different mythology of the same deities, and in different Slavic languages and histories, Zhiva is known with different names, and the most prominent ones were Zhibog (life god), Živa, Жива, Siwa, Šiwa, etc. Along with the variety of names comes the variety of descriptions, and searching for definite and the most accurate ancient text is the mission impossible or one of those Sisyphean tasks if we want to stay in the realm of old legends and stories. However, I did find one mutual description of her that pretty much covers all sources, and it explains the goddess as: "Zhiva is the main female goddess in the world of the Slavs. Like the god Svarog, she covers the whole world with his light and closely follows the basic laws of the Kind. Goddess Zhiva gives tenderness, care, kindness, heart, and care to all pregnant women and lactating mothers." Zhiva existed as a supreme goddess, and she was the offspring of the main Slavic deities (Rod as a main supreme god, creator of everything; Svarog, god of heaven; and three great goddesses), a sister goddess to other female deities (Vesna, Morana, and Lada, terrestrial goddesses related to Earth seasons), the sister of the god of thunder and lightning Perun, and the wife of Dabog (Dazhbog), the god of sun, justice, and well-being.

Artistic presentation of Slavic temple

I can imagine that it is very hard to enumerate all Slavic gods, their relations, and all their pantheons due to the vast diversity of Slavic people, but if we consider only South Slavs who migrated to the Balkans at some point in the 6th century, one thing is for sure. They immediately collided with upcoming and already established Christianity that took heavy root in the Roman and Byzantine empires. Almost immediately, missionaries are sent to start conversion and kill old beliefs for good. It turned out it was another wave of Sisyphean tasks that required centuries to process. Serbs accepted the new religion only later in the 9th century, but not entirely. While god in plural ended with its existence almost fully with the start of the second millennium, many customs remained until today. For example, Serbian people still celebrate a family religious day called slava, which was dedicated to the god the family had chosen to be their protector in the old days. Christianity never succeeded in eliminating this custom and only managed to convert it into worshiping Christian saints instead. What was once a day dedicated to Perun, god of thunder, is now replaced with Saint Elijah (Sveti Ilija), which is also connected with thunders and lightnings in Christian tales. Old Serbs believed that gods could take the form of ordinary people who were visiting family homes at random times, and one of the related customs was warm hospitality toward strangers who knocked on their doors. The oak was the holy tree, and all the temples were built out of it instead of using heavy and everlasting stones. In the aftermath, no Slavic holy sights and temples persisted today. In temples dedicated to goddess Zhiva, high priests wore ritual hats or helmets with horns, which were symbols of fertility among Slavic people and other religious folklore throughout Europe in the old times.

Aside from Slavic deities, Serbs believed in other godly creatures who had influence over nature, like ghosts, fairies, demons, dragons, and forest mothers, and also human-like creatures that originated from people like vampires, witches, werewolves, etc. The list is endless. To better live with all those beasts and scary underworld monsters, many rituals are invented and practiced all over. One in particular is still alive in Eastern Serbia in the event called Rusalje, where women fall into trances after ritually caroling and dancing and virtually connect to the ghosts and afterlife world in order to predict future events and understand upcoming dangers. Interesting facts are that many women refused to exert 'the healing procedure' in local monasteries performed by Christian priests and willingly performed the ritual every year. Of course, these were the extremes, but there were other more benevolent rituals that were practiced in the past, and I would not be surprised if they are still alive today. For example, if we are talking about Zhiva, human worshipers were ceremonially providing bouquets of flowers, fruits, and wheat on numerous occasions, but also there was a ritual of sacrificing a rooster before the time when wheat is sown and/or after the harvest is over.

Christian church on the Isle of Bled

If we are considering the Eastern European Slavic history, perhaps the strongest sites where Zhiva was worshiped were throughout the lands of nowadays Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and eastern Germany, but perhaps the most interesting site where the temple of Zhiva once existed was the famous Lake Bled in Slovenia. More precisely, the foundation of the temple that provided the support for a square wooden house in the 8th century was excavated under the Christian church on the Isle of Bled. Attached to the foundation was a square building with an apse from the 9th century that clearly indicates the transition from a pagan temple to an early Christian church. Christian missionaries dedicated to shutting down old Slavic sites and temples at the time almost always transferred the sites of worshiping Slavic goddesses into the worship of the Mother of God to ease the transition, and the nowadays church on Lake Bled is consecrated to the Ascension of Mary. The temple of Zhiva on the Isle of Bled and the waterfall on the nearby Savica river were commemorated and celebrated in the epic poem 'Baptism on Savica' by the 19th-century Slovenian poet France Prešeren.

Well, temples dedicated to Zhiva definitely no longer exist, but it is documented that many places, at least in Serbia, with names that survived the last millennium and have the words 'deva' or 'baba' in their roots (which means goddess mother) suggest sites of worshiping the female deity, most likely locations of Zhiva's temples. A couple of those places and nearby mountains have such words near the village where my great-great-grandfather lived and where our summer house still stands. Also, lots of people's names and surnames have the word 'Živa' in the root, and they all originate in old Slavic beliefs. Years ago, during my education in high school and faculty, Živa was my nickname, and I always turned around if I heard somebody call it.

Image refs:
https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2017/08/10/reanimating-slavic-gods-the-man-who-breathes-life-into-deities_820264
https://www.locationscout.net/locations/6017-lake-bled
http://www.1zoom.me/de/wallpaper/156998/z349.2/

Refs:
http://www.starisloveni.com/Bogovi.html
https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/550443944/goddess-zhiva-wood-birch-statue-slavic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deities_of_Slavic_religion
https://www.rasen.rs/2017/01/rusalje-ili-zene-padalice/#.W26_Kegza00
https://www.srbijadanas.com/vesti/info/misterija-istocne-srbije-ko-su-zene-koje-padaju-u-trans-i-predvidaju-buducnost-2017-05-20
https://vesna.atlantidaforum.com/?p=3916
http://lifestyle.enaa.com/horoskop/Kdo-je-bila-Ziva.html
http://vladimir-uno.blogspot.com/2015/09/ziva-goddess-of-living-water-life-love.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Pre%C5%A1eren
 

Smart Microscope

Most of the popular digital and DSLR cameras are perfectly equipped for macro photos. Taking a great photo by zooming to the scene no farther than 20-30 centimeters is a little effort and requires only clicking the shutter button and leaving all the technicalities to the camera's automated software. Even the cheap lenses can do that without a problem. A while ago I collected some of those photos and wrote a little about macro photography and how to record all the close objects not very distant from our nose.

But can we do closer than that? Can we take a photo of an object like the top of a pencil as close as a couple of millimeters away from the lens, for example, like the one in this photo:

Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot

Well, not with a consumer camera, not without specialized optics. However, "augmenting" our smartphones to do the magic is just a little effort. And yes, I took the above photo with only my smartphone, an additional plastic lens I taped to its camera, and... lots of patience.

To be completely honest, taking a photo of an insect, small in size, like a hair louse that is erratically running and jumping in your small zooming window, is not little effort per se, but it can make your day and everything else is just a piece of cake. All you have to do is strip one of those laser pointers and rip out its lens. Perhaps the better results you can get are with a laser pointer equipped with a lens made with greater optical quality, but for starters, anyone can do it. So, like in the left image, or if you click on the bottom reference link, when you take out the lens, all you have to do is tape it to your camera lens on the back of your smartphone, and the rest is your imagination. If you follow the image story, the goal can be even bigger—the end result can be one of those microscopes you can find in toy stores with quality lenses, capable of taking a photo or even a video clip of a microworld with up to the cellular level. Complete instructions on building such a device you can find within the Turn Your Smartphone Into a Digital Microscope! YouTube page.


Of course, taking microphotos means you have to get close to the scene, and your smartphone will block most of the useful light, so you have to think like an ordinary microscope. You bring the light with you and position it just below or next to the "set". I recommend one of those LED flashlights that are very small in size that allows you to carry them along with your phone. I used one of those book reader LED lights with a flexible handle with just one LED source on the top. That way you can fit both in your hand—the light and the phone. The other hand will be responsible just for zooming and the button. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is how it looks in action.

I didn't play too much time with this, but I am sure the following summer will bring lots of more microphotos when all of that microbiological life emerges, but it is amazing what exactly you can stumble upon in your front yard or balcony in just a couple of hours. In the image below to the right, when I pointed the lens toward the rose's stem, I thought I would get only some sort of reddish plant spores, but instead my memory card was filled with tiny and not too adorable rose lice. In other words, if you make this, prepare to be surprised at what exactly you might find in there.


Therefore, I advise practicing first with non-live objects in your own household, like in the above example of pencil tops, and believe me, exercising is what you really need to do, simply because zooming out of focus is just one tiny move of your finger or even a significant breath or hesitation. Anyway, I will be adding more images to this gallery in the future, and besides the embedded images in this post, there are more in the web gallery.

In today's update, the story goes further into the microworld, and this time with a cheap 'consumer' digital microscope. I bought one for Viktor's 11th birthday earlier this year, and during this entire spring we played with it a lot. In quality and zooming, it was more or less in the realm of the DIY smart microscope I made and described in the post. However, it brought to the scene its own powerful LED lights, and with its pencil-like shape, it was more controllable and applicable. The downside was that it was far beyond smartphone camera quality, and the number of pixels was not too high to capture quality videos, but still, its educational value was out of the question.



This new addition to the post imagery was actually a video from Viktor's YouTube channel, zViktor22, where he tested the microscope with various plants, food, money, fabrics, insects, and more from our country village, household, his 5th grade herbarium, and our front yard. I also included our old smart microscope photos and the caterpillar video from the initial post to complete the story about what it's possible to do with little effort and cheap technology.

Original post: May 2014, Update: June 2018.

Smart Microscope:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TNng7utQTw1zb3GK8
 

Space Humor

It happened long ago, in the dark ages of CRT monitors, when I first received a short forum message with :-) at the end. I stared at the message for a long minute(s) before giving up on decoding its meaning. It came from a well-respected friend of mine, so I responded with a short reply:

"What!?"

"You have to turn your screen 90 degrees clockwise." The answer came promptly.

My CRT was large and heavy, and it looked way too dangerous to tilt it that way, so after a little brainstorming of the problem, I concluded there's a better way of achieving the same goal.

I tilted my head 90 degrees anticlockwise.

"Aaaaaah!!!" I said promptly, and after realizing the picture, the big smile on my face slowly morphed into loud laughter. So I typed back:

"Wow!"

I didn't have to wait long for the next message:

"LOL!"

"What!?" I quickly copy/pasted my earlier message but realized I was too uninformed about new internet fashion, so I canceled the message and opened a new Netscape window instead, called www.altavista.com, and 'googled' new internet words. Ever since then, LOL has been at the top of my list of favorite acronyms. Along with all those cute ASCII faces. ;-)


In my case, and probably with many people as well, laughter is one of those most powerful cures for everything. The almighty vaccine for all diseases. Especially boredom and poor moodiness. LOL moments somehow come naturally with live social occasions and in movies, but in books they have one extra dimension. I really can't explain why that is. Perhaps funny moments in the written world often come unexpectedly and are more genuine. Take, for instance, Andy Weir's "The Martian." The hilarious parts in the book were genuinely funnier than in the film. At least with me... Well, nevermind that. So, to get to the chase, last month I read three extraordinarily funny books in the realm of science fiction and space exploration. So here they are in this short review, sorted by the count of LOL moments I had during reading. In descending order, of course.

The first one was "Where the Hell is Tesla?" by Rob Dircks. I stumbled on this one by accident, and boy, I am glad I did. Nikola Tesla is one of my favorite men in the history of people, science, and engineering, and here in Serbia, especially during my childhood, Tesla was idealized and always portrayed in a too serious manner. Anyhow, when I saw the title with Tesla playing the major role in the comedy story, I couldn't resist, and I didn't regret a single penny. It was by far the funniest book I read in a while. It had it all: decent science fiction based on cutting-edge scientific theories of the multiverse, the romance and friendship within different storylines, cute aliens, sci-fi battles of enormous proportions, great style of writing, Nikola Tesla in the most entertaining meaning of the word, and of course... Chip. I am not going to spoil the reading for you, but I will tell you this. On one occasion, I almost dropped my Kindle on the hard floor because of one of the strongest LOL moments. Enough said.


The second is "Jazz of Artemis." In the context of today's post, this is how I would name the book if I were Andy Weir. Of course, his new book is not a comedy per se. But it is not "The Martian" as well. However, in the realm of the funny moments, it is a decent sequel. Way better and much funnier. Jazz is... let me find the right word... an extraordinary girl on multiple levels. I enjoyed her adventures fully, and I do hope for the real sequel this time. I mean, with Jazz around, what can go wrong on the Moon? I really hope there will be a movie after this one as well, but not solely because of the entertainment part and all the LOL moments, especially with that Svoboda guy and his ability to manufacture various devices that do or do not belong to ESA blueprints and worksheets.

But seriously, what Andy Weir did with creating a fully functional city on the moon with both working technology and society organization is amazing and also extraordinary. It definitely deserves the motion pictures, and I am sure filming the movie that takes the entire story and action on the moon is another challenge. I am sure Ridley Scott is buzzing his mind with this as we speak.


Finally, and to use the cliché, last but not least comes the good old British humor. Something I grew up with was all the great TV shows like "Monty Python" and "Only Fools and Horses" or short comedy sketches and skits by Dave Allen, Benny Hill, Rowan Atkinson, and others. But in the flashlight of the parody novels, the throne is still with Douglas Adams and his "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This was the first book I experienced LOL moments with, way before the LOL acronym was ever invented. "The Worst Man on Mars" by Mark Roman and Corben Duke was probably the most similar novel I read in a long while.

This is also a parody, but not really as much as its famous predecessor. This book follows plausible science fiction and doesn't go into wild imagination, like the restaurant at the end of the universe or "42". I really did like many technological backgrounds inside, like artificial intelligence or a space elevator, for example. But the humor with this one comes first, and the robots in their sitcom on Mars are something I do recommend warmly.

:-)

Refs:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25053578-where-the-hell-is-tesla
http://www.andyweirauthor.com/books/artemis-hc
https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Man-Mars-Mark-Roman/dp/1536930970
http://www.milanzivic.com/2013/06/dave-allen.html
https://www.space.com/38725-artemis-andy-weir-author-interview.html
 

Super 8

The history of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who, among others, were the first to take several images per second in one effort—all for scientific purposes back then—to study the locomotion of birds, animals, and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first to take a series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less at the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun-shaped camera capable with one trigger pull of capturing 12 images in a row within one single second and storing them all on the single 90 mm film. He used his gun to study various motions of animals, fish, and insects within his so-called 'animated zoo', including dropping cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet.

ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera

It was not long after initial chronophotography efforts and enthusiasm in the 19th century that the 'evolution' of motion pictures diverted heavily into entertainment and cinematography. The history of films and fun started almost with the start of the 20th century, but in the spirit of today's title, 'domesticating' films within ordinary people and human homes waited another 65 years for the invention of Super 8, or, to be precise, the improvement of Kodak's standard 8mm film from 1932 into a more efficient surface with a bigger width for the frame itself and significantly smaller perforation on the film's right edge. After they introduced it at the 1964-65 World's Fair, Super 8 instantly became the very first home video format with light cameras capable of filming 18 frames per second and more than 3 minutes of the movie per small film cartridge.

To say that my father was a film enthusiast in the second part of the sixties and the entire seventies would be an understatement. It was natural for him to go the step further and, in addition to the several analog SLR cameras and darkroom equipment for developing photos, to invest in home movies. Spending time in the darkroom and hanging photos on the wire were some of the most thrilling experiences of my childhood, but when Super 8 came, another world opened. I was too young to operate the camera, but on the occasion or two I remember, I did hold it and press the red button, especially during our vacations in Greece. Well, aside from those rare moments, most of the time my job, with being a kid and all, was to be in front of the camera and not behind it.

Tondo Super 8 Projector and LG Nexus 5 in action

But to cut the story short, this month I did something I was delaying for a long time. During the last two weeks, every night I was descending into my own customized darkroom equipped with a tiny Super 8 projector and digitalizing our family films. Twenty of those survived over time, and with a speed of two per day, I projected them on the wall and filmed them all with my smartphone. It was far from being an ideal setting, but this was the best I could do. I tried different approaches, filming from different distances, using different settings, and using my DSLR Nikon in the beginning. I even tried to project the film directly into the DSLR, but all my efforts failed due to not having proper lenses and objectives, and in the end, the smartphone was the chosen solution, and it did a better job in the dark than the Nikon.

With more expensive equipment, I am sure the results would be much better, and probably the weakest link was the cute and old Italian Tondo projector, which was my father's portable cinematic projector. I did try with a bigger 'player' first, but despite all my efforts, I couldn't manage to repair the old and superb Crown Optical Co. Ltd. Auto-P, a silent Standard and Super 8 film projector, our primary projector capable of displaying big and crisp screens on the large walls and with much better quality. To be honest, it's more than half a century old and built with nowadays rare parts, especially the missing lamp that is hard to find these days, but I didn't give up, and perhaps in the future, if I stumble on some solution (read it: an eBay sort of solution), I will repeat the effort, at least for those videos filmed indoors.


Nevertheless, all twenty rolls now come with twenty MP4s, and for this occasion I decided to create two movie collages with six movies each. They are all filmed in the late sixties, during the seventies, and in the early eighties with an ELMO Super 106 camera from the first image. The first one, embedded above, contains six films from our early vacations in Greece, and in chronological order, they are filmed in the Acropolis of Athens, Zeitenlik, the World War I memorial park in Thessaloniki, vacation resorts in Kamena Vourla, Asprovalta, Katerini Paralia, and two vacations in the vicinity of the port city of Volos.

The second collage is from our home and village in Niš and Guševac in Serbia. Mostly it focuses on my sister's and my babyhood and early childhood, birthday parties, family gatherings, and excursions. Also our old house that is now gone and the old shape of our country village front yard. This video also contains one of the rare black-and-white films from our collection that probably originated from different cameras and settings.


This entire effort triggered lots of memories and emotions from almost forty years ago, and seeing people live, especially those that are not alive today, is something extraordinary that regular photography cannot induce. Perhaps we today, with all of our pocket gadgets, are taking video clips and home photography for granted, but before, in the Super 8 era, this was a completely different experience. What we today do with just two taps on the screen, before you had to do in a more complex manner, including purchasing film cartridges, carefully planning (directing) filming sequences for a 3-minute film, sending it to development, organizing cinematic sessions...

One thing is for sure: Super 8 was the origin of what we have now in our homes. It was eventually replaced with VHS tapes in the 80s, but at the dawn of the 21st century, the analog period came to an end, and old-fashioned home gadgets were replaced with home digital camcorders first and, in the very last decade, with smartphones. To tell you the truth, it is nice to have a camera in your back pocket, it is, but somehow, with me, as I witnessed the origin of the entire process in my early childhood, the nostalgia for the analog days gave me another layer of the entire experience. Something special and extraordinary for sure.

'Super 8,' a sci-fi movie by J.J. Abrams

Perhaps for the best conclusion for this post, it would not be fair not to mention one of J.J. Abrams' greatest movies from 2011. Simply named 'Super 8', it tells a main sci-fi story about an alien encounter, but everything is perfectly wrapped within a background story of school kids trying to film a short movie for a Super 8 festival. It was really a great movie, and if you liked E.T. before, this is definitely a decent sequel and one of my favorites.

Refs:
http://www.kodak.com/id/en/consumer/products/super8/default.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_formats
http://www.retrothing.com/2009/09/tondo-super-8-projector
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/super-8-jj-abrams-says-194908
 

Robert De Niro

While the short tale about the famous actor is itself a small historical record, especially for him and one little Serbian village half an hour away from my current location, I have to say that this post is a little bit mistitled even though De Niro's story has several connected points with what I want to write today. Instead, it will be about my grandfather and his war stories I listened to yesterday for the first time. Actually, my mother told me all this before, but yesterday, during our annual dinner, he was in a great mood to tell them himself, and this is my attempt to write them down while they are still fresh in my memory.


But, for a moment, let's get back to the title story. Not too long ago, I read in a newspaper article* about Robert De Niro and his European travels he did about 40 years ago, more or less in the time when I was about to be born. Back then, these kinds of tourist destinations were extremely popular among young Americans—if you were young and adventurous, you didn't need much money to visit most of Europe, traveling by foot and hitchhiking, meeting local people, living their lives for a summer, getting lots of experience, and filling your memories. In the case of a 25-year-old actor at the beginning of his career, this probably has more importance than with other people. Well, unless young De Niro was on some mission of seeking his ancestors, this is exactly what he was doing back then in the sixties when he ended up for a week or so in Čokot, the neighboring village where my mother was born and where my grandfather still lives in his nineties, enjoying life the same as when he was much younger. Yesterday he visited our house for a small celebration, and I took the chance and asked him whether this story was true and interpreted by the newspaper like it really was. To my surprise, he confirmed everything and also spiced it up with the fact that the family where De Niro stayed are actually our distant relatives living not so far away from my grandfather's house. He remembers the actor clearly, as he helped them to collect some vegetables and accompanied them to free markets where they all have been selling tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and other food and vegetables. He said that De Niro, in his short visits, even picked up a little of the Serbian language and bonded with locals very well. Well, I am not going to spread this story any further; I just like to add that after last night I admire him even more. The other day I stumbled on a midnight projection of his masterpiece"Midnight Run" and enjoyed the movie again for the umpteenth time.

Ok, let's get to the history part and some half a century before De Niro's visits. Both of my grandfathers were about the same age when the Second World War happened. They both stumbled through this part of time in their early twenties and experienced it very differently. My father's father at the time was in the army when Germans captured his whole unit and transferred them all into a military camp in Germany. He was forced to do labor work the whole war there, and I hate myself because I didn't write down his stories, especially once, long ago, when he eagerly told us all his adventures, especially those in the days when the war was finally over and how he traveled back thousands of miles on foot along with thousands of people trying to cope and find their way home. Ironically, despite avoiding military fights during the war, my mother's father experienced it in an occupied country and was faced with imminent death a couple of times, and not only by Nazis! Obviously he managed to go through it; otherwise this blog would be just another 404 page. Following are his war stories that shaped his personality more than even he is ready to admit.

First World War**

However, in order to even try to understand his behavior, I feel like I need to add a couple of history facts first. After the First World War, Serbia was kind of a pillar of a new, fresh country where Serbians, Croats, and Slovenians joined and created the first monarchy of Yugoslavia. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 and exterminated by communism after the second war. The Serbian monarchy inherited it, and it was ruled by King Peter I and later by his son Alexander I. Despite being doomed to imminent collapse due to a vast amount of differences, the kingdom actually was pretty respectful in those days of Europe for its part in the First World War and many battles on the southern front, especially in Macedonian Greece. My great-grandfather took a big part in this war and was in the same lines with the king himself during their winter retreat at the beginning of the war. That was one of the most horrifying moments in the violent history of Serbian wars, but after many months and years of coping with the invasion of German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian armies, at the end our exiled army survived and returned to the battle by forming, to be proved later, a long-lasting alliance with French and British divisions, allowing them to finally move toward the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the very end of the first great war in Europe. However, even though the Serbian royal period between two wars flourished with the rise of democracy, free thought, and educational and civil rights, my grandfather didn't like it at all. When I asked him why, he told me just one story from his youth, describing maybe even better how old-fashioned tales from the 19th century were still there, opposing all the progress happening, especially in big cities. In the fall of 1935, after finishing elementary education in his village, he was so eager to move to a big city and start gymnasium—the best high school possible at the time (the same one I spent three years in during my teenage days, 50 years later). Yesterday, I swear that I saw a sparkle of a tear in his eyes when he was remembering how brutal was a man from the school who literally kicked him out of the school to the street, saying that he is not welcome simply because he came from a village with a big country estate and his place is not in the school, but rather his part in this country is only in the field doing hard labor in the cultivation of food. If you were a woman, it was even worse; there was only one school in the entire city encouraging young girls toward further education, but the quality of the education given there was questionable and not comparable to a gymnasium. My grandfather's disappointment rose even more later when he realized that living in the village had no benefits at all. All food manufacturers were at the mercy of greedy bargainers and dealers without any fair market or developed economics in the system. The villagers were simply second-class citizens.

Later, in the dawn of World War II, things were getting even worse. The rise of communist thought, brought initially from Spain and their civil war and also from the east and the first communist country established in Russia, polarized people in Serbia to the bone. The German occupation of 1941-1944 not only gave our grandfathers another wave of German and Bulgarian armies but also a full civil war between royalists and communists and their resistance movements. It was next to impossible to cope with all that if you were just a 17-year-old boy like my grandfather was.

Family photo taken in Čokot, Radovan Lazić - upper, left

I asked him what his most painful experience from that time was, and in the next half hour, he opened his heart and told us everything his young soul had to do in order to survive, and with an occasional wiping of a tear or two from his left eye, I finally learned how he eventually grew into a strong father figure and local community leader. Like today, back then Niš was one of the biggest cities in the former kingdom and as such was targeted by allies and their air force from time to time. Being just a couple of miles away from the main German command, Čokot was a natural point in air defense, so they spread heavy artillery in the fields in order to defend from allies' planes. One of them was settled in the yard where today is my grandfather's house. German soldiers slept in a nearby shack on, at the time, state-of-the-art air beds and shared local life with villagers. According to my grandfather, compared to Bulgarians that came later, they were all civilized men and paid for all the food they needed.

Also, there was one more important target in the village, and that was the national railway passing by on its way from the north toward Greece to the south, and Germans used it very often for deploying tanks and heavy vehicles and armory to the south fronts and even further to northern Africa. The local resistance was using that fact to stop the convoys and demolish the rails every now and again when they got informed of some important train passing by. In lack of people, for some tactical revenue, and to better protect it, Germans deployed young boys down the line in order to alert the army of possible attacks. During one night in 1942, my grandfather was one of them, and only by chance did he avoid death, as only a couple of hundredmeters to the north, resistance took action, and as a result, the whole train derailed that night. Germans killed on site all deployed boys along the line in retaliation. 1942 was especially cruel, as this was the year where fighting started to be more intense, the captives from the local Nazi camp performed a prison break that year, and it seemed that German command started to take resistance more seriously. Unfortunately, civil war also became more intense, and royalists, people who were basically leftovers from the dismantled Serbian army, and the communist movement started to fight each other with the same or even worse cruelty compared to all the German and Bulgarian occupations and their retaliations performed against both civilians and the resistance. Those years were the dark side of the whole Second World War in this neighborhood.

Air battle over Niš***

Faced by the fact that he almost lost his life, my grandfather chose to go low profile and continue cultivation labor with his father, going to the field, seeding crops, collecting food, and trying to live a normal life. It turned out that during the war this was not really possible. Even on the field they had that one experience where they just barely escaped and saved their lives when resistance started bombarding the German army from the neighboring hill. When they came back tomorrow, the sight was scary; blood and dead bodies were everywhere. I can only imagine how scenes like that leave a permanent mark on any witnesses, especially among young people and children. Anyway, in later years, the war started to fade out, and the winner and loser could be easily recognized. Communist resistance won their fight with royalists, and Germans started evacuating and leaving space for the chaos in the last years of the war. Like Germans before, communists saw the potential in all young boys in their early twenties and recruited them for the time that eventually came after the Germans officially withdrew. The young boys living in villages were easy targets; they were already bitter and disappointed in royal democracy before the war, and many of them saw their chance to get a more important role in the new society. Once again my grandfather was in mortal danger, and this time from upcoming communists. They were cruel. Even more than occupying armies. Especially toward those who were labeled as a threat for what they had in mind. In a moment I thought I saw fear in my grandfather's eyes when he told us what happened in the fall of 1945. In order to justify the full dismantle of the royal family and democracy, they organized a census. You can only imagine how elections were back then with no help of modern technology and no mass media to explain both sides. There were two wooden boxes, one to support royal democracy and the other to support communism for future state government. There were also rubber balls you had to put in one of those two boxes. You voted in a way that you had to put your hand in both boxes and leave the ball in one. Needless to say, official results showed all the royal boxes pretty much empty. Sadly, the truth was completely different, at least at the voting point where my grandfather was appointed as a monitoring agent. The voting day was coming to the end, and my grandfather and his peer associate started to feel some anxiety and fear of the final result. They chose to vote at the end of the day, and when they pulled the hand out of both boxes, it was more than obvious that the royal box was full of balls, while the communists scored almost nothing inside. They already received threats from the headquarters before the census, and what they did is maybe something you do only when you are faced with the most horrifying future. Instinctively, an hour before closing, they locked the door, broke the seals, and moved all the 'royal' balls into the communist's box. Then they reopened the voting again. The last remaining hour brought dozens of now balls into Royal's box, but the 'official' results were that more than 95% went to the new regime. Two things happened tomorrow. My grandfather learned that most of the other box keepers in neighboring villages were killed on site for the full royal boxes, accused of fraud, and persecuted without any trials. The second thing he realized was that he not only again kept his head on his shoulders but he was also commended and later became a mayor of his village, responsible for all big decisions, mostly by following orders from the 'above'.

The birth of communism in post-war times gave birth to the upcoming Cold War between the Soviets with their socialist allies and western countries. At the end of this war, my grandfather witnessed the air bombing of the city not only by the Germans but also by allies as well, even after the Nazis retreated. And even one real air fight that lasted pretty much about half an hour or so. In November of 1944, just about four weeks after Germans retreated from the city, over the western parts of the city of Niš and not far from the Čokot suburbia, happened perhaps one of the first US-USSR air 'encounters', and, as it seems, this one was one of the real and severe air fights with significant losses on both sides. In short, US fighters attacked a Russian convoy and killed many Soviet troops, including their general, who were progressing toward the north front. Soviet planes soon after attacked the US fleet in retaliation, and in the aftermath, Americans were forced to apologize in an official manner on the highest level. At least that is the official story. The main participants were the US Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the Soviet Yakovlev Yak-3. According to one eyewitness, and I am quoting the Wikipedia article, which you can find referenced, 'Soviet fighters flew over the old city fortress at an altitude of only 20m and attacked the Lightnings from below in a steep climb'. The final number of fallen crafts and deaths varies according to who you are asking—Americans, Russians, or Serbian witnesses from the ground—but they all agree that it ended in more than an ugly result with multiple aircraft fallen to the ground. The worst statement was that up to ten fighters ended in flames and were crushed.

Monument risen in memory to 'US-USSR Niš incident'****

The rest is the modern history of the 20th century. Communism lasted much longer than anybody anticipated, and the reason is no doubt the nuclear-based cold war with strong roots originated right there in World War Two. My grandfather was more or less satisfied with the new government. He recognized all its flaws and good sides, but from his point of view, especially thanks to those decades of prosperity back in the 60s and 70s and the fact that common villagers were treated better than in royal times, he enjoyed half a century in peace without any conflicts or wars. The only conflict he had in those times was, in fact, that he was a truly religious person, and religion of any kind was a major nemesis in all communist societies. Even though he never hid his religious personality, he managed to deal with this duality in his life during the entire communist era. Despite all the obstacles in the way, he even managed to play all the way and rebuild a small church in the village without being punished or suffering any major consequences from 'comrades in headquarters'.

We can only try to understand those violent times and how blood, animosities, war, and death can affect children, especially those who spent all their teenage years in dark shadows of our history books. Yesterday, by wiping the final tear, my grandfather finished his tales with these words: "Every night when I lie down in the bed in my dark room, there are only two of us, me and the god, and I always pray that I made good decisions before."

R.I.P. Radovan Lazić, September 21st, 2015.

Image and article references:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000134/
*http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Drustvo/I-Robert-de-Niro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Yugoslavia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_army's_retreat_through_Albania_(World_War_I)
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Campaign_of_World_War_I
***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_battle_over_Niš
http://zmilan.blogspot.com/2012/05/military-sidetrack.html
****http://www.juznevesti.com/Drushtvo/sovjetski-vojnici.html