East tunes

Reflections on Serbia’s EXIT Festival

Text and Images by Toby Stone

The first weekend of July saw thousands of Brits descend on the Northern Serbian town of Novi Sad for the Exit Festival, a Glastonbury like music festival held there since 2000. The festival is fun and in many ways conventional, but its roots are very different to the other festivals of the season, and this is still reflected in what I found there this year.

The Festival began in 2000 as part of a student campaign against the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosovic. The 100 day festival ended on the day before the election that was to lead to his downfall, with a ‘get out and vote’ campaign. A large gathering of Serbs, with (legend has it) Croatian and Bosnian DJs sneaked over the border in the boots of cars, and with foreign musicians and a reformist agenda, was a strong political force at the tail end of an oppressive and nationalist dictatorship.

Exit has undoubtedly joined the ranks of Europe’s large, commercial music festivals. This year, a four-day ticket cost £90, and the festival attracted around 40,000 people per day. However, underlying the big name acts, the heaving crowds of young foreign people, Exit maintains its original purpose and identity.

Unlike Glastonbury, Exit is a night festival, sprawling over the Petrovaradin Fortress in Serbia’s northern city of Novi Sad, spotlights and lasers shooting up into the sky. Kicking off at around 8pm, but not really getting going until midnight, the last acts tend to fade out around 7am. During the day, attendees sit around the cafes and restaurants of Novi Sad’s pretty old town, or party some more at the ‘beach’ on the Danube.

The impact of Exit on Novi Sad is hard to fathom, and more so due to both a lack of statistics and an unwillingness of officials to acknowledge it. However, one can guess that for a relatively small city in the North of one of Europe’s more isolated countries, to have thousands of foreign tourists descend like this every year must have many positive outcomes. Novi Sad is tourist-savvy, with signs of the wealth that this one-week mass tourist season must bring.

For example, this year wifi proliferated around the town, both the impressively fast free wifi provided by the City of Novi Sad, and wifi in a good proportion of the cafes, and even up at the beach. Such things are not to be taken for granted in a country that only 10 years ago had no functioning cash machines due to UN sanctions.

I remember well the struggle I had back in 2002 to get online at all in Serbia, having to search out dark subterranean Belgrade web cafes full of sweaty teenage boys playing online war games.

Novi Sad café workers generally speak good English, and the police are remarkably civil and relaxed. Again, this might seem normal, but anyone familiar with dictatorships, or chaotic early democracies, will instinctively feel uncomfortable around large numbers of uniformed and plain clothed police, but that instinct seems misguided in Novi Sad, at least during Exit.

By contrast, I delayed my Croatian friends by 20 minutes as we drove over the border into Serbia. While they just had their passports checked, I had my bags searched, passport thumbed through page by page, and was kept standing out in the sun while the border guards went through pointless questioning and dithering about. That is a Serbia I remember well, and why Novi Sad feels so different and tolerant by contrast.

Novi Sad has clearly been transformed over the last 10 years by Exit. Indeed, Serbia as well, has benefitted from this very positive, progressive tourist attraction, countering the negative perceptions of Serbia that many of her own politicians have perpetuated.

My first memory of Novi Sad was in 2001. I was driving to Belgrade, and came in over the road border from Croatia. It was winter, and the place was totally deserted. I climbed to the top of the fort, overlooking Novi Sad and the Danube, and looked down at the large white bridge bombed neatly in the middle, with the broken roads hanging down into the water. I had never seen a bombed bridge before, and it was a chilling sight, in the snowy and grey landscape.

I had driven in from Eastern Croatia, and was still shaken from having driven through the Croatian town of Vukovar only half an hour earlier. Vukovar back then was still devastated after the siege by the Serbian army, and I had driven past heavily shelled buildings, everything around them pock-marked with shrapnel damage. It reminded me of photos I had seen of bombed cities from the Second World War, only this was now, and in my contemporary Europe.

Now, only 5 years later, the rebuilt bridge stands white and clean across the river again, and young Brits are drinking beer and going red in the sun around its base. This in itself is an achievement, yet one that probably goes un-noticed. How many other cities can boast tens of thousands of foreign tourists so soon after major war damage has been rebuilt. And these tourists are not on the adventure travel circuit, coming to see a former war zone. Most of them are probably oblivious to the recent past, and are here for the music and the fun.

It is clear that the majority of the young Brits plodding around the dusty fort with plastic cups of beer in their hands, sleeping on the beach by the Danube by day, are generally unaware that only five years ago the bridge over the Danube was the victim of a NATO bombing raid. The speed with which Novi Sad has managed to move on from this is impressive. I say Novi Sad, and not Serbia, because it is clear that Exit has pulled Novi Sad forward ahead of the rest of the country.

It is good that British tourists can sleep on a beach and dance alongside Serbs in front of international and local DJs and musicians without the war and the past dominating the agenda. That was not possible 5 years ago. However, maybe it is also worrying that such things are being forgotten so quickly.

When it comes to a projection of Serbia abroad, Exit has done something different. The image of Serbia abroad is one of dictatorship, nationalism, and war crimes. Most people probably know Serbia from the NATO bombing, and of course from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. And they are not far wrong. The Serbian establishment has made painfully slow progress over the years since Milosevic fell from power. They have been weak in their confrontation of Nationalist myths and ideologies, and the country has not rushed away from its past as one might have expected.

Yet here, in an ancient fortress, young progressive Serbs have created a progressive State – their ‘State of Exit’ in which Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians are friends and collaborators, and in which foreigners are welcomed.

The people behind Exit are aware of the tension between its roots as a student protest, and its future as a successful commercial music festival. They have now set up the Exit Foundation, to support young local musicians. They encourage visiting DJs to mentor local DJs, and during the festival there are still public debates, a strong green lobby, and opportunities for new musicians and DJs both from the region and abroad to perform. This year that line-up included musicians from Cuba and Zimbabwe.

It is not often that one ends up sitting over a beer in an Austro-Hungarian fortress on the Danube, in Serbia, with Zimbabwean musicians and civil society activists fresh out of Harare, discussing politics and civil society. That, for me, is Exit.

If you know what to look for you will still see the true Exit spirit coming through, though often subtly. The last set of the festival, around 3am on Sunday night, was three young DJs on the smaller ‘Suba Stage’. What started with a small crowd sitting on the grass watching them grew until the whole area, and the terraces over-looking it, were packed with people dancing like crazy as the sun came up. The set lasted several hours or more, carried along by sheer enthusiasm and the pleasant disintegration of any schedules or rules as the sun rose on the morning after Exit. The security men started dancing, and the DJs’ friends climbed onto the stage to dance with them.

Rajko Bozic, an Exit organizer and veteran, who brought these three together to play at Exit, stood in the crowd with a smile of genuine satisfaction on his face. As the crowd grew and the performance was clearly becoming one of the best in the whole festival, he climbed onto the stage and made a low bow to the three DJs.

When I asked him later, he said proudly that they were from Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia and he’d brought them together to play for the first time at a previous Exit festival. Peace through music; this was the true Exit of 10 years ago still alive and well today. Things have moved on in the Balkans, of course, but you only have to look at the tension when Kosovo declared its independence, to realise that it is still important to have these three DJs playing together here in Serbia. And clearly Rajko knew that this was a far greater achievement than having had Placebo or The Chemical Brothers on the main stage.

Exit is different. Yes, it is now a leading European music festival, and a truly international commercial success. But whilst other music festivals may have been born of idealism, rebellion, and a freedom of spirit, this one is born from a genuine and brave fight for freedom, rising from the darkness of war and dictatorship.

It brought together the young people from countries in which their parents were killing each other, creating some unity in a generation that could otherwise have inherited that nationalism and hatred. People should attend Exit to see a true music festival, in all its chaotic, messy charm. But they should also attend as a homage to everything it has done, and continues to do for openness, democracy, and civil society. When forming a coalition was seen as a constitutional crisis for the UK, it is sobering to spend a weekend amongst young people who overthrew a dictator.

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