City-as-Action

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, it was difficult to find the usual postcards of the city with images of monuments, squares and parks. There were almost no tourists in Belgrade. Foreign visitors were reduced to journalists, negotiators and envoys with no interest in tourist memorabilia. The only kind of postcards that one could still easily buy from Belgrade street-vendors featured iconic images of various political protests. Some of them were reprints of documentary photographs from the protests, while others depicted the protest’s main symbols: a whistle and a broken egg. The whistle was one of the protesters’ most used props, alongside eggs which they threw at the Serbian Television building, singling it out as an instrument of a regime that operated through censorship and propaganda. The postcards often looked like propagandist posters of the Russian avant-garde with the conventional inscription, ‘Greetings from Belgrade’, adding an extra twist. In the year 2000, preceding the end of the Milošovic´ regime, postcards with insignias of the democratic opposition resurfaced, most featuring a raised fist – the symbol of the political organization Otpor. Some of the postcards had their inscriptions written in English, but most of these ‘Greetings from Belgrade’ were written in Serbian Cyrillic.