Pilić Damir: Kao da je sve normalno

Damir Pilić: As if everything is normal

On October 4, 2009, Vedran P., a fan of Sarajevo, was killed in Široki. Journalist D. left Split for Sarajevo, hoping that his colleagues from the capital of the Federation would arrange a meeting with representatives of the Horde zla fan group. Although it is only early autumn, he finds snow on the way, and memories of earlier trips to Bosnia and Herzegovina come flooding back. From the end of the eighties, when he visited Kupres with his class, all the way to Busovača and Ahmić, unreal scenes emerge from the past and one cannot but ask what happened to the Spirit of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Is he still alive and what is he doing? As a child, he imagined how this Spirit sits somewhere in the Bosnian hills and, like a good giant, makes sure that something ugly does not happen.
The hordes of evil do not want to talk to the press and D. will, in all likelihood, have to return with unfinished business. There was, however, one more night in Sarajevo. The snow is falling relentlessly, the streets of the old, tired and scarred city are covered with a white blanket and D. gets lost in them. The faces of the people he meets visibly distort, turning into something that makes the blood freeze in the veins. The ball of past wars slowly unravels, and the image of evil spreads over the entire continent and reaches through time to our days.


"I put my notebook and chemical pencil on the bedside table, next to my cell phone and grandfather's gun. I open the curtains: the snow is spreading outside like a huge tapestry without edges, shapes and colors. Although I am separated from them by the window glass, I have the feeling that the flakes are stabbing me with cold, painless thorns all over my face. I suddenly feel exhausted: I shouldn't have put energy into the song. It doesn't matter. I have to focus. I don't suffer from formality, but I don't want mine to be an exception. In Zagreb, he obtained a master's degree in psychology and a bachelor's degree in journalism. Published the scientific monograph Suicide: Farewell Letters (1998), the novels The Devil First Eats His Mother (2001) and Splitting: How I Looked for Serbs in the City (2014), and the non-fiction study Marx is Not Dead (2016). In co-authorship with Dražen Lalić, he published a book about young delinquents from Split, On young people, the world stops (2001) and the monograph Torcida: a view from the inside (2011), and with Ed Vujević a study about former heroin addicts, Daedal na iglama (2005). He lives in Split, writes for Slobodna Dalmacija.