unbordered

It was October 2000, and there I was: a small girl perched on her father’s shoulders, stretching upward like a hopeful sunflower trying to see over the heads of an entire city. Before us, the crowd seemed infinite — a living sea of singing, dancing bodies. The atmosphere was so jubilant that even the Catholics looked relieved, as if heaven had finally stopped playing hard to get and descended onto our little corner of northern Serbia.

Why was everyone so happy? Because Slobodan Milošević — until that day, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — had just been overthrown. I was seven years old and profoundly confused. I tugged on my father’s hair and asked, with the earnestness only a child can muster, what Milošević had done to deserve such a dramatic farewell. Was he really that bad?

My father paused, the way adults do when they’re trying to translate geopolitics into kindergarten language. “Well,” he began slowly, “he wanted to enter another room with his head through the wall. And that’s just not the right way to go about it.”

I considered this carefully. “You mean,” I said, “he should have knocked and waited for someone to open the door so he could enter?”

“Yes,” my father replied, relieved. “Exactly. He didn’t knock. He wanted to enter another room by force. That’s why we’re celebrating that he’s gone.”

To me, this explanation made perfect sense. In fact, it made so much sense that I decided, right there on his shoulders, that I was proud to be Serbian. After all, what nation wouldn’t glow with pride while celebrating the departure of a man who apparently tried to enter metaphorical rooms headfirst through the wall? Weren’t we, in that moment, the heroes of our own fairytale — the people who had finally said, “Sir, please use the door like everyone else.”

As I looked at the crowd — singing, dancing, overflowing with joy so bright it could have powered the streetlights of the entire world — I thought: These must be the good guys. These must be the people on the right side of history, the ones who know how to knock politely, the ones who gather in the streets not for war but for the sheer relief of someone finally leaving the building. In my seven‑year‑old logic, everything was perfectly clear: Heaven had descended onto northern Serbia, the villain had exited the stage, and my people were radiant, triumphant, beautifully alive.

There was only one small complication — strictly speaking, I wasn’t Serbian. My entire family belonged to an ethnic minority so tiny that even as a child, I understood our political significance hovered somewhere between “decorative” and “symbolic.” In Subotica and the surroundings, we mattered a little; but the moment we left these limits, we evaporated from the national map like a footnote someone forgot to include in the main text.

That’s why I preferred thinking of myself as Serbian. It didn’t matter that I was raised Catholic, that my dialect could be identified as non‑Serbian from an airplane, or that the traditions in my home overlapped with Serbian ones about as much as a hedgehog overlaps with a harmonica. Even today, I find it a little awkward when people ask me how Serbians celebrate Christmas. I don’t know. I never celebrated Serbian Christmas. But none of that concerned me back then. At seven, identity wasn’t about ancestry — it was about atmosphere. And the atmosphere that day was irresistible: loud, joyful, victorious. Who wouldn’t want to belong to the people who had just overthrown their own villain and were now celebrating as if history itself had thrown them a surprise party?

At school, I was never ashamed of my minority status, nor did I fear how my classmates might react, but I also never announced it with any particular enthusiasm. Why would I? I adored Serbian literature and Serbian history, both taught with such fervor that every lesson felt like an invitation to fall a little more in love with the country. I loved belonging — at least emotionally — to a nation that collected basketball world cups as if it were a casual hobby. My heart beat faster every time I saw the Cyrillic alphabet, as if the letters themselves were waving at me from across the page. I felt Serbian down to my bones. And Serbia (and Montenegro), in the early 2000s, felt like a country finally exhaling — a place with a decent prime minister, a fragile democracy taking shape, and a sense of hope so palpable that even a child could feel it humming in the air.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when the first real shock cracked my faith in the myth of nations, but I remember precisely what caused it: learning about the First World War. In class, our teacher used the pronoun “we” to describe the Serbians who had gloriously died defending “our” country. Yet the map in the textbook refused to cooperate. With the cold precision only school maps possess, it showed that my hometown — Subotica — sat firmly on the enemy side of the line. This meant that my ancestors were not individuals who gloriously died defending Serbia. My teacher’s ancestors, presumably, were also not Serbians who gloriously died defending Serbia. In fact, the ancestors of every single pupil in that classroom had potentially been shooting at Serbians during that war. Subotica belonged to the Austro‑Hungarian monarchy, and for the first time, I had to face the unsettling truth that borders are not natural divisions but human inventions — and that my national pride was therefore also an invention, a story I had accepted rather than a truth inscribed in my bones.

In the years that followed, I kept loving the same poems and the same alphabet that once made my heart flutter — but the innocence behind that love was gone. I began to understand that nations are fictions, and sometimes the story fits only because you never thought to question its seams. What I had taken for something ancient and instinctive — something “in my bones” — was, in truth, a feeling I had stitched together from school lessons, celebrations, art, and the warm illusion of belonging.

And yet, even after learning how arbitrary borders can be — how casually history redraws them, how indifferently they slice through languages, families, and childhoods — I didn’t feel betrayed. My pride didn’t vanish; it simply softened, loosened, changed its shape. I began to understand that what I loved had never been a nation, but the world that had formed me: the sounds, the gestures, the humor, the contradictions. A world stitched together from influences that refused to stay in their assigned boxes. A world always more beautifully complicated than any single name could contain.