Posts from ‘October, 2008’

I stumbled across a very interesting article earlier today. It’s about Albanian women who became men, not as transsexuals, but because the man of the house had died, leaving a mother alone with her daughters. Back in pre-communist times, Albania was a staunchly patriarchal society (and still is to an extent) and the lack of [...]

Photo by kalandrakas
Is the cloudy and cold weather getting you down? Feel like you just need to have a warm, comforting hug? Well, you should definitely head to Belgrade’s Trg republike (Republic Square) on Sunday, 26 October, because free hugs (besplatni zagrljaji) will be dispensed to everyone and anyone who feels the need for some [...]

The 53rd International Belgrade Book Fair (Medjunarodni beogradski sajam knjiga) was opened last night by the acclaimed Serbian author Dragoslav Mihailovic whose works include Kad su cvetale tikve and Goli otok. Held at the Belgrade Fair complex, over 800 publishers from Serbia and over 20 countries, such as the UK, Canada, Angola, Denmark, Ukraine, the [...]

Viktor over at Belgrade 2.0 has discovered a very interesting report published by UNHCR. Apparently, Serbia is among the top ten countries with the highest number of asylum seekers seeking refuge in industrialised countries such as the US, Canada and Germany. No, this report doesn’t use old data from many, many years ago, the figures [...]

I saw this advert the other day while watching television. It’s for a chocolate bar called Kidy (i.e. kid, child). I just stared at it with my mouth open. What on earth was the marketing company thinking/smoking/drinking when they came up with the idea to have an adult woman enter an lift with a teenage [...]

A Yankee In Belgrade has to be one of my favourite blogs about Belgrade and Serbia. ‘Bibi’, an American woman who has lived in Belgrade for some 30 years, has created a fantastic photo blog over the last 8 months featuring photos taken on her walks around the city – from photos of interesting buildings [...]

The anti-fascist rally outside the Philosophy Faculty in Belgrade passed peacefully this afternoon in central Belgrade. Several hundred anti-fascist demonstrators began their protest at around 4pm. Originally, the protest was planned to be a counter-protest to the announced neo-Nazi demonstration scheduled to be held at the same time. However, the neo-Nazi protest was banned by [...]

I had MTV Adria (MTV broadcast in the former Yugoslav countries in the Slovene and Serbian languages) on in the background the other day while I was doing some work. Something caught my ears and I looked up and saw an advert for a show called MTV Cribs. Maybe some of you know what the [...]

As you can see, Balkan File has moved to a new address and had a major design revamp. I hope that you like it.
All previous posts from the old Blogger site have been manually moved to this new system (and new photos have been added to many of them). Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to import [...]

This post at Maria’s Wish I Could Reach You In Belgrade blog about a travel book on the Balkans, which was written at the turn of the 20th century, got me wondering how Belgrade looked in the early(ish) 1900s.
So I did a quick search and found some interesting videos of Belgrade in the 1920s and [...]