NOBLE SAVAGE! ‘I’m the richest man in Europe without a penny to my name: I married the girl who KISSED me first ON THE STREET’

He ran away from people because he likes them. Nearly 50 years ago he went into the woods with his wife and three children. There he founded his Family of Clearwater Streams, only to sometimes go back to the civilized world. He has written 27 novels in the woods. He started a theatre. Over 50,000 people have visited his commune so far. Before going into the woods, as a young man, he played in 18 international association football games for Vojvodina FC

My older brother, who was born in a hospital, watched my birth. He was scowling at me, as if to say, “This will be turn out to be a good man, but he will get the short end of the stick too.” So I took my first step in life and set off on the path of my childhood.

My parents

We lived a harmonious life in a Socialist environment, in which it was believed that the world could be made better. My father Milomir was a traveling wholesaler. A chauffer from the company Gvožđar would pick him up on Monday morning in his Škoda and drive him all across Serbia, where he conducted his business, until Friday. He was a very capable man. We were fairly well-off, and had two bicycles, suitcases, and an empty apartment, which was gradually filling up. Every time he’d return, he would bring loads of presents. We were a happy family. My mother would hold us in her lap and sing the songs by Safet Isović, Nada Mamula, Zaim Imamović, etc. Since she was bored, she would take us to cinema matinées and exhibitions every day, and to the theatre in the evenings.

My childhood

On Thursdays we would listen to radio dramas, setting the magical green eye and turning off the lights for a better experience of the voices of Ljuba Tadić, Olivera Marković, Milutin Butković, and others. On Saturdays we went to the restaurant Zanatski Dom (The Craftsman’s Centre) – the tradesmen’s watering hole, had minced meat rolls for dinner, and then us children would run around the courtyard. Milomir would often call me over, hold me in his lap, and ask, “So kiddo, who gave birth to you?” I’d respond proudly, “You did, Pop!” My brother would then get miffed and say, “It wasn’t Pop who gave birth to you, it was Mom!” To this day, my father has left me with the strongest impression in life. He protected me during the hardest times and would give me advice about what to do in a few sentences.

The death of my father

The idyllic life came to a sudden end. When I was six, my father died in an accident. He sat on the windowsill of the Zeleni Venac (Green Wreath) Hotel in Šabac, slipped, and fell from the second floor to his death. He’d wanted to conclude one more business deal and go back home, but that was his last day of trading. It was a great tragedy and a turning point in our lives. My mother went from being a 32-year-old young lady to an old woman in the space of one day. Three days later, she got a job as a cleaning lady at Milomir’s company. When the family came home after the funeral, she said, “Miroslav, Božidar, from now on you’re on your own!” It was a mantra that has guided us throughout our lives. We are both lone riders refusing to accept this sort of life, searching for a new art, and never giving up on humanity.

The arrest

After my father died, I became a juvenile delinquent. Podbara, our neighbourhood, has a history of crime, so I joined the older petty local thieves, such as Bata Čaruga, Gavra the Killer, Koda, Kitza, Zeka, Falko, and so on. I was 14 when I was caught stealing woollen socks at the Uzor apartment store in August. I was interrogated by a police inspector in charge of minors. He listened to me telling him what I had stolen until then and kept nodding. He said to me, “That’s nothing. I used to steal such things too.” He sent me off by giving me a hug in his office at the Vojvodina Police Force HQ in Pap Pavlova Street, gave me some candy, and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mention this to anyone.” I was trembling as I came down the stairs, and I said to myself, “Božidar, you are a liar and a thief!” And then a cloud of light appeared overhead, roughly 14 meters long and seven meters wide . It stood there no more than 20 minutes or so. I was enlightened. From that point onwards, I’ve been an entirely different person.

A football star

I started to play football. First in Slavija, then in the Vojvodina FC junior team. Our first coach was Jovan Marjanović, who was very strict – the Hungarian football school. Seven exercises for two hours. We were Yugoslavian champions. Can you imagine – we beat Red Star 2-0! Our team line-up included Seki, Šovljanski, Milivojev, Bobinac, Samardžija, Mandić, Štrboje, Nikizeći, Daljac, Ivezić and Vasić.

When coach Jovan read out an essay in the locker room, it sounded like poetry in rhyme. The left midfielder Mandić – that wasn’t me but my own brother Miroslav. I quickly joined the junior first team. I was 15 and went straight to a junior championship in Viareggio for 18 days. The sporting director Vujadin Boškov saw us off saying, “Don’t disgrace me, you represent Yugoslavia!” We won fourth place. I played against A.C. Milan, AFC Ajax, and Dukla FC. When I returned to Novi Sad, just about everybody would stop and congratulate me. I had become a small football star.

My uncles

In my childhood, our two uncles – Steva and Dušan Temerinski, who were bakers – were there for us more than any other men. They were downright mad – they’d come on their bicycles at 4 am, after their night shift ended, and knocked on our windows, asking questions about Jesus Christ. Why Christ said, “.. if it can be, let this cup of trouble pass by me,” and whether he really existed or was just a mythical figure, etc. They loved us, and we loved them. My love for nature and the earth developed from their sensibilities. Steva was always saying to us, “Miroslav and Božidar, you listen to me, but do as you see fit.” They were savages and sages. Steva would take me to his country house with a small garden in Kamenica. He’d give me a heavy sack to carry. I’d ask what was in it that was so heavy, and he’d say, “You’ll see when we’re there.” When we’d arrive, we would untie the sack, and in it would be a ten-kilogram stone. So I’d ask why I had carried it, and he would reply, “It’ll be nicer to weed out carrots, celery, and radish with this stone.”

My brother Miroslav

My older brother was a great role model for me. He took me everywhere. First to football games, then to literary evenings. And me? I’d always follow him. When I was in my delinquency phase, he was the only one that beat me up. I beat up others, but I couldn’t hit my own brother. If he caught me committing an offence, he would punch me on the thighs, never on the cheeks, and say, “You want our mom too to die because of you?!” So he started to take me to the Youth Forum. I was 16. That’s where we met amazing avantgarde artists: Žilnik, Varadi, Aleksandar Tišma, Ottó Tolnai, Vranešević, Judita Šalgo, and Bogdanka and Dejan Poznanović.

Art is everything

I fell in love with art at the penultimate Yugoslavian Triennale at the Museum of Modern Art at Ušće. That’s where I met Oto Bihalji-Merin, Marko Pogačnik, Šutej, and David Nez. It was then that I realized that art is everything, but not anything! I was slowly moving away from football and started to spend more time doing street happenings, living a shared life in the city commune, and writing, as well as having exhibitions and playing in non-mainstream theatre productions.

The departure with my wife and children

I married the girl who had kissed me first on the street. We became husband and wife. We welcomed three children – Ista, Aya, and Sun. We lived in 18 Teslina Street. Today that is a cult villa, which retains the memories of the Novi Sad avantgarde. Braila and me went to the village of Brezovica, located on Mount Rudnik, in 1977, and started our own commune there, called The Family of Clearwater Streams. We founded a community modelled after the city commune, which I had named Intimacy. We started our life from scratch, with just two wooden spoons, two blankets, and two earthenware bowls. We put up cardboards in an abandoned house, which didn’t have glass in the windows, so when we got up, the first thing we’d do was dust off the snow that the wind had blown in from our children’s heads. Only now am I aware of how brave we were. As a young man, I thought it was all perfectly normal. Our life experiment, without money, material delights, or conventional slavery can serve only us personally and as a paradigm of the “general possibility of the world”.

Anti-pedagogy

I brought up Ista, Aya, and Sun without bringing them up. They formed and brought themselves up. I believe in a child because it brings experiences from innocence. Every morning, after I’d milk the cow, make a truckle of cheese, and bring mushrooms, I couldn’t wait for the three of them to get up so that we could play all day. They were raised without hollering, beatings, or suggestions. They ran across meadows, launched toy walnut boats into the stream, made a hut from fern, and listened for what nature had to tell them. Ista, being the most rebellious one, now says in jest, “You were too liberal raising us.” They set the house on fire three times, and my wife and I didn’t say a word. Ista, Aya, and Sun are different from me, but we do share a trait – we all belong to the revolution of tenderness!

The Family of Clearwater Streams

The Family of Clearwater Streams is my biggest life project. This is where I had my emancipation as a “noble savage”. I learnt from the plants, the wind, the stones, the ants, and the springs. People started to visit us. Now, looking back, it’s a 46-year-long history. Incredible, isn’t it? It was here in Brezovica that we started a mission of vegetarian non-aggression, a relationship towards the earth as a philosophy. We opened up our home, ran a modest business, and forged a cult word – ‘embracehood’.

People

A great many people visited us from the very start. Braila and me vowed since day one that we wouldn’t teach anyone anything, that we would be a small home, an emotional checkpoint. So far, some 50,000 people have visited me, with around 30,000 nights spent here and 320,000 free meals shared. I have been visited by a wealth of intellectuals, including Vladeta Jerotić, Ljubivoje Ršumović, Ružica Sokić, Rada Ðuričin, Jovan Ćirilov, Tibor Varadi, Dragan Kresoja, and Vladan Radovanović. Over 120 culture studies scholars have enriched my home, myself, and those around us with amazing agoras on the grass and conversations without fear. I like to say that I am one of the richest people in Europe without a penny to my name. I regret nothing, except the fact that my three ladies couldn’t stay here longer and cultivate the idyl.

The award

Thirty years ago we founded our award, called The Family of Clearwater Streams Award. It consists of a plaque with the pyrographed name of the laurate, one litre of spring water, one kilogram of black bread that I make, and ten dinars. So far, it’s been bestowed on Petar Lalović, Zagorka Stojanović, Gordana Brun, Vlada and Nada Adačić, Ratko Božović, and Emir Kusturica. Jovan Memedović is this year’s, 30^th laureate. It has now become a tradition to give the award at the Association of the Writers of Serbia in autumn.

Ecology is a way of life

Our small dot on the planet is among Europe’s and the world’s environmentalism pioneers, so through this award we would like to further encourage artists to join the gestural fight for the survival of life and planet Earth. We were the first to start living in harmony with nature, clean the streets and spaces in the most direct of ways – using our own hands, and defend a mountain – Mount Mijovac. Although we haven’t been entirely successful, we have found a modus vivendi. It renews, heals, and reforests itself. What about us? We are there for it. There for a slightly damaged Paradise, but still by its side, just as it is by our side. With this we thank it for feeding us with its very existence and endurance. In ecology, which I see as a way of life rather than a science, the most important thing is to endure.

The Šumes (Forests) Festival

The Forest Encounters is our festival, which we named Šumes. It is a gathering of alternative and avantgarde theatre workers who believe that theatre and nature mesh in a special way nowadays. This is very popular in the world. For 22 years already, on the last weekend in August we gather together The Mimart Group, Dah Teatar (The Breath Theatre), Ljubivoje Tadić, Ljubivoje Ršumović, Sanja Krsmanović, Dragomir Zupanac, Jelena and Milena Bogavac, Ivana Inđin, Andrija and Lidija Pavlović, Nemački Cirkus (The German Circus), etc. Every so often the festival hosts artists from Ceylon, Australia, the US, Germany, France, and they become part of our theatre “gang” that searches for new aesthetics. This gathering typically features a poetry platform, conversations, exhibitions, and, for the most part, we protect those who have been pursued and misunderstood in art.

A million-dollar outhouse

I remember when world-class director Želimir Žilnik visited us many years ago. He spent time with us and made us an outhouse. Now this outhouse costs a million dollars! He asked me once afterwards, when we met up, how much shit it contained. I said, “There’s about 300 kilos.” “Well, then you should ask for more than a million dollars!” he replied.

Friends

Friendship is a great fascination of mine, as is the love between a man and a woman, the harmony between the ‘Bindress’ and the ‘Binder’, as in alchemy. The male-female war is the most eternal phenomenon arising from history. The 20^th and 21^st centuries have demagnetized even more the two poles. I am a pure heterosexual man in search of spending at least five minutes with a woman in an erotic embrace or conversation. Five minutes is the same as eternity. A friend of mine, one of the winners of the NIN Award, told me that the matter of men and women is a matter of pure hygiene. It all starts clean and ends dirty. I give myself selflessly to others, but not conceptually, but because it is a drive of mine. I consider friendship to be the greatest attribute of the meaning of life. There is no greater wealth than having a friend. This is why, especially now, in post-Covid times, I work hard to bring people together. I often say that I’ve become a gatherer rather than an occupier. A person who wants to make pleasant the time spent together. If someone were to ask me if I would prefer being a billionaire to having friends, I wouldn’t think twice and would choose friends.

Looking back...

My life has truly been rich, full of events, encounters with strangers, the enjoyment of having time, the joy of empty pockets, but also the will to love and see it last…

I have lived my life ecstatically, you could almost say orgasmically. Now I say to young people, “Let life run through you, don’t let it pass by you, because the Creator (whatever you may wish to call him) has given us two of the greatest gifts – being and life. It is unacceptable to ruin them, which, sadly, happens often. The greatest mission that I have come to understand in life and spirituality is hospitality.

When I am gone...

I don’t give a lot of thought to the continuity of The Family of Clearwater Streams when I leave this earth. I would like it to continue, because the world needs it as a paradigm of individual life and responsibility. Personally, I would like Sun to take over the mission that I was given once, to implement it ethically somehow. Perhaps our small commune will become a myth, and perhaps it will fall by the wayside.

Recorded by Andrijana Stojanović