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Bulgarians Stop Dancing to Serbian Tunes

21 09 2006  Changing fashions mean the star of Serbian “turbo-folk” music is no longer in the ascendancy.

By Tatyana Vaksberg in Sofia (Balkan Insight, 21 Sept 06)

Bulgarians have ended their long-standing love affair with Serbian “turbo-folk”, if the fiasco of Ceca Velickovic’s recent concert is anything to go by.

A chance to see the brightest star on the Serbian turbo-folk scene on September 14 lured only 3,000 fans to Sofia’s biggest stadium. Organisers hoped to sell 25,000 tickets.

The feeble turn-out shocked the singer, the organisers of the concert and many in the Bulgarian media.

For weeks they had been feverishly raising expectations of the event, describing Ceca’s dramatic love life and marriage to the notorious Serbian paramilitary leader, Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan, who was assassinated in 2000.

But the public had other ideas and their cool reaction to the concert suggested Bulgarians are bidding farewell to a kind of music that has enjoyed enormous popularity in the last 15 years.

The change is all to do with fashion and has nothing to do with disapproval of turbo-folk’s association with militant Serbian nationalism.

Turbo-folk crossed the border from Serbia to Bulgaria in the early 1990s, quickly spawning local imitators.

A few years ago, a Bulgarian pop-folk artist freely admitted that she saw Ceca as her model. By then, Arkan’s widow had turned into one of the most popular representatives of Serbian culture in Bulgaria, displacing her predecessor, Lepa Brena.

In July, the organisers of the Ceca concert, Pick and More Agency, announced that they were preparing for a huge show, which is why they hired the national Vasil Levski stadium.

Ticket prices ranged from 30 and 50 leva - the equivalent of around 15 to 25 euros – which is the average amount for such an event. The streets of Sofia were covered with Ceca posters, her participation in the main television shows was arranged, and interviews were given to the most popular newspapers.

But all their efforts did not turn the concert into the expected block-buster. On the night, Ceca sang to a mere 3,000 people, though she managed to appear unfazed by the empty-looking stadium.

While the influential weekly Kapital interpreted the dismal turnout as a sign that Bulgarians were dumping turbo-folk, statistics suggest there may be another explanation.

These say that while admiration for the musical genre is, in fact, growing, fans are less and less interested in foreign performers.

Home-grown stars who once imitated Serbian models now feel more confident of their own allure. Recently, the Bulgarian Pioneer Agency, which specialises in promoting local pop-folk stars, said it had sold over 22,000 tickets for a concert of one of its artists.

Ceca’s concert came five years too late, said Martin Radoslavov, owner of the Shok and Weekend tabloids.

Radoslavov, who set up the first Bulgarian weekly for pop-folk fans, recalled that Bulgarians bought about 70,000 copies of Ceca’s album “Decenija” in 2001.

“This was a record that no Bulgarian stars at that time could match,” he added. “But things have changed.”

Radoslavov noted that last year, Bulgarian pop singers routinely attracted up to 15,000 people to concerts.

Riding this wave, businessmen have already built a huge new pop-folk dancing club in Sofia. Billed as “the biggest in the Balkans”, it lies on the site of an old cinema, renowned for its impressive dimensions and named after the communist leader Georgi Dimitrov.

The sign bearing Dimitrov’s name recently gave way to a new identity: Sin City. The club features scantily dressed women dancing on table tops, while visitors have included the mayor of Sofia, Boyko Borisov.

A popular and media-savvy politician, the mayor told Ceca in person that he was a big fan and was longing to see her concert. Their kiss was published on the front page of three national dailies.

The singer herself declared to the daily Standart that if she were Bulgarian she would vote for Borisov. As it was, she would celebrate his future victories with big concerts.

But even the popularity of Sofia’s mayor failed to encourage Bulgarians to watch Ceca’s performance in person.

“I like Ceca very much,” said Neda, a 30-year-old broker in a real estate company in Sofia, resting between dances in Sin City. “But it never crossed my mind to go to her concert”.

“To us Ceca was a great star,” her friend Sasho, a hotel chef, added. “But now we also have many singers who are real stars”.

No one mentions Ceca’s political background as a factor in their disillusion.

Arkan, her husband, was a war crimes suspect wanted by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, on account of the “ethnic cleansing” operations he carried out in Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s.

After his murder in 2000, Ceca inherited his business empire.

Ceca also kept singing the songs that were widely seen as having been musical adverts for Slobodan Milosevic’s regime and inspiration for Serbian militias.

In 2003, after the assassination of Serbia’s moderate prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian police put Ceca behind bars. She was released after four months.

None of these details intruded into the fawning articles on Ceca in Bulgaria, or her interviews. Arkan was rarely mentioned and if he was, was presented as a “Serbian military leader”. Their love was described in glowing terms as “legendary”.

In one popular television show, on the private national channel bTV, an interviewer asked Ceca to comment on her wedding picture. “My husband was brave and masculine,” she replied shortly.

When shown a portrait of Milosevic, she added: “I am not interested in politics”, but only in “removing borders and Serbia becoming part of the European Union”.

While the picture of Milosevic was whisked away, Ceca’s wedding photograph remained on the screen, showing her in a white wedding gown and Arkan in a First World War Serbian army uniform, a sword at his hip and a long Orthodox cross around his neck.

The public’s facile adoration of Ceca is unsurprising, given the Bulgarian media’s signal lack of interest in events in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. While wars raged in a neighbouring country, Bulgarians were scarcely informed about them.

None of the local media kept permanent correspondents in the war zones and most news came from international agencies, and was dumped on the back pages.

Bulgaria ’s fascination with Serbian turbo-folk music, therefore, developed against a background of a lack of information on events in Serbia itself.

Shortly before the conflict in Kosovo, in 1999, a poll conducted by the MB/BD agency suggested only three per cent of Bulgarians could locate Kosovo on the map, even though the Kosovo capital, Pristina, lies only 150 km away from their country’s borders.

In Bulgaria, Serbian turbo-folk had no political context. This helps to explain why the success, and now the failure, of Ceca Velickovic come down to nothing more than fashion.


Tatyana Vaksberg is a freelance journalist in Sofia and a Balkan Insight contributor. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.