The sound of silence: The student protests sweeping Serbia
On why students are protesting in Serbia, how the theatre community are supporting them and why it matters.
Happy new year! I was going to kick off this newsletter with a list of some of the most exciting shows opening in Europe in 2025 - and I definitely still plan to write that list - but this week I wanted to delve a little deeper into what’s happening in Serbia at the moment, not just because it’s been under-reported outside the region but because it’s inspiring, which I’m sure is something we can all use at the start of the year.
Thank you to everyone who’s supported my writing by subscribing, sharing or becoming a paid supporter. There were several sign-ups over the festive period, which I really appreciate. If you’d like to join them, you can still do so for just £4 a month of £40 a year. It helps me to keep the site largely paywall-free though there will be occasional bonus posts.
It has just struck midnight on 31st December in Belgrade, but no one is celebrating, no one is cheering. People stand in silence. There are hundreds of people in Student Square in the heart of the city, hundreds more stretching down the street, but no one is moving. Some stand with their heads bowed, some with their phones raised. The faint thud of distant fireworks can be heard but no one makes a sound. It is a foggy night, and the city is blanketed in thick white mist, adding to the powerful atmosphere. Finally, at 12.07, a shout goes up and people begin to belatedly greet the new year.
This silent protest, a gesture of both remembrance and resistance, was part of a string of actions which have taken place across Serbia since 1st November last year when the concrete canopy above the entrance to the recently renovated main railways station in Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia, collapsed, killing fourteen people including two young children. Two weeks later a fifteenth person died in hospital.
Initially the government, led by President Aleksandar Vučić, and his ruling Serbian Progressive party (SNS), claimed that the canopy had not been part of the renovation, but documents and photographs appeared to contradict this. People wanted answers. They wanted someone to be held to account.
For a lot of people this was a tipping point, the lethal consequence of living in a society where corruption and cronyism are endemic, and party loyalty is rewarded over merit and competence. Living under such a system is destabilising and depleting. It takes a toll psychologically. Now it felt like you couldn’t even trust the buildings which you used every day not to fall down on you. An early slogan encapsulated this: “We are all under the canopy.”
Early protests in Novi Sad were volatile. Windows in city buildings were smashed. Not a surprise given that pro-government thugs often infiltrate protests with the intention of stirring things up. Several people were arrested, among them a young theatre director, while the protestors were accused in the media of not being sufficiently respectful of the dead and using the tragedy for political ends.
Perhaps with this in mind, the protests soon mutated. Students started arranging 15-minute silent protests, one minute for every life lost, beginning at 11.52 am, the moment when the canopy collapsed, and lasting until 12.07.
On 22nd November, the students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, embarked on one of these 15-minute protests. They’d reported their plan to block a nearby street to the police in advance. “Everything was in order. We had the permission to go out for 15 minutes,” explains Vanja Šević, a 22-year-old student at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Minutes into the protest several angry drivers arrived at the scene and started making a scene. Things escalated and some of the students were verbally and physically assaulted. It later turned out that some of those involved held jobs with municipal authorities.
On 25th November the students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts set up a blockade at their faculty. Classes were suspended and the students moved into the faculty building. They set up dormitories, kitchens and donation points. Crucially, all decision-making is now undertaken by the students themselves via working groups and plenary sessions. It is a profoundly democratic process. Other faculties soon followed suit. At the time of writing the majority of faculties in Serbia are blockaded.
There’s a long history of students in Serbia (and Yugoslavia) using this method to campaign for change, but this is the largest such protest since 1968. The students have issued a series of demands to the government. While some faculties have additional demands, the core issues are that students want all documentation related to the reconstruction of Novi Sad railway station to be published. They want those involved in the assault on students and professors to face consequences. They want those responsible for what happened in Novi Sad to be dealt with by the law. Their demands boil down to a wish to live in a functioning country, with a government that serves its people rather than protecting its own interests. “We are just asking for everything to go by the law,” says Šević.
The image of a bloodied red hand, five fingers held aloft, has quickly become the symbol of the protests. The use of strong imagery and the clarity of narrative has been a key feature of the movement. This is perhaps to be expected with students of playwriting and performance being the driving force behind these protests. “Good storytelling is our branch of education,” says Šević.
Despite the numbers involved, one of their biggest challenges they’ve faced is getting coverage in state-run media, especially the country’s national broadcaster RTS. Vučić, on the other hand, is on television constantly. Turn on the TV and there he is, addressing the public or being thrown softball questions by friendly interviewers. It’s hard for alternative voices to get an airing. In order to address this, the students decided to gather outside the building in which Vučić was giving an address and make such a racket they could be heard in the background while he was speaking, so their presence could not be ignored.
Actor and activist Branislav Trifunović is a veteran of multiple protest movements in Serbia since the 1990s, has been heartened by the students’ organisation and determination. “I lost the faith that something will change in Serbia. Until November I really didn’t believe that the young people would do anything,” he says. But he’s been surprised by the students and what they’ve achieved. “They have so much empathy, so much humour. They have a unique perspective.”
“I’ve never felt energy like this,” he continues. “We are looking to the students. We are listening to the students. We are letting them lead us and they are doing it brilliantly.”
What began as – and remains – a student-led protest has gained the support of other groups. Serbia’s farming unions, who have their own set of issues with the government, are being vocal in their support of the students. In Novi Sad, rather wonderfully, they have even started cooking goulash for the students participating in the blockades. When high school students also started to join in with the protests in increasingly large numbers, the government responded by closing schools a week earlier for the winter holidays, as reported here in the Guardian.
The theatre community has also been very vocal in their support. Statements of support have been read out by actors at the end of many performances. In recent days, performers have taken to sporting red gloves at curtain calls, even in venues where you might not expect such a display of solidarity like the National Theatre.
On 22nd December, the students, together with the farmers’ unions, staged their biggest action yet. A call went out to gather in Slavija Square, a roundabout in downtown Belgrade, at 4pm. People started to assemble earlier in the afternoon and by four the whole area was awash with people, stretching in every direction. As at previous protests, they stood in silence for 15 minutes. Thousands and thousands of people standing together in shared silence. (Some video footage here). And then they erupted. They blew whistles and waved phone torches and placards. It is estimated that over 100,000 people attended, making it the biggest protest in Serbia this century. More people turned out than on 5th October 2000 when Slobodan Milošević was ousted from power. It was an incredible moment, says Trifunović. “100,000 people standing in silence for 15 minutes was the biggest message ever, politically, I think, in Serbia.” After the protest, people dissipated in different directions still blowing their whistles, carrying that energy with them.
Since the beginning cultural and educational activities have been taking place within the blockaded faculties. There have been talks, workshops, literary events and film screenings. There have also been performances. Students of the Faculty of Political Sciences invited independent theatre company Heartefact to perform their play Our Son, a family drama about the complex relationship between a young gay man and his parents, in their faculty amphitheatre. (Here’s a piece I wrote in the Guardian about this play and the impact it’s had on Serbian audiences). “That proposal passed the student plenum,” explains Patrik Lazić, writer and director of Our Son, “as does every decision they make related to blockades.”
There is no stage in the faculty amphitheatre, so they were forced to improvise, he says, “but the atmosphere was wonderful from the beginning.” The after-show conversation lasted almost as long as the play itself. “We talked about the play, the problems it opens up, but we also put it in context. Our story is about the need to talk, to communicate, to be free from what our parents and the authorities want from us, to make choices for ourselves and our future, in this context, it took on a special significance. At the end, they applauded us, and we applauded them.”
“The students have given us the much-needed optimism that this country has a future, and we can only admire them, thank them and support them when they need our support,” says Lazić.” When they called us, there was no hesitation whether to go. And I must say that I am particularly impressed by their solidarity. They could have invited a play with a "lighter" theme, but they still invited a play with a queer perspective.”
Similarly, Trifunović and the company of Kokan Mladenović’s hit play Once Upon a Time in Brijuni, inspired by the friendship between Tito and his wife Jovanka, and the actors Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, also performed in front of the students. Trifunović had asked them if there was anything they could do to help and, once they had discussed the matter in their plenum, the students invited them. Performing the show at their faculty was, he says, a unique experience. “I have starred in a lot of political plays and performed all around Serbia, but this was probably the most exciting thing that I have ever seen in the theatre. We were crying. We were hugging. We were saying thank you. They were saying thank you.”
These gestures of solidarity are even crossing borders. There have been statements of support from many of the countries which made up the former Yugoslavia, including Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia. This goes both ways; when a seven-year-old was killed in a school stabbing incident in Zagreb in December, vigils were held in Serbia and in some towns an extra minute of silence was added to the 15. This feels natural to Šević. People of her generation don’t have the baggage their parents have; many weren’t even born during the 1990s. There is a recognition that they have a lot in common with other young people in the region, that they understand each other. “Of course we will be in solidarity with them, in the same way that their Academy of Arts has supported us.” The students are hoping that more people will take up their cause, and adopt their methods, internationally. “Self organise and start practicing direct democracy now,” they urged in an open letter.
Vučić’s government does not appear to have coherent gameplan to deal with the protests. On the one hand, it is claiming that the protests are funded by foreign powers, at the same time it has come up with several schemes to try and appease the students, including a new offer of affordable housing loans for young people (most of the young people I’ve spoken with have scoffed at this scheme as being completely unworkable). This is typical of the government’s kneejerk approach to any form of social unrest which is usually countered with small financial incentives, a little top-up to people’s pension here, or notoriously, free sandwiches for people turning up to a pro-government rally. They are clearly hoping that the protests will dissipate over the holiday season (which in Serbia starts with New Year’s Eve, as the country celebrates Christmas on 7th January). But the students have other plans.
There is something qualitatively different about these protests to the many previous waves of protests which have taken place in the country. While a lot of recent movements have all eventually petered out, unable to sustain themselves, what the students are doing seems to be cutting through in unprecedented ways. Even people who have little faith in Serbia’s fragmented opposition are supporting these protests. It helps that the students have been very clear that they are not politically affiliated (“We’re not politicians, we’re artists,” says Šević of her fellow students at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts). Despite the appearance of high-tech spyware on some activists’ phones, and many students receiving anonymous threatening phone calls, these fear tactics simply aren’t working, if anything they’re strengthening the students’ resolve. It helps that so many of their frustrations are shared by the wider population. How come the government has resources to build stadiums and highways, while the education and health care systems are crumbling, and infrastructure is in disarray? The last 12 years have seen democratic backsliding, electoral irregularities and increasingly limited freedom of speech. “We have a dictator in Serbia, and a lot of people in Western countries are blind to this,” says Trifunović.
The feeling that nothing you do will change anything has a cumulative deadening effect on people, a state of inertia sets in. This has been palpable in Serbia in the past, but it feels like a kind of psychological rewiring is going on, a rewriting of the narrative. The students have given people permission to hope again.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
Such an important article! Natasha gets to the core of the protests in Serbia and the hope they may inspire.