Living in Diaspora

On Tuesday, December 21, 2021, the first in a series of online meetings called “Living in Diaspora” was held, at which journalist Borivoj Erdeljan from Petrovaradin was a guest.

Mr Erdeljan was born in 1936 and has been a journalist since 1958. For more than 40 years, he worked in the newspaper publishing houses, such as “Politica” and “Politica Express”, as a foreign policy commentator, editor and permanent and special correspondent from abroad. In his long career, he spent a long period of time in Cairo, Jerusalem and Athens as a permanent correspondent, then as a special reporter from the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Cyprus, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and other countries of that region, but also as from many European countries and the USA. He later turned the aforementioned vast experience into wonderful columns as a foreign policy analyst in newspapers such as “Danas” and “NIN” in which he dealt with Middle Eastern topics. Great reputation among the Serbian public in the last 20 years, Mr Erdeljan earned it precisely by writing the aforementioned columns. It is not bad to mention that Mr Erdeljan was once the editor and host of the TV Belgrade program “The World Around Us”, but also that he gained several decades of experience as an author on television programs such as TV Belgrade, Novi Sad, “Politika”.

The meeting was moderated by the president of SECC St. Helen of Anjou, Jelena Jablanov Maksimović, and the participants (about fifteen of them) were from Serbia and Malta. In the beginning, Mr Erdeljan mentioned his first stay in Malta in December 1989, when he attended the Soviet-American summit as a reporter. The importance of this summit was reflected precisely in the fact that it took place very soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and that at the same time “the wind of change was felt” and it was wanted to determine whether we are really moving towards better times and that the future is “approached with experience”. The conversation continued with the story of Erdeljan’s stay in Cairo, in the 70s of the last century, what the community of Yugoslavs was like at that time, how the Serbian-Croatian language school was organized for Yugoslav children, how that system was in line with the school system in the mother country ( Yugoslavia) and the witness and interlocutor was the daughter of Mr Erdeljan, Jelena Erdeljana, who attended the aforementioned “Yugo-school”. Their stay in Israel at the end of the 80s was for Mr Erdeljana a completely new experience because there was no “southern community” like in Egypt, but the friendship with the then patriarch of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, Diodoros, left the biggest impression. Mr Erdeljan mentioned that he was and remained close to the current Teofilus, who at that time was the abbot of a monastery in Cana of Galilee, where the church was frescoed by the Belgrade painter Saša Savić, which is not known to the general public in Serbia. Mr Erdeljan’s third diaspora was Athens, where he lived from 1995-1998, as many Serbs did during the mentioned period, who decided for various reasons to choose Greece as their new home.

During the conversation, the imminent topic of preserving national identity in the diaspora and whether is it enough and good to focus only on one’s own community came up. In Mr Erdeljan’s opinion, the big “trap” that many people in the diaspora fall into is precisely closing themselves in their own communities and separating themselves from the host country and people. It is important to learn the language of the country where you live, get to know the culture and take advantage of the unique opportunity to get to know each other. It is equally important to maintain contact with the motherland and in this way to refine and participate in the life “over there”. “We cannot be enough for ourselves anywhere, even when we are satisfied with the material side,” Erdeljan concluded his presentation.

The meeting was recorded and posted on SECC’s YouTube channel.