Emina Jahovic on divorce day: We laughed, then came silence
In a new interview for Hype, Emina Jahovic describes the day of her divorce from Mustafa Sandal in unusual detail. They laughed through it, she says, and the silence only arrived when she got home.
- In an interview for Hype, Emina Jahovic has described the day of her divorce from Turkish singer Mustafa Sandal in more detail than ever before.
- She says the two of them laughed through the entire process: "There was a lot of tension and stress and I suppose we were pushing it all out through laughter."
- The house was empty that day because both of her sons were with their father, so it "turned grey", as she puts it.
- She moved into a new house afterwards and, in her own words, started over.
Emina Jahovic has spoken to Hype about the day she divorced Turkish singer Mustafa Sandal, and it is the most detailed account she has given so far. What stayed with her from that day was not the silence in the corridor. It was the laughter.
“We laughed the whole time. There was a lot of tension and stress and I suppose we were pushing it all out through laughter,” she said.
It sounds like an anecdote. It is not. The laughter was a valve, the only way to get through several hours in which a decade of shared life is closed down administratively. Two people who know each other well know how to make it easier for one another, even while signing off on the end.
Why did the house turn grey that day?
The break did not come in the courtroom. It came when she unlocked her own front door.
“The house was completely empty, the children were with him at that moment. A house that had been full of warmth turned grey,” she said.
That sentence explains the mechanics of divorce better than any legal document. While the procedure is running, a person is busy. There are papers, appointments, obligations, and someone sitting across the table. Then it all ends, the door closes, and the room where somebody is usually waiting stays empty.
Both of her sons were with their father that day. Jahovic came back to a house where everything was in its place, minus the people the house existed for in the first place. That, she says, is when she realised that what she had built had collapsed.
She insists that a divorce is never merely a formality. It is heavy and traumatic in itself, she stressed, regardless of how civil the former partners are with each other, and the hardest part is always the one involving the children.
It is also worth noting how rarely anyone in the public eye talks this way. The standard version is “we remained on excellent terms” and the story stops there. Jahovic kept that part too, but she added what usually goes missing: that stress was sitting behind the laughter, and that the silence came after the laughter.
A new house and starting again
She moved after the divorce. That was not only a logistical decision but, as she puts it, a fresh start.
A wall in the old house could not simply be painted over into something else. Every room carried its own memory and its own sound. Changing an address, in situations like this, is the simplest way to break the automatic routine, so that the morning begins in a space with no roles assigned to it in advance.
Sandal has since remarried. Jahovic does not talk about that with bitterness, which is probably the reason she was able to return to the story of the divorce day at all and tell it without hedging.
She still performs, writes and releases music, and her career has moved through several very different phases in recent years. This interview changes none of that. It changes only what the audience knows about her: that a day which looked from the outside like a calm parting was, on the inside, anything but calm.
What is striking is how many people in the comments recognise that exact scene with the empty house. Not the courtroom, not the paperwork, but the moment the key turns and nobody answers.
Is laughter in moments like these a sign that a divorce has been handled well, or is it simply the best mask we have?
