Mala Cana: “I screamed that Andrija’s cross was gone”
The singer has described for the first time what happened at Belgrade's New Cemetery, where she found her partner's grave covered in fresh flowers, surrounded by strangers and with the slab moved.
Singer Mala Cana spoke publicly on July 30 about what she went through at the grave of her partner, singer Andrija Bajic, at Belgrade’s New Cemetery. Until now the scene had reached the public second hand, through people who happened to be standing nearby.
Bajic was buried in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens. On July 28, the actress and singer Olivera Katarina was buried in the same plot. Cana arrived at the cemetery that day with a group of close friends and says she knew nothing about it.
She found strangers around the grave, piles of fresh flowers and a slab that had been moved. The cross was not there.
“How I did not faint. I grabbed hold of a friend and screamed that my Andrija’s cross was gone”
She was holding a candle and crying. The people standing there told her the cross had been placed inside the plot, and that more than one person can be buried in a single grave.
Why was Olivera Katarina buried in the same plot?
The explanation Cana was given on the spot came down to two points: the plot takes more than one burial, and the cross had not been removed but moved inside. She learned this while standing in front of the grave, two days after her partner’s funeral, in the middle of a burial nobody had told her about.
“I did not even know that Olivera Katarina had been buried there. I went to the cemetery with the friends who are standing by me. That is where I came closest to a breakdown”
The Alley of Distinguished Citizens is the most prominent burial section in the country, reserved for artists, scientists and athletes, and decisions about who goes where are not made in consultation with a partner of the deceased.
The four days that led up to it
The cemetery scene did not happen in a vacuum. It followed an open dispute with the singer’s family, which we covered earlier this week, when Bajic’s daughters carried Cana’s belongings out of the family house and left them in the street.
- July 26: Bajic’s daughters removed her belongings from the family house in the Vozdovac district, and police came to the address after she filed a report
- July 28: Olivera Katarina was buried in the same plot, and Cana came to the cemetery with friends the same day
- July 30: the singer speaks publicly for the first time about what happened at the grave
Three days, three incidents, and not one of them without witnesses. Police were called to the first. The second played out in front of people who were explaining cemetery paperwork to a woman holding a candle.
What is missing from that timeline is a phone call. Cana says she found out about Katarina’s funeral only when she reached the cemetery, meaning nobody in the family warned her the grave would be opened that day.
The photograph she never took out of the wardrobe
In the same statement, Cana addressed her relationship with Bajic’s first wife, who died before him.
“I keep a photograph of Andrija’s late wife in my wardrobe, out of respect for my husband… And I used to visit her grave, even when Andrija could not”
She offers that detail as an answer to those who treat her as an outsider in the family. The photograph, she says, stayed where it was after Bajic died.
The dispute over the house in Vozdovac and the police report she filed are both still open. What happened at New Cemetery on July 28 was not part of that dispute, but it landed in the same week, on the same woman, in front of the same circle of people.
