Milan Djurdjevic Named Zajecar Gitarijada's Rock Mayor
Milan Djurdjevic received the key to Zajecar and the rock mayor title as the 59th Gitarijada opened before roughly 5,000 people at Kraljevica, ahead of a weekend with Crvena Jabuka and Zoster.
When the mayor of Zajecar handed the city key to a man who, four decades earlier, stood on that same stage as a young member of the band Nova Zemlja and won the Gitarijada, the circle closed, in a sense, in front of a crowd well past five thousand. Milan Djurdjevic, today the founder and keyboardist of Neverne Bebe, was named rock mayor of the 59th edition of a festival that still calls itself the oldest rock event in Europe, a title that sounds like a joke until you count how many people have carried it before him.
The opening night of the 59th Zajecar Gitarijada took place on Thursday, August 27, at Kraljevica, the festival’s traditional venue. According to figures from the ground, around 5,000 people attended the opening, a serious showing for a city this size and a sign that the rock scene still draws crowds outside the major centers. The festival runs through August 29, admission is free all three days, and the eleven-band, three-night lineup previously announced has now played out its first chapter.
Who is Milan Djurdjevic, the new rock mayor?
Djurdjevic is no random pick for a role that carries more weight in Zajecar than the name alone suggests. He is the founder, creative force and producer of Neverne Bebe, and his résumé also includes a stint in Smak, one of the pillars of the Yugoslav rock scene in the 1970s. In 1983 he won the Gitarijada with the band Nova Zemlja, so the city key handed to him by Mayor Vladimir Videnovic and his deputy Dusan Vruckic amounted to a return to the very place where it all began.
The rock mayor title is, in essence, a festival ritual with no real institutional counterpart. It carries no formal power, but it carries symbolic weight, since it goes to people whose biography is already part of the festival’s canon. When that title returns to someone who stood on the other side of it forty three years earlier, as a competitor, the message is clearer than any speech from the stage: Gitarijada sees itself as a chain, not a series of standalone evenings repeated year after year.
That chain was visible in the competitive part of the program too. The first semifinal of demo bands featured Mece and Ricky Loud from Belgrade, Frontmeni from Leskovac, Crockett from Novi Sad and Arterije from Brod, a lineup drawn from different corners of the former Yugoslavia with nothing yet to their name but a band and a slot at Kraljevica. It is a role the festival has protected since the 1980s, and it is still what sets it apart from most summer rock events that have long since become purely showcase affairs.
The showcase portion of the opening night, meanwhile, showed where the festival now stands on the regional map. Last year’s winner, Promonael, opened that block, and Crvena Jabuka and the Mostar band Zoster closed it, two names that draw nearly the same audience despite belonging to different generations of the post Yugoslav scene. The announcement that Letu Stuke, Neverne Bebe, Goran Bare i Majke and Divlje Jagode will perform over the next two days, alongside tribute sets for Ekatarina Velika and Iron Maiden, suggests this year’s bill was built to cover both the crowd that comes for a band playing live and the crowd that comes for names that no longer exist in their original form.
The return to Kraljevica carries extra weight given what happened last year. Following a security assessment and a fire that hit the festival’s usual site, organizers moved the 58th Gitarijada last August to the late antique site of Felix Romuliana. This year’s return to the old location, with an estimated five thousand people at the opening alone, suggests the grounds under Kraljevica have been repaired and that the festival is once again building around the site that turned it into an institution in the first place.
For a festival that also had to work through questions about the safety of its own venue, an opening night with five thousand people under Kraljevica is proof the audience still shows up when the program takes both the demo scene and the regional veterans seriously. The rest of the weekend, with Neverne Bebe, Letu Stuke and Divlje Jagode still to come, will show whether that balance holds through Sunday. The opening night, in any case, did its part.
