Vladicin Han: First Oj Moravo Crowns Ristic's Orchestra

As the last note of the trumpet faded over the banks of the South Morava on Saturday evening, Bojan Krstic said a sentence that explains, better than any scoreboard could, why Vladicin Han decided to build its own trumpet competition in the first place.

“In my family I play, my father played, my great grandfather, my grandfather. The trumpet has to be passed down, we all play in the family, and we all live off this instrument, because the trumpet means so much to us,” Krstic told RTS.

Krstic is one of six trumpet masters this town has given to Guca and the world, and it was he, alongside Bojan Ristic, who closed the evening with his own solo performance before Radisa Trajkovic Djani took over the stage.

The first edition of the Oj Moravo trumpet orchestra competition took place in Vladicin Han on Saturday, September 5, organized by the town’s Center for Culture and backed by the municipality. Five orchestras entered, and the jury handed down a clear verdict: first place and 250,000 dinars went to the Stefan Ristic Orchestra of Vladicin Han, second place and 150,000 dinars to the Slozna Braca orchestra, also from Han, while third place and 100,000 dinars went to the Marjan Krstic Orchestra from nearby Zaguzane. The orchestras of Darko Ivanovic and Milan Mica Petrovic, both from Vladicin Han, also competed. Municipal president Goran Mladenovic handed out the awards.

The idea of giving the town its own trumpet holiday did not appear overnight. It was pushed forward by Bojan Ristic, known by the nickname Carapa, one of six trumpet masters Vladicin Han counts in its history, alongside Junuz Ismailovic, Boban Markovic, Slobodan Salijevic, Stojan Krstic and Bojan Krstic. For decades this group has sent orchestras to Guca and brought them back with awards, and Oj Moravo was conceived as a place to celebrate that tradition at home, before young orchestras even set out on that road.

That points to the essential difference from Guca, one the festival made a deliberate point of not copying. The Dragacevo trumpet festival is a national and world stage, with a history spanning more than half a century and competitors arriving from across the country. Oj Moravo is something more modest and, it seems, more deliberately aimed: a local competition built to nurture what already exists rather than measure itself against the giants. Caslav Mladenovic, director of the Center for Culture, put that distinction almost like a mission statement for the event.

“Guca is the place that made the trumpet famous, but Han is no less important than Guca, so out of respect for the trumpet players who came from this region, we are organizing this competition,” Mladenovic said.

Respect, rather than rivalry, is the word carrying the weight here, and it showed in how the jury approached the scoring. Jury president Vladica Vasic, a trumpet professor at the Music School in Vranje, set a criterion that reads more like an artistic statement than a judging instruction.

“Every orchestra is the best in its own right, that much is true. But what matters most is the interpretation they deliver, how they perform it, in what way. No two are the same, of course there has to be a best one, but the best is the one that touches the whole audience, not just the orchestra performing it,” Vasic said.

That is a standard that resists being reduced to a single score, which is precisely why it feels credible in a small town where everyone already knows every orchestra by heart. On the other side of the stage stood a generation still building its name, among them Milan Mica Petrovic, whose performance in the competition doubled as a statement of his own ambition. “My goal is always success, effort, effort matters to me. I want it to pay off, because I really do invest in myself and in my orchestra so that we sound phenomenal and are the best of all,” Petrovic said. Bojan Ristic summed up that same ambition from the perspective of someone who has already made the journey, from Guca to the world: “Vladicin Han gave all of us wings to fly from here, to go to Guca, to the whole world, and I think Vladicin Han deserves this, for all the trumpet masters, and we have six of them, to celebrate the trumpet,” Ristic said.

The first night’s results, however, show how inward looking the event still is. The top two places stayed inside Vladicin Han itself, third place traveled only as far as neighboring Zaguzane, and none of the five orchestras came from beyond that narrow circle. That is not a criticism: a first edition is not supposed to be a regional spectacle. But it does show that Oj Moravo is, for now, a celebration of its own backyard rather than a showcase for the wider south of Serbia. Whether future editions will widen the field or stay a home celebration remains an open question, though organizers have already said this will not be a one off event.

Like any first edition of anything, Oj Moravo carries all the uncertainty of a beginning: a program still finding its shape, an audience still waiting to grow. But what it already has is rare. A town that, rather than waiting for someone else to notice it because of the trumpet, builds its own reason to celebrate that tradition out loud, once a year, by the river.