Djordje Marjanovic Gets Mural With His Real Signature

The facade in Milos Pocerac Street looks like hundreds of others in Belgrade, an ordinary building with no plaque to speak of, until the eye lands on a wall where Djordje Marjanovic’s face has been painted, his signature underneath. That signature was not generated from some font meant to look like handwriting. It is a real autograph, pulled from a family album and copied onto the wall exactly as it looked when the singer used to leave it on postcards and letters to fans. The mural appeared five years after Marjanovic’s death in May 2021, on the building where he lived for decades.

Painting began on September 8, and the project was not the idea of an institution or the city government but of the building’s tenants and neighbors from the street, who approved the initiative with signatures before any painting started. A day later, in an interview with N1, the singer’s son Marko Marjanovic spoke publicly for the first time about where the signature on the wall came from, and announced a concert to mark an upcoming major anniversary. The reaction from people nearby, he says, was unanimous. “Almost everyone commented on it. He deserved it,” he told Nova.rs.

The name of the mural’s author, however, does not appear consistently everywhere. Only N1, in its interview with Marko Marjanovic, noted that the wall was painted by “Saski Art,” while N1’s own separate piece on the event, like the Nova.rs article, does not mention the artist’s name at all, even though both outlets covered the same wall on the same day. The same inconsistency runs through the location: only the N1 interview with the singer’s son gives the exact address, Milos Pocerac Street in the Savski Venac municipality, while the other two pieces stick to the vaguer description of “the building where he lived.”

Where Did the Real Signature Come From?

The detail that sets this mural apart from the usual street art tribute is the signature itself, and Marko Marjanovic explains that it was not an artist’s improvisation but a document he tracked down himself and handed over for the work.

“This is his autograph, which I dug out of the archive and wanted to preserve. He was known for that autograph too, known for signing those postcards for every fan, or records as they used to call them, replying to letters, always with his recognizable signature,” Marko told N1.

Marko adds that in that street his father was, above all, both an artist and a beloved neighbor, recognizable for the dogs he walked every day, and that it was on that basis that neighbors circulated the petition that got the painting approved.

Marjanovic was born in 1931 in Kucevo, finished high school in Pozarevac, and enrolled in pharmacy studies in Belgrade, a course of study he eventually abandoned while earning a living, according to N1, as a railcar unloader, a milk and newspaper delivery man, and a bill collector. The turning point came in 1958 in Nis, where during a break in a program he sang a song that won the crowd over and brought him back for an encore, launching a career that eventually took him to the Lenin Stadium in the Soviet Union, where he sang for fifteen straight nights in front of fifteen thousand people each time. On the domestic stage, he was among the first to take the microphone off its stand, walk down into the audience and take off his jacket mid performance, a gesture unheard of at the time for a popular music singer, who were used to standing still in front of the microphone.

On his own view of that career, Marjanovic once said a line that Nova.rs quoted alongside the mural story.

“Wishes and dreams drive us, and each time they give new meaning to life. I’m happy that I managed to fulfill myself both as an artist and as a family man. I wish I’d had more time to spend with friends who are scattered around the world.”

That line makes the mural less a monument to a career and more a monument to a man who, by his own admission, gave up time with the people close to him for that career, the very people who, as neighbors, have now put their signatures behind the wall.

The sources do not fully agree on how that career ended. Marko recalls the last performance as sometime in the nineties.

“That was around ninety something, Sava Centar, that was after Melbourne, when he had that serious stroke. He spent two years recovering after that, and then he gave a farewell concert at Sava Centar.”

N1’s separate piece on Marjanovic’s career, however, states that he officially bid farewell to audiences with a concert at Sava Centar in 2004, more than a decade after the stroke in Melbourne in 1990. The two outlets do not fully agree on his age at death either. Both give the date as May 2021, but N1 writes that Marjanovic was 89, while Nova.rs puts him at 90.

The mural, in any case, was not meant as an ending but as a beginning. Marko Marjanovic is announcing a concert to mark one hundred years since his father’s birth, in 2031, a continuation, he says, of what he already organized last year with the help of the MTS Hall. Unlike an official plaque or a bust in a park, this mural came from below, from people who spent years running into the singer in the hallway and on the street, rather than from an institution marking an anniversary, and that may be why, as his son puts it, walking down that same street now carries a different feeling.

“I can only say I’m very happy that all this happened, and that now, somehow, when I walk down his street, I feel a sense of fulfillment, happiness and satisfaction,” Marko told N1.

The street stays the same, the neighbor is still a neighbor, only now there is a signature on the wall that no one will ever again receive in a letter.