The Banner That Killed Birds: When a Slogan Eats a City

I was queuing at the bakery on the corner of Kolarceva when the man ahead of me, never lifting his eyes from his phone, said to a friend: “Birds, mate, people have gathered because of birds.” He said it with that mixture of bafflement and unease a Belgrader reserves for something that surprises him by still being able to move him. Then, after a pause, he added more quietly: “Well, fair enough, birds are something too.”

And it was something. On Palata Albanija, Belgrade’s first skyscraper, the building that for decades stood for a city that looks upward, a banner appeared bearing the slogan “Serbia is winning”. It covered all thirteen floors. Behind that fabric, on the facade, white swifts had nested, birds that are strictly protected by law. The banner closed off the entrances to their nests. The parents could not get in, and the chicks were left without food.

When a slogan seals the window you breathe through

There is something almost too symbolic in a word like “winning” literally cutting off the air of a living creature, so much so that one is almost ashamed to write it down, lest it look like forcing a point. But the fact is stubborn and asks for none of my interpretation: the slogan, in square metres of cloth, physically covered the nests. Birds do not read messages. They only try to reach their young, and where there had once been an opening there was now a statement.

The sociologist Henri Lefebvre wrote back in 1968, in “The Right to the City”, that a city is above all the work of those who live in it, not a banner thrown across it. In those days Belgrade, without reading Lefebvre, arrived at the same thought on its own. The Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia demanded immediate removal. The Institute for Nature Protection and the Stari Grad municipality arranged care for the birds, on the orders of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The system, then, did move. But the people moved before it did.

What does it tell us that people gathered at all?

From the afternoon of May 30, 2026, citizens and students stood in front of the building and blocked traffic on Kolarceva. Not over an election, not over electricity prices, not over any of the great fault lines this society has split itself along in recent years. Over swifts. Over something that has no voice, does not turn out to vote and does not post online. That, it seems to me, is a fact worth more than any opinion poll: there is still a place in us that reacts when it sees that someone weaker has had the window they breathe through sealed shut.

On the matter, Aleksandar Vucic said: “No one had bad intentions.” I believe him, and that is exactly why the episode is instructive. Most of the harm done to a city does not come from malice, but from carelessness, from the habit of draping cloth over the living because it looks tidier from the street. Climbers took the banner down that same evening. The nests had their air back.

I went back later to that corner. The bakery was open, the man with the phone had gone, and Palata Albanija was once again just a building: bare, old, ours. Perhaps the whole story fits inside that sentence of his, spoken half under his breath, between disbelief and something warmer: well, fair enough, birds are something too. They are. Perhaps the most important thing of all.

Would you, too, stand in front of a building for a nest you cannot even see?