Hospitality facilities change owners, kitchen, interior, clientele, purpose. There is nothing controversial about it, although it can be sad.
It is controversial when a city company, in this case "Tašmajdan", a restaurant in front of which a monument should be placed to one of its regular guests, Vaska Popa, for example, hands over to an individual such as Aleksandar Kajmaković better known as Aca Bosnian.
Disputed, of course, for all those for whom "Last chance" was one of the last still living bars where the spirit of the former Belgrade could be felt, the outlines of which the progressive government is looking to obliterate, lest the history of the city should start counting from the laying of the foundation stone for Belgrade on the water.
An obsession with everything that is urban
Vučić's city government behaves like barbarians when they occupy an urban place: first they loot it and then they gnaw it to the bones in order not to free up space for their totems and shrouds, palaces and temples, casinos and fairs.
"The attackers (of the cities) resemble a madman who throws acid in the face of a beautiful woman and promises her a new, more beautiful face," wrote Bogdan Bogdanović, an architect, not a basketball player, in the context of the devastating war in Yugoslavia.
That story about the constant battle between "city love and city hatred" is now being conducted in peacetime conditions: the same people who in the 1990s were only demolishing, are now demolishing in order to build the opposite way.
"It seems that in the panicked souls of the city destroyers I feel an evil aversion to everything that is urban, that is, to the complex semantic series of spirit, morality, speech, taste, style... I will remind you that the word urbanity, starting from the fourteenth century until today, in the most important in European languages it always means the same thing: smoothness, articulateness, harmony of thoughts and words, words and feelings, feelings and movements... etc., so when someone doesn't know how to submits to the laws of urbanity, the easiest thing for him is to simply - bypass it," wrote Bogdanović.
With this passage, it is enough to recall the characters of Aleksandar Vučić, Aleksandar Šapić, Goran Vesić declaiming tirades about the beautiful development of Belgrade.
A stain on memory
Why is this pathetic-dramatic bonito and shedding tears over the fact that a tavern has changed owners, the respected reader will think. Especially since the "Last Chance" has changed over the decades - from a really last chance for a few more drinks at the tables covered with checkered tablecloths, when everything else in the city would be closed, to a restaurant suitable for parents with small children, where pizzas, cakes were the best , ice creams and lemonade.
Because this is the latest "capsular acid" that is spilling over the urban face of Belgrade. Now, therefore, I, who in "Last Chance" once met Vasko Pop, for whom the dawn dawned before going to the army in "Chance", who was in "Chance" with girls from the Fifth Belgrade Gymnasium, who I watched my daughters' first steps from "Shansa", I should have gone to "Kod Ace Bosanca", if I wanted to drink a beer or something in that area on Tasmajdan.
For many Belgraders, "Last Chance" evokes fond memories of many things that will now be stained by the thought of the new formal owner and the one who and everything that stands behind him. It's easy to imagine what will grow in that place.
And so it is all over Belgrade, wherever you go, the spirit of the old, urban Belgrade is disappearing, a new aesthetic is emerging according to the greedy ideas of those who do not care about the city and its citizens, and that without almost any resistance from us who swear by the love of the city.
A city is not made up of bricks, asphalt, concrete, steel and glass, but what kind of idea emerges from the building material, what fills the walls, urban thought that connects all differences.
Let's go back to Bogdan Bogdanović: "If, therefore, they also declare us to be a confused, unhealthy and insufficiently Serbian population, if they decide on a fundamentally racial and national revival of the cities, then all of us who fail will be banished forever (and on top of that, those how devotedly they work) - then, as the holy books recommend, they will turn us into monkeys..."
