Dragoslav Grujić Gruja (1952–2021)

The editors of "Vremena" are saddened to announce another great loss. After a short illness, Dragoslav Grujić Gruja, the journalist of "Vremena" who established and for years ran the Documentation Center of our paper nurturing the journalism of facts, died, without whom "Vreme" would not be able to nurture its newsmagazine formula and base its texts on reliability and credibility. He was a meticulous chronicler of political life, a connoisseur of the dissident scene and complicated relations in the political milieu of Serbia in the 1990s.

He especially showed his sense of facts that speak for themselves in the author's column "Character and Deed" in which he published about 400 biographies of people from public life, which, if collected in one book, would represent a kind of biographical dictionary of the transitional era in Serbia in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of those croc biographies were also written by other authors, but based on data, statements, notes and anecdotes that Gruja diligently collected, recorded, preserved and classified.

Many texts published in "Vremen" without his documentary basis would not have the factual and journalistic value they had, and many topics of the week would not have been written without his contributions.

In today's crisis of journalism and fake news, facts checking is being discussed as an indispensable basis for reliable and credible journalism. Dragoslav Grujić did exactly that and conscientiously, diligently during the transitional war cacophony, collecting facts scattered in various newspapers, agencies, monographs and numerous books, and he was a rare bibliophile.

The documentation he collected over the years is still a valuable source of reminders of the difficult times of the nineties and an indispensable source of facts, which is an invaluable asset for the "Vremena" editorial office.

Conscientious, thrifty, industrious, clever, grumpily witty in his criticism, valuable as a co-worker in every way. Many times he corrected our mistakes, corrected our theses without covering in reality and brought us back to the facts.

He was not lucky, he was in fragile health, he was seriously injured during the demonstrations in 1996-97, he overcame many health adversities that came to him one after the other, he worked like a bee fighting pain and health difficulties, but unfortunately he did not fight the last battle for his own life managed to get - he died on October 17 in the hospital "Dragiša Mišović" in Belgrade. After Dragoslav Grujić, "Vremen" leaves a big void. We have lost a great, conscientious colleague and dear friend. Where will the tear go but to the eye...