New Pazar

The name alone says it all (although no one has heard of Stari Pazar): market, bazaar; from Persian - market, marketplace, market. Through Novi Pazar you go to Kosovo, to Montenegro (Rožaje is there immediately), to Albania - and back to Serbia. The geographical position is ideal: in the upper course of the Ibar, accessible by a gorge below Kopaonik, and high enough that the mountain passes are not far away. Nature is stingy here, so people are inevitably hard-working, smart and quick-thinking; in addition, caravans of merchants passed through Novi Pazar for centuries, so - by the nature of things - crafts developed. First there was an inn for intending travelers, then a forge for shoeing horses, then a gunsmith to make ammunition, then a butcher to supply the inns - and so on...

And then the people of Pazar remembered that they could also trade. Clear and witty, such as God gave them, they had great success in this; that success today, thanks to the twilight and fall of Serbia, is enormous. It is not without some: someone who has been trading and producing something for the free market for centuries is necessarily tolerant, inclined to accept ethnic, religious and other differences as a matter of course; there is no worse enemy to commerce than prejudice. The residents of Pazar suffered such atrocities, hoping that they would pass in the end, but they themselves did not hide their weapons. They knew that eventually, when the madness passed, they should trade. Mutatis mutandis, Novi Pazar is - historically speaking - Dubrovnik in the hills. The people of Pazar saw the backs of the Turks, Austrians, Chetniks (the original ones and today's ones), Germans, communists, and Julovites. Trade and production did not stop.

Novi Pazar is a miracle in Serbia like this one. Already on the approach to the city, one notices a huge number of large trucks of all possible license plates (there are even more of them in the city). The town - otherwise a nice and beautiful Ottoman palanquin - is full of stalls, shops, shops, brick shops, coffee shops, taverns, kiosks, newsagents, stores, aščinica, kebab shops; everything is sold there; which is not available, can be ordered for tomorrow. Cars are generally new and expensive, and there are too many of them for a city of that size. Money sticks out from every stone of the Novi Pazar cobblestones; a lot of money. My friend Zaim, the editor of a local newspaper, says: "In Novi Pazar, there are only two things that are shameful: stealing and not having."

That's how Pazarci work; they work and work and work. All employees of the local radio-television SAN (from Sandžak, but more than St.; the owner, Ruždija Šabotić, dreams of his media company being the main regional center, also present on the satellite) they have another job besides their own. The producer has a chain of kiosks; one journalist is a nurse, the other sells cigarettes; and so on. SAN is just one of the local broadcasting companies, but these days it launched transmitters in Raška, Sjenica and Tutin; all legal. On Fridays, Radio SAN has a religious program in which the imam, parish priest and future head of the Đurđevi stupovi monastery, which is currently being reconstructed, speak. TV SAN has a bingo raffle with the largest prize pool in FR Yugoslavia; in addition, he leads a constant campaign for humanitarian aid to the sick, disabled and the poor; they collected over 300.000 marks in a few days just for the operation of one child. Novi Pazar merchants and industrialists respect the bazaar order: it is a matter of reputation to pay a decent amount for humanitarian purposes.

Where do you get the money from? As we said, the people of Pazar work, work and work; so then they trade, trade and trade. Novi Pazar is the European capital of jeans and everything else from jeans; in addition, all possible clothing and all possible shoes are made. A pair of jeans costs from 15 to 100 marks; those of one hundred marks in Germany cost 150 and their quality is world-class; those of 25 marks will last five or six years, so you see. If you buy ten pairs of jeans, the price will be 12 instead of 25 marks... Local legend says that the profit rate of the jeans manufacturer is two dollars per pair - ex-factory. In the case of shoes it is similar. Moreover, the factory halls where everything is made are far from the expected image of a paleotechnical hell in which the poor sweat like those Silesian weavers from the XNUMXth century: it is bright and modern, and the work is well paid. You won't hear anyone in Novi Pazar complaining about anything: that would be rude and humiliating, because whoever complains must be lazy or stupid. Thus, it is not possible to find out if a racket is being paid, if customs officials are being bribed, and in general how to survive with the various thieving authorities that have been endemic here for centuries. To such questions, Pazarci shrugged their shoulders and smiled in a charming Levantine way: you don't want to know... I guess that's why nothing is ever closed there: everything is always open and one call on the mobile phone is enough to open the shop at midnight. By the way: both mobile phone networks were congested to the point of paralysis in the evening, because both Mobtel and Telekom save money on base stations... In short: in Novi Pazar, anything is always possible.

The political life of Sandžak is complex and layered, but it has its own rules. There were no crisis headquarters and dramas in Novi Pazar after October 5; people sat down and waited to see what would eventually come out of this whole fertutma; remembers Novi Pazar and more dramatic events. However, there is hope that Serbia will open up in all directions and - accordingly - to freer trade. At the nonsense about "thousands of armed Mujahideen in Sandzak", the people of Pazar are laughing. The whole story about the future of Montenegro, however, worries them: they have had little trouble with checkpoints so far; they just need more of that... They want a peaceful life, free trade and legality; they will pay taxes, respect the state, just to let them work and trade in peace.

I guess that hard-working, bright and witty people, in which it is the greatest shame to steal and not have that desire, will be fulfilled.