Historijska čitanka 2

"...I recorded the facts of my own memory, objects, situations and events that accompanied the everyday life of the last two decades of Yugoslavia and socialism. Of course, it is important that the center of my world spread from Mejtaš, through the municipality of Centar, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina... If I had lived somewhere else, my story would have been different in details, and perhaps in its entirety.

The first bound 'Historical Reader' was published in 2000. After it, the column in Dani continued to be published for a little over a year. It was discontinued, although the topic was not exhausted. But the author did.

Since the first columns, the editorial office, and my Zagreb and Sarajevo addresses, have received corrections and additions from readers, and sometimes letters filled with reproach. There were people who thought that I wrote about their pre-war bazaars in a bad and condescending manner, some read irony in my stories, they thought that something different should be done...

In one text I hurt my a shoemaker from Mejtaš. I wrote that his shop was slowly closing down after the war. And he tried to save it, and in the end he kept it the same as it was before the war. When the rubber on the heel wears out, he still fixes it. And Sepetarevac is steep and dangerous, especially in winter. That shoemaker is the first and best prevention for a trauma clinic.

After being published in the web editions of Dani magazine, many texts from the 'Historical Reader' appeared on the websites of hometown clubs, and emigrant families and individuals born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who now live in Canada, Australia, America, Sweden, Norway, Germany...

I found my texts alongside interactive postcards of Sarajevo and other cities, family photos, school reports, memorial notes, old songs and musical numbers from the seventies and eighties. I believe that they had a place there, and that these beautiful and sentimental bootleg versions." (Miljenko Jergović)