Caption: The Kosmaj Monument (Kosmaj Spomenik in Serbian), is made of six freestanding concrete structures, each roughly 40 meters high, that taken together look a bit like a spaceship sent through time from a future envisioned in the 1970’s.
Background image is of JPEG format. Photo of Zemun, Belgrade, Serbia by Nikola Cirkovic licensed under Unsplash
Information on this page is adapted from the following sources: Vimeo original video; A Kiss Deferred | With Joanna Kulig article
Nikolina Kulidzan was twelve years old when she fell in love for the first time. Not long after, the Bosnian War changed her life forever. Her essay is read by Joanna Kulig ("Cold War").
During the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, an estimated 100,000 people died and millions were displaced. The conflict produced the worst atrocities in Europe since World War Two. But Nikolina Kulidzan was 12 years old, and had no idea any of that was on the horizon. Many saw it coming.
Where are they now?
And she told us more about what it felt like to get his note so many years later.
"The message arrived in my email inbox saying, you have a message from Marco Lasic through Facebook. And just to see Marco Lasic in my inbox was so exciting, and it was a little bit like having your dream come true," she says. "And then when I read the message itself I just thought it was funny, it was brilliant."
"On the surface it sounds so serious. 'I’ve been your boyfriend since 5th grade, get back to me so we can figure out what to do about it.' But it didn’t for a second occur to me that he was seriously asking me to get back to him so we could figure out how to resume this relationship that had been interrupted."
"In a way it’s typical Bosnian humor, and that’s what I really loved about it — that he knew that I would know that it was humor. So there were multiple layers of trust involved in this message," she says.
But some readers interpreted that note, and Nikolina and Marko’s relationship, differently. She was surprised by the number of people who wrote to her to ask what happened after the end of the Modern Love story.
"And it never occurred to me that this story could have any happier ending than it had," she says. "We were sitting on this beautiful terrace, overlooking this bridge that had been destroyed in the war and then put together. And to me that was sort of like my heart, like my life. It had been destroyed and it was put together."
"When we met and we were talking and we kissed, what I had lost in my life — some of it at least had been found and put back in place," she continues. "I don’t think we were trying to rekindle a romance, I think we were trying to honor our past together, and really clinging to something beautiful from it."
Nikolina and Marko are married now — just not to each other. "Marco had a baby boy last year — I see pictures on Facebook, he’s cute — but no. We did not stay together."
Nikolina says that by the time they reunited in Mostar, she and Marko were living very different lives. His was in Croatia, and hers in the United States. She says she never thought about changing the course of her life to be with him. To her, their story was about something different.
"We come from a country where ... every generation remembers a war. My dad, who is 79, remembers three wars. So what people remember is crimes and atrocities and slights and insults, and then what they leave their children as an inheritance is this desire for revenge," she says.
"For the two of us to actually remember our friendship, our loyalty to each other — to me, that was more than an act of romance. It was almost like a small political act. Like an act of courage that says, 'No, I will not put you in a box with the rest of your tribe that has committed these crimes. You are this individual that I have shared something with.' I do see that as a small act of redemption."