Month: June 2008

In Serbia, the business is booming. Across the street from Pancevo City Hospital there are two undertaker offices download putty , clearly visible from patient’s rooms. So that the relatives of a patient wouldn’t have to search for one, if the need comes.

The competition in this business is fierce, like in any other. When a patient dies in a hospital the relatives will get a call from an undertaker, offering his services to the shocked family, in a matter of minutes after the loved one died. The undertakers have doctors and nurses on their paying lists; they are buying information about the deceased immediately after exitus letalis has been diagnosed. The competition is so brutal that in some cases an undertaker will call a patient’s family even before the poor one really died, which can have tragicomic implications. At the time when the official telegram from the hospital arrives, the fastest undertaker has already long ago booked a funeral.

I heard that in some other small Serbian city two undertakers also have their offices in the same street. The stores are facing each other, and big shop windows are full of different articles. Among black pillows and silk cloths one of them has displayed a small child’s coffin, in order to attract customers to his shop. About 60cm long. And in white, of course.

Take a look at this post from Kiklop Nandor’s Blog: Stone cutter’s business card on graves in Pancevo Cemetery (or “What do you wait for, order a tombstone”).

On the picture is an advertisement for a funerals band in the old Zemun’s cemetery, Belgrade. Everybody is invited to pluck off a small excerpt with a telephone number.

One evening in 1991 Vanja was showing me photos from her childhood. She took one after another out of an old shoe box puttygen download , and eventually she took this one out. I glanced on it, and thought how strange it was that she had one of my photos. She said: “The girl on the right, that’s me.” “It cannot be!” I thought in disbelief: I definitely had the same picture. “And the boy on the left – that’s me!”, I said. We looked each other in astonishment. Than we started laughing… and the picture was laughing back at us. After many years, we discovered that once we have already been holding hands. And never knew it.

On the back of my photo, in handwriting of my grandmother, stands “2. IV. 1977”. We were both about 4 years old.

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Many years later, near Klismerina in Montenegro.