Visitors to the Belgrade Zoo are sure to find an unusual monument next to the monkey cages. That’s the monument dedicated to Sami, a chimp who managed to escape from the Zoo in the second part of the eighties, not once but twice. After those escapes, he became famous and a Belgrade zoo favorite, making his way into various city urban legends.
Here’s what I managed to find about him and his escapes on the net.
Lady who claims to have worked in the Zoo at that time writes at Leksikon Yu Mitologije that he was “an unusually strong chimp, extremely intelligent… a philosopher. He didn’t feel as he was one of the chimpanzees. Sami was at the wrong place, behaving just like a homo-sapiens.”

On February 23rd, 1988, Sami made his first escape and according to many witnesses, caused a real chaos at the streets of Dorcol. As the radio stations reported of his escape and updated live on the attempts to capture him, hundreds of citizens gathered to support the chimp in his fight for freedom.

Much like in the case of Belgrade Phantom some years earlier, some Serbian thinkers regard this kind of behavior as a sort of mutiny against the dull and repressing communist society at the time. According to Ivan Kovacevic and his essay on the subject (Ivan Kovacevic, Semiologija mita i rituala III, 2001, page 21) “thousands of people gathered in the streets, shouting: Sami, we won’t let them catch you!, Watch out, Sami!, Sami, don’t come down!” and even carrying protest signs with “Sami, we’re with you!” and “Monkey to the people!” slogans. Kovacevic tries also to make a connection between the monkey and the slang word for 10 dinar bill which was also called “monkey” but that’s pushing it too far, I think.

What is interesting, however is the fame this brought not only to Sami, but to the Belgrade Zoo as well, and its eccentric and controversial manager Vuk Bojovic, who was the only person Sami allowed to come near – Bojovic claims that after one such escape he and Sami took a cab ride back to the Belgrade Zoo. The Zoo got much media attention which was used to pour some money into it and temporarily improve the dreadful conditions the animals were forced to live in at the time. As covered in this article from before, the Belgrade Zoo and it’s animals are today, thanks to ongoing bad economic situation, but also thanks to manager’s stubbornness again in trouble.

Sami passed away in 1992, probably unable to confront with all the misery the sanctions and the wars in the nineties brought to Serbia, but remains a part of the Serbian urban legends and a symbol of freedom and disobedience in Belgrader’s minds.

His fail-proof plan to eliminate Tito by hijacking a 727 jet in the USA and than subtly crashing it into the communist party headquarters in Belgrade was never implemented because he said he didn’t know where the building was exactly located.

LaLara found this video on youtube recently, and I thought it would be cool to bring the story of Rimtutituki antiwar action that happened in the early nineties in Belgrade to the audience of our blog.

But, first, the (approximate) translation of the song:
“Now Listen Here”
Peace is the most beautifull girl
Not everybody can have
If I can’t [...]

My grandmother, an old Belgrader, always used to tell me what was Belgrade before the Second World War. It was a city that was following the European trends of life-style and architecture, with notable families raising buildings in order to match the beauty of other notable cities such as Budapest and Prague. The capital of [...]

So, for those of you from Outer Space, not particularly familiar with our little Serbian Julius Cesarian Orthodox Delay, today, on the 7th of January, is when the vast majority of Serbian citizens celebrate Christmas, that is – all those belonging to the Serbian Ortodox Church, still a bit skeptical about the common, Gregorian calendar.
I [...]

This subject had to come up sooner or later, you know.
But I was hoping that something else will trigger it other than your usual drooling foreign guys impressions you see on net or hear from various sources: “Dude, they have the most beautiful girls there, I swear!” or “Man, Serbia is heaven on earth as [...]

Well dear friends, we supposed you were slightly paniked when you saw that Belgrade 2.0 was down for a while, since our database had an error. We’re now online, full with ideas and read to kick, so now we continue with an unconventional subject, the murder of king Alexander of Yugoslavia.
From many considered to be [...]

Yugoslavian version of Band Aid: Ju-Rok Misija, 15th of June, 1985.

There are many Yu rock stars in this video – try and recognize some.