"Farm" winner Kristijan Golubović: Escape from common sense

It's all the fault of the authors of the documentary We'll see you in the obituary, which turned 20 this year since its broadcast, Vojislav Tufekdžić and Aleksandar Knežević. Sloba Georgiev wrote in 2015.

They found Kristijan Golubović twenty-odd years ago and they put him first in front of the cameras and it seems that since then he has never left the Serbian TV stations and the pages of the Serbian press. 

And then, as now when he is the "biggest star" of the TV reality show "Farm" broadcast by TV Pink, it was seen that he likes cameras and likes to talk, which is not the main characteristic of people who are believed to be criminals, robbers and generally condemned for serious crimes.

This is how the "famous Christian", a man who described every step in his life, except for criminal acts, in various TV programs and newspaper interviews, found himself in a new world, in a new role, in a new film, as Boris Tadić once said.

He briefly replaced the prison uniform with a civilian suit, but he still remained locked up, now voluntarily and for a high daily wage, and he continued to do the same: to entertain the crowd and to have fun himself when it was already possible for him. As the months spent at the Farm go by and the moment when he will have to go to "serve his sentence" approaches, perhaps his popularity will grow so much that people will request his release via text messages, writes the text "Escape from Common Sense" from 2015. 

A reminder of criminal beginnings

Dejan Anastasijević in his text "Virtual Christian" from 2008 recalled the biography of a criminal who became a reality star. 

Although he was born in Germany, Golubović grew up in Belgrade, where as a young man he was friends with Milorad Ulemek Legija, who was still called Cema at that time. As a minor, he engaged in hooliganism, fights and tapping cinema tickets, and later moved on to more serious matters, such as serious thefts and burglaries, not only in his homeland but also in Italy, Germany and Greece... He became known to the general public after his spectacular escape from the building of the Fifth Municipal Court, when he jumped from the second floor and broke both legs. He was helped in his escape by Branislav Trlajić, known as Bata Trlaja, who hid him in Belgrade, and then took him to Erdut with Željko Ražnatović Arkan. However, after seeing the wounds in Erdut, he clashed with Trlajić because he was stealing the cars of Bata's friends.

In the early nineties, Golubović came into conflict with the so-called Voždovac clan, which at that time was one of the most dangerous in Belgrade. As murders on the streets of Belgrade were already frequent, a friend allegedly advised him to take refuge in Greece. "I had two solutions: to blow up the entire Vozdovac clan in the cafe 'Fresca', where they used to gather, or to listen to my friend," said Christian afterwards. Before leaving, he managed to appear in the cult documentary See you in the obituary, as one of the main characters. He became famous with the sentence "I have reliable information for Judge Falcone that he was killed with two tons of dynamite and only he and his bodyguard were injured."

He quickly ended up in prison in Greece, from where he was released on parole in 1998. As soon as he came out, someone tried to kill him: he survived eight gunshot wounds. He was soon arrested again, for car theft and robbery, and received a total of fourteen and a half years in the famous Malandrino prison. After four and a half years of imprisonment, the Greeks decided to court him, so they deported him to Belgrade in the spring of 2003, in the middle of Sablje.

After returning from a multi-year "vacation", Golubović found a completely different Serbia: most of his friends were dead or in prison, and his friend Cem/Legija was on the run. Already in June 2003, he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for some old extortion, and already the following year, the special department of the prosecution for organized crime filed an indictment against Golubović for possessing a weapon and trying to extort a jeweler. He was legally sentenced in August 2006, to four years in prison, and sent to serve his sentence in Zabel. From there, he gave an interview for the New Year's issue of the tabloid "Kurir" last year, in which he said, among other things, that in his book he would reveal "who prepared the list for the liquidation of 300 important people in Serbia and Montenegro, and who carried them out." "I will change the course of history," said Christian.

Trial after trial, sentence after sentence

Even later, Golubović did not relent, and on December 12, 2005, before the Special Court in Belgrade, he was sentenced to six years in prison for attempting to extort 15.000 euros from the former police officer from Sremska Mitrovica, Petar Žeravić, and for extorting 3000 euros and a certain amount of jewelry from the married couple Arsić from Arandjelovac. 

The case of attempted extortion from Petar Žeravić remains in the memory of Mitrovica residents to this day, who say that Žeravić then found a coffin with his name and surname in front of the house. 

On appeal, Christian's sentence was changed to four and a half years in prison. While serving his sentence, Golubović married Suzana Milojković in prison on September 29, 2006. According to newspaper reports, the bride arrived at the prison in Požarevac that day "in a limousine, followed by a column of jeeps." 

During his stay behind bars, Kristijan Golubović also created his own website, on which - in addition to excerpts from his still unpublished book I - you can even see videos taken with a mobile phone in the prison in Požarevac. When Christian was released from Pozarevac prison last year, he swore that he would live a peaceful life in the future and that he would no longer come into conflict with the law. Until January of this year, wrote Jovan Milević in 2010. 

During his stay in the remand prison, on February 1, 2010, the media in Croatia announced that Kristijan tried to commit suicide by hanging in the Central Prison, allegedly because he was deeply affected by the fact that this time his mother also ended up behind bars with him.

It is also interesting that the Belgrade media announced that "all the lawyers that Christian tried to hire" refused, with the explanation that "he has no money to pay them", so now both he and his mother are represented by ex officio defense attorneys assigned to them by the court. A source close to the Ministry of Interior of Serbia tells "Vreme" that "this should not be taken too seriously and it should not be believed that Christian has suddenly become poor, but that he is being tormented by a financial investigation under the Law on Confiscation of Criminal Assets, which is being conducted against him with the aim of determining what he owns from real estate, bank accounts and cash. This, it seems, is Christian's way of convincing the investigators that they have nothing to find."

Reality star Kristijan Golubović

Finally, let's return to Slobodan Georgiev's text - written in 2015, and literally up to date ten years later. 

"Vreme" has already dedicated the column Portrait of a contemporary to Kristijan Golubović in the issue of December 9, 2009, when his life up to that point was presented and described, with most of the adventures, peppered with juicy statements that he spilled over the years in the Belgrade media.

And then his increased presence in the media, where he was presented as a convalescent, as someone who might have a criminal record, but that is not the most important thing, but much more interesting and important for the public, is that he likes to draw, do sports and to propagate healthy life attitudes.

The intention of television productions to constantly bring a proven and confirmed criminal in front of the cameras and give him a space that perhaps other participants in public life in Serbia do not have, seems to have additionally served to relativize literally everything and make it meaningless.

Now that Christian is rampaging in the Farm, it seems that this procedure of the magicians of television production is at its peak, because the "thing" is brought almost to the point of absurdity: in the Farm, a diverse crew from different social strata - most of them from the show and from the real social fringes - is led by a man who is waiting to serve a legal sentence of 14 years for the organized trade and sale of narcotics.

"More people watch Christian while he sleeps than watch all your news," said TV Pink owner Željko Mitrović at a conference on new media and technologies, proud of the fact that his idea with Christian on the Farm led to an enormous increase in viewership for his TV station.

Mitrović exposed the "thing" to the end: only what brings viewers can be broadcast, and the justification is "that people like it" and that much more than sterile informative content.

The worst of all is that Christian himself in such an environment is not someone who stands out for his simplicity, primitivism or violence. He doesn't seem to know what hit him, but, following his instincts, he enjoys all the media attention that actually made him the first and biggest show criminal. Unlike the others, his future is quite certain and that's what distinguishes him from other "farmers" and can arouse sympathy from both the "combatants" and the audience.

The text from 2015 also says: 

Whatever the outcome at the Farm, Christian would have to go back to prison at some point, but given his career and resume to date, that may not be the end of his media incarnations. It's a miracle that no one has gotten around to making a movie about his life so far, because the very fact that he's the only one who survived, that he's an old hook, can mean two things: either he was never more than a lovable city robber or such an image is intentional created to cover up his terrible criminal record.