We met at Sretenje.

Something is going on in the streets and roads of Serbia, and we don't just mean students walking. Ever since those young people embarked on a campaign that they called the "March to Kragujevac", we are watching how the whole spirit of a society is reborn.

photos: marija janković

"I watched my city change before my eyes," a tearful resident of Kragujevo told TV Nova S, the morning after the large "Let's meet at Sretenje" protest organized by students in the blockade.

Someone said, after March 1 and the blockade of three bridges in Novi Sad, that the protest in Kragujevac has already been announced, but it will hardly surpass Novi Sad. It sounded slightly insulting and name-calling, but it turned out to be true: Kragujevac did not surpass Novi Sad because they did not even compete. The large gathering in Kragujevac was a natural continuation and the next phase of the blockade of bridges in Novi Sad. Together with Slavija, Autokomanda, Niš, who is still waiting for us and who knows what else to come, these gatherings form one big unit. A whole after which nothing will be or can be the same.

THE ECHO OF FOOTSTEPS IS HEARD...

Now we can admit: at the beginning, no one believed that something so big and beautiful could happen in Kragujevac. These days, many are talking about people, and even entire cities, being freed from fear. Students go on foot and really enter every place and are welcomed as liberators. That's what they are. They poured into Kragujevac on foot, on bicycles, running, from Novi Sad, Belgrade, Kraljevo, Čačak, Užice, Niš and, especially important, Novi Pazar.

All pedestrians arrived in Kragujevac the evening before the Meeting, on Friday, February 14. They flew out of the column, hugged random people, people hugged them... Legs in bandages, some in bags, some over slippers, some with two different sneakers, some on crutches... But they all came, rumbled through the city and liberated it.

But, not only from fear... We will not idealize: in every city, in every village, there are those who are afraid and there are those whose fates are in the hands of the local sheriffs, regardless of whether the sheriff is the president of the municipality or the head of the shift in the cable factory. However, fear is not our biggest problem. Hopelessness, however, is. And here Kragujevac is perhaps the best example of a city where it seemed that all hope had died out, and despair and indifference reigned. People have surrendered and given up the possibility of changing something themselves. The local government in Kragujevac is not intimidating or controlling. Something happened in that city, so he surrendered peacefully and almost until the end of January - quietly grumbling. There were also student blockades there, because Kragujevac is also a university center, but they were neither massive, nor covered by the media like in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš.

And then something broke... In mid-January, students of the Faculty of Medical Sciences informed the public that they were under pressure from the employees of the faculty. Not from the professors, because most of them support them, not even from the dean, but from the administrative and auxiliary workers who threatened them with the publication of their identities and the delivery of their personal data to the media. It seems that people reacted to that, so the daily silences became more massive, and the blockades were taken more seriously. And so it happened that Kragujevac students got together and practically out of nowhere announced a big protest in their city. And they announced it by carrying a banner in Novi Sad that read "15. 2. in Kragujevac".

In less than a week, everything was known: the gathering is called "Let's meet at Sretenje", students come from other cities on foot, it has to be in Kragujevac because it is National Day and the anniversary of the First Serbian Uprising and the adoption of the Sretenje Constitution... We need mattresses, bags, heaters, food...

This action of collecting things needed for pedestrian students led to the awakening of Kragujevac from the hopelessness it fell into a little more than a decade ago, when the progressives first took power by force, and then legitimized it in the first subsequent local elections.

"Rasanica", said a young man when the "Mašina" portal asked him to describe the protest in Kragujevac in one word.

The natural continuation of the march that we saw for the first time when the Belgrade students went to Novi Sad, brought the whole of Kragujevac and the whole of Šumadija to its feet. Everywhere people were cooking, preparing, welcoming, showing wounds, offering lodging, transportation, everything...

"Students are passing through Jagodina, the people are about to rewrite their house and garden", read the tweet of a woman from Jagodina who followed the convoy from Nis.

photo: marija janković

FROM MY MARKET, YOU KNOW WELL WHICH ONE

Well, someone will say, what happened so important at Sretenje? The whole of Serbia gathered, danced, sang, went home. You can look at it that way. But it is neither beautiful nor correct. The protest in Kragujevac may have had a festival atmosphere, but it is by no means without political significance and weight.

Ever since the blockades at the faculties began, the citizens, accustomed to divisions and leanings, are trying to determine whether this student body is left or right, whether they like Russia or the European Union, and whether they are some nationalists or, God forbid, anarchists... Yes, they are all of these and none of the above. Because it seems that this something is not very important to this generation, at least not now.

Wiser commentators have already noticed that all those old divisions of ours fell into the water on the day when the State University in Novi Pazar entered the blockade. Novi Pazar is the city where the Bosniak, Muslim population of Serbia lives and tends towards. And let's be fair for once and say that Pazar, Tutin, Sjenica and many other majority Bosniak places always voted for the lesser evil of all our evils and always chose the option that, it turned out, was less disastrous for all of us.

But we also have to be honest and remember something that has already been mentioned many times on social networks: students of Bosniak and Albanian ethnicity have never been the leaders of any student rebellion in our country. They were not there in 1991 or 1992. We do not know any of these people's names even from the 1996/97 protests. Even in Otpor, that symbol of modern, urban and cosmopolitan rebellion, which gave birth to several recognizable leaders, not one of them was from outside the Belgrade circle, they all safely had their last name ending in -ić, and there was no one from Sandžak.

And now this generation, which has not yet fenced itself off, is rising up, walking, carrying icons and crosses and Ferrari flags, singing and Bilećanka i Who says that, who is lying, Serbia is small, and with them the Bosniaks from Pazar hand in hand, and while they are being baptized after 15 minutes of silence, they recite the prayer and pray standing up, as is the only and obligatory for the dead.

"For the first time, I feel like a citizen of this country," said one of the students from Novi Pazar. He did not say this only in his own name, but in the name of all his ancestors, to whom this country has been the motherland for centuries and which has always treated them as second-class citizens. And then there is a generation of those who don't even remember the time without religious education in schools and all of them bloodied their feet together to reach Kragujevac under the flag of Serbia, all of them standing quietly with God of justice and were baptized and worshiped together. On National Day.

"My people from Pazar, you know which one", is a heart-shaped banner worn by a girl from the State University in Novi Pazar.

So, if the most important consequence and outcome of the protest in Kragujevac must be singled out, and so far perhaps the greatest achievement of the student protest in 2024/25, it is the fact that students from Novi Pazar set off on foot towards Kragujevac, on the way they met students from Kraljevo, Užice and Čačak and marched together to Kragujevac, where together, without distinction, they hugged and were hugged, and together they all cried and laughed with relief. And pumped!

These students go through Serbia on foot from village to village, from town to town and treat trauma. Not only traumas created under Aleksandar Vučić, but multi-generational traumas. And yes, there is also that parallel with the 1300 corporals, young people, students, who were led into battle to raise the morale of the elders. No one led them, they set out on their own, they raise morale, but they go further than that. They heal, clean the air, restore the will to live, and wherever they go, hope remains behind them.

photo: marija janković

AND WHAT WAS THE PROTEST LIKE?

This text was written in Kragujevac, two days after the great meeting. The city is still clean and, although it is cloudy and snowing, the subjective feeling is that it is still sunny. And that February 15 was cloudy and cold, but in the memory of everyone who spent even a minute in Kragujevac - it is sunny and bright.

Honestly, there are few people in Kragujevac who didn't panic when they realized how many people were coming. The only thing no one cared about was the food. In Šumadija you can be poor, naked and barefoot, in debt and ugly, but hungry - difficult. But everything else was a concern: how to find so many mattresses for students, where to put them, what to rent trucks for transporting bedding, food, hygiene, everything that arrived at the universities for days...

And we ask the readers to remember one thing: Kragujevac has long ceased to be the tormented gray city where "Zastava" is dying out, but it is still a city that never recovered from the collapse of the car factory that happened in the early nineties. This is still felt today when monetary donations are counted: from the beginning of the blockades to the protest on Sretenje, the people of Kragujevac collected (only among themselves, without donations from citizens of other cities) about 800.000 dinars. For the sake of comparison, block 21 in New Belgrade collected that much in four days. So, penury is still a serious problem. The fact that piglets and lambs and even beef for stew are created out of nowhere is only because there is always food in Šumadija, even when there is nothing else. And this time the question was whether Kragujevac has enough streets for everyone who came.

Well, he had... All the recordings, photos and videos that the readers have seen so far from Kragujevac were created in only one small part of the space: near Zastava's solitaire, from which a huge banner was lowered explaining why and where this gathering came from, across from where the stage was. In the immediate vicinity is the Small Park, where there were grouped points with food and other activities. It was planned that the protest would be held along almost the entire Lepenica boulevard, one of the two that Kragujevac has, and at the same time the largest. However, rivers of people spartan all over the wider city center. Even the most experienced protesters claim that, although they have been to massive protests, they have not seen such a miracle.

And what wonder is there when the organization was minimal, the program almost non-existent at least until 18:XNUMX when the choirs performed, the students' letter was read, the actor's monologues and all this with a sound system that, like the one in Novi Sad, was barely audible?

First, people came joyfully, motivated by students who came from all over the country on foot. That joy spread to almost all the central streets of Kragujevac. Columns passed each other all the time, little by little some group would sing, people who don't know each other jumped together and chanted "pump, pump!"

In the bars and cafes, the atmosphere was also unusual: no one stayed too long because at least a few more teams are waiting for a table, and everyone needs to warm up and rest from walking. But if one of the guests blew a vuvuzela, a chorus of whistles would await him. Everyone is patient, kind to each other, as if it's not us.

And what are all these good people looking forward to? Well, the future, well, the future came to our city, she came on foot, a bit tired, she has sores on her feet and her knees are a little wobbly from walking. But it is beautiful and promising.