If you have never lived in this short alley, especially in the 60s and 70s - and there are few of them now - then do not even enter the current Češka Street, unless you are visiting someone who now lives there. And if you grew up in that once most beautiful part of Husinskih rudara Street in the aforementioned years of the bygone century, walking along it now will surely bring a tear to your eye. Not only for the former life and for what is no longer there, but perhaps even more because of what you now see in the street of your happy childhood - housing poverty and misery. What was once beautiful, neat workers' houses and gardens, still stands there now, but has been changed for the worse or even completely dilapidated, turned into a mockery. Do not enter Češka Street!
After 56 years, I am back in the place where I grew up, played and learned about life. I am walking through this old workers’ settlement in Miladije, which consists of two short rows of ‘old barracks’ and a couple of houses longer ‘New Column’, a total of 20 houses with two small apartments each. I am trying to remember which family lived in which house. Mostly mining, working families: Užičanin, Novaliċi, Josiċi, Kopiċi… I have forgotten many last names. I remember the names much better: Muharem, Bogdan, Mehmed, Mirko, Jovo, Himzo… … My mother’s ‘sevda’ and women’s klapa: Zlata, Fata, Hata, Ana, Hana and Cana. My friend Esad lived in this house, Boban in this one, Brano here, Hasan and Ulfeta here, Mario there… Under the same roof, on the other side of our house, my school friend Pero lived for a short time. Some of them, I heard, are no longer alive. Memories come flooding back, the memories are numerous. The entire street was a children's playground. On the (asphalt) road, we played football, 'between two fires' and 'ebereĉke-ebertute', unhindered by traffic. There were no vehicles on the street, no one had a car. The only 'means of transport' back then were hand-made scooters and tricycles, in winter sledges and ligures, and rarely a bicycle. At the place where the street made an 'L-curve' at its end for two more houses and a row of coal sheds, and ended at a stream that was later filled in, there was a small meadow. It served everyone, it was a natural 'social center'. After a hard day's work, fathers would sit in the meadow, play 'tablanet' and sip brandy; mothers drank shared coffee, crocheted, knitted and embroidered, boys and girls played volleyball and flew around each other, and we children played ‘rotten mares’ and wrestled there in the summer, and in the winter we built snow forts and fought snowball wars. The meadow is gone – it is partly concreted and partly covered with gravel. It serves as a shared parking lot. Cars have taken over the street.
Memories come flooding back. It was a time when girls collected postcards and napkins (and exchanged them), and we boys collected matches, bottle caps and hard cigarette boxes ('Primorka', 'Zeta', 'Drava', 'Opatija', 'Morava', 'Ibar'). We played the game 'half-whole' with pictures of footballers, we had bottle caps instead of dinars of the time and we played 'tour-jazije' with them, and we drew player cards on the back of cardboard from cigarette boxes and played 'donkey' with them as children, and later learned real 'gambling' card games: 'match', 'ajnc' and 'sljaga'. It was an era when only one house in the street had a TV. All the children from the street gathered there to watch the popular children's show 'Mendo and Slavica', the boys' favorite 'cowboy' TV series 'Bonanca', and other children's TV shows.
Translated by Google •
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