Byzantine Blog

I was thrilled to find the magazine both my parents and I grew up with, Politikin Zabavnik (Politika's Entertainer), is available on the web.

This is one of Serbian oldest magazines, first published on 28 February 1939. From 1939-1941 it was published biweekly, during which time a total of 220 issues were published. The title was picked up in 1952 (the magazine is the edition of Serbian oldest publishing house Politika) and has since been published once a week. The numbering restarted in 1952, reaching over 2,800 issues in 2006 which, with previous issues, would go well over 3,000.

I was always fascinated with the fact editors of Zabavnik are able to make every single issue so engaging and exciting, and afraid they'll run out of ideas at some point and the magazine will suddenly become boring, repetitive and choked up with dull fillers. But it never happened - they haven't just preserved the ability to find an intriguing angle and fresh approach to each story both visually and textually, but are still one of the rare weekly magazines that are commercial-free.

They still have a “Believe It or Not...” section where they reveal the most amazing things, like the fact there is a river in Algeria the chemistry of nature has turned into ink. The stream is formed by the union of two others, one of which is strongly impregnated with iron, while the other contains gallic acid. And the natives use this compound for writing letters and other documents.

Many of the articles are written by historians, mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists and experts from different fields, and every one is wonderfully illustrated. You can learn about ancient Serbian cities, like Sokograd (Falcon City), a town made of stone high up in the hills (“neither in the skies, nor on earth”), which served as a fort to Serbian hero Hajduk Veljko from where he fought the Ottomans; about the Byzantines and why were they so proud of their beards; about Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof who created “The Language of Hope,” Esperanto, in which Tolstoy was able to read few hours after receiving its Dictionary and Grammar from the gentle doctor; the history of Romanov Dynasty and the Holy Tsar Martyr Nikolai, including the fact three Serbian princesses were married into the Romanov family; the most famous fairy-tales and than those same stories retold by the kids with the unexpected twists, like the Little Red Riding Hood being swallowed by one of the storytellers' TV and thrown into her living room and how, from that moment on, this great friendship was forged, so the girl remains Little Red Riding Hood's best friend since, while the grandma lives in the closet and they feed her with sweets from Riding Hood's bottomless basket; about the great Saints of the Church, like St. John Maximovich, whose father was of Serbian descent and who, at some point, was selling Politika in Belgrade for living, and all you ever wanted to know about the Moon, like why both Sun and Moon look so much bigger on the horizon than while they are in the zenith.

Although most of the articles are so interesting, well written and engaging adults read them too and remain faithful to the magazine throughout life (Zabavnik says it is for readers “from the age of 7 to the age of 107”), The Entertainer is generally aimed at children, so it has regular sections for comics by Disney, Dick Browne, etc. During the sanctions in the '90s, Disney prohibited the use of their comics in the magazine (I guess the idea was that Serbian children should also get punished and feel the sanctions on their own skin), and Zabavnik switched to other comic writers. I don't know if they still use the Disney stuff, though. I hope not.

Unfortunately, the World Wide Web edition offers only few marginal articles per issue and not even the main article around which each weekly Zabavnik is built, and the illustrations designated for the Internet edition are just a tiny fraction of those that are printed.

But for those of us who sometimes feel stranded in a foreign universe, everything that tastes like home is greeted with great joy.