What Remains of the Culture of Lies in the Balkans?

“In the terrible times of war, apart from the culture of death, the things that come irrepressibly to the surface, like hologram grimaces, are the shapes of parallel lives. In the chaos, an infernal balance is established: suffering masks its parody under a black mourning cloth, tragedy drags farce in its face, as unhappiness does cynicism, brutality and compassion go everywhere together. Times of great truths are usually deeply permeated with the all-pervading culture of lies.” 

– Dubravka Ugresic, The Culture of Lies

It’s been twenty-four years since the last Yugoslav war, and though I wasn’t born early enough to witness Yugoslavia firsthand, I’ve always felt its presence—lingering in our customs, beliefs, and ways of thinking like living shadows of the past. I never experienced Yugoslavia’s permanence myself, yet I grew up surrounded by stories that made it feel real. My grandparents spoke of a time when no one locked their doors, when neighbors looked out for one another, and trust was second nature. One of my earliest memories is in my grandmother’s shop: she hands me to a stranger while she helps him with his order, unbothered, believing this was still the Yugoslav way—safe, familiar, communal.

It always struck me how differently my Croatian friends remembered Yugoslavia. For many of them, it was a society they were glad to leave behind—rigid, mythologized, or simply irrelevant. To me, it was something I was still willing to try. But growing up in a small town near the Serbian border, I realized that more than stories remained. Why did our neighbor feel entitled to report on my teenage whereabouts to my grandmother, as if I belonged more to the community than to myself? Why did we lie about sicknesses and misfortunes to shield one another from worry? When my mother gave birth to my brother, we told my grandmother she had gone on vacation—because the truth might have been too much.

To me, all of this began to feel like a generational curse—soft lies told out of love, authority exercised through watchful eyes, truths quietly folded away. And as part of a new generation, I began to wonder: is this something to carry forward—or to break free from? Can we even lie out of free will? Isn’t lying something always exercises at the collective level of being - to sustain our newfold reality of lies, we must not only convince ourselves and others of its foundation, but we also must participate in rituals of sharing and spreading the lie. This is something Dubravka Ugresic talked about in many of her books, but she lays it out perfectly in her manuscript The Culture of Lies. 

Perhaps it’s not quite accurate to say, as Dobrica Ćosić once did, that lying in the Balkans is “an aspect of our patriotism and confirmation of our innate intelligence.” Instead, I’d suggest it’s a byproduct of social fragmentation—an inherited survival mechanism in a region where the truth is often too fragile to carry. Patriotism, or the absence of it, is a shapeshifting force in the modern Balkans. It’s difficult to pin down, because our imagined political communities are so fractured—caught between East and West, between past myths and present disillusionment—that national pride depends on the mood of the day. One moment, we’re swelling with pride after a sports victory or an international math competition; the next, we’re lamenting the realities of life here—low wages, corruption, brain drain, and broken infrastructure.

In this context, patriotism becomes a third presence in the daily rhythm of life—emerging somewhere after a second Turkish coffee and a spirited conversation in the neighborhood café. Lying, meanwhile, operates on a deeper level: it is the façade beneath the façade, the silent architecture of strength. First, the average Balkan person must be unshakable—resilient, unbreakable in the face of hardship. Then, they must lie to preserve that image. The performance of strength becomes the condition for survival, and truth becomes a liability.

Appearances, in this world, are everything. There’s a well-known joke that a Balkan woman won’t even take out the trash without makeup and a proper outfit—and while humorous, it points to something real. The burden of appearances weighs especially heavily on women. But what interests me most are the ways these performances—of strength, of pride, of composure—manifest in the collective. What happens when an entire society builds itself on curated truths?

The war may be long over, but the legacy of the culture of lies lingers—especially within the highest levels of political power, where corruption remains rampant. Dubravka Ugrešić once suggested that the experience of living parallel lives was unique to the war years. She pointed to the brutal realities of that time—ethnic cleansing, rape, murder, and the mass displacement of people—as proof of a shattered moral landscape. But I wonder: was she right to confine this phenomenon to the war itself? To me, it seems that the culture of lies didn’t end with the violence—it merely evolved, becoming even more deeply embedded in the fabric of postwar society.

Yes, the war made deception glaringly visible, but can we say this fragmentation—the splitting of truth, identity, and public trust—is a universal feature of all wars? Or is the Yugoslav war distinct in how it institutionalized and normalized duplicity, not just as a wartime tactic but as a postwar way of life?

I like to think the Balkans are uniquely entangled in this, with a transmission of memory that is deeply fractured—if not outright chaotic. The existence of conflicting history textbooks is just the tip of the iceberg. Different groups commemorate the same events with opposing meanings. State-run and partisan media often offer wildly divergent accounts of the same event, especially around elections, protests, or commemorations. People often grow up with private, family-level narratives that completely contradict official ones. A child might learn in school that a certain group committed atrocities, only to hear stories at home painting that same group as victims…

Dubravka Ugresic claimed that “what is being built on the ruins is the new truth, the one that will one day be the only memory. In that sense, the war on the territory of Former Yugoslavia is only a repetition of the old story of disappearance and appearance, the story of human civilization.”

I think that Ugrešić was right: what is built on the ruins is not truth, but a new version of it—distorted, selective, and eventually accepted as memory. The tragedy is not that we lie, but that we no longer agree on what the lie is. We speak of the Balkans as if it were one shared space, but our truths do not align. We use the same words—war, nation, suffering, home—yet fill them with meanings that cancel each other out. How can we build any sense of unity, let alone a shared future, when we cannot even agree on the past? In this way, the culture of lies doesn’t just survive—it thrives, not in silence, but in the noise of competing narratives. It is not forgetting that threatens us most, but remembering differently.