It’s been a week for serving up roast piglet in Belgrade, the traditional way to mark the Serbian Orthodox Church’s New Year, and the joke doing the rounds is that the locals should be tucking into kangaroo instead.
They’d expected to be watching Novak Djokovic chart a course to an historic 21st Grand Slam at the Australian Open, by far his favourite tournament, but instead the local hero is back in the Balkans, hunkering down this week in his Montenegro bolt-hole.
The flat screen TVs at the Novak Tennis Centre he’s built near the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers here were showing Carlos Alcaraz v Matteo Berrettini late on Friday afternoon. No-one was remotely interested.
Novak Djokovic was deported by the Australian government, and his nation is split on the issue
For the rest of the world, the 34-year-old’s removal by the Australian Federal Court, who successfully argued he was ‘a talisman of anti-vaccination sentiment’, is a controversy about the right to individual choice.
For Belgrade, it is about Serbia’s place in the world and whether these events actually reflect a prejudice against the country, stretching all the way back to the 1990s Balkans war, which saw Serbian leaders convicted for war crimes.
‘They wouldn’t have treated an American player or a British player like that,’ says Matja Malinowski, a nursery teacher walking near the tennis centre. The experienced former Serbian Fed Cup captain Dejan Vranes goes as far as to say that this might have been a convenient way for the tennis authorities to prevent Djokovic from surpassing Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal’s 20-Slam tallies.
‘The success of a small, unfashionable country doesn’t fit their script,’ Vranes says. ‘They have ways of stopping these things.’
Djokovic is a national hero in Serbia and his fight relates to their suspicions of prejudice
Some even mutter darkly about how Monica Seles, born in Serbia’s second city Novi Sad, an hour’s drive north, was cut down in her prime when stabbed on court in Hamburg in 1993. She never reached the same heights.
With remarkable timing, the Serbian government announced on Thursday that it was revoking lithium exploration licences granted to Melbourne-based Rio Tinto, sinking a £2billion mining project which would have seen the compulsory purchase of vast tracts of Serbian countryside.
‘The Australians thought they could take our land. They were wrong,’ says Malinowski.
That won’t quell the arguments over Djokovic currently raging in the pubs and restaurants of Belgrade. Arguments about whether the player was given an easy ride by Serbia media after breaking quarantine rules, having tested positive in the weeks before he flew to Melbourne.
About whether a real act of heroism would have been using his huge influence to help Serbia’s struggling vaccination effort, which has currently managed to get only 50 per cent of the population protected.
One opposition politician here this week compared Djokovic to Muhammad Ali, whose refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War saw the American government cancel him.
Some Serbs believe Djokovic was thrown out of Australia to prevent him winning a 21st Slam
But Ali was also the individual who backed a national campaign to get schoolchildren vaccinated against mumps, measles and polio. ‘Get your kids their shots,’ he declared in a 1978 national TV ad.
‘We’re struggling to get the message out about vaccination and that’s we’re stuck on these low numbers,’ says a medic at the Dorian Gray bar on Kralja Petra Street. ‘Our people traditionally don’t trust government. He could have made a difference.’
Lawyer Blazo Nedic, a regular commentator on the controversy on Belgrade TV these past weeks, has known nothing like this. ‘It’s an open wound,’ he says.
And at the centre of it all is Djokovic — ‘Nole’ as they affectionately know him. A complicated, curious, eccentric individual who is certainly not all he seems and, whatever your view of his refusal to vaccinate, simply does not conform to the simple, binary definition of an ‘anti-vaxxer’ which many have attached.
‘He has some strange ideas about things and this forms the background to him and the vaccine,’ says Marko Lovric, an op-ed writer with Nin, one of numerous weekly news magazines in this blisteringly cold city, where the striking number of bookshops reveal the appetite for knowledge. ‘You might say that Novak has promoted “pseudo-science”.’
He is talking about the player’s
