Snežana Ċurčić’s cultural highlights
Snežana Ċurčić is a journalist, a radio reporter and a researcher. Originally from Belgrade, Serbia, she now divides her time between the UK and Greece. Her ever-present passion for travel has taken her around the world, reporting extensively for BBC World Service and Somewhere on Earth: The Global Tech Podcast. Her work has also been published in the Financial Times. The focus of her writing and research is cultural, social, human, technological and green issues. Snežana speaks Serbian, English, Russian and Greek.
Book market: College Street, Kolkata, India
On my recent trip to Kolkata, I visited the world’s largest, second-hand book market. Nearly a kilometre long, College Street is a literary paradise, dotted with countless stalls and bookstores and flanked by old, academic institutions. With a tired copy of Tagore’s short stories under my arm, I walked into the iconic ‘Indian Coffee House’. As I was sipping coffee and flicking through the book, I marvelled at the grace of the Hindi script, but also at the thought of Rabindranath Tagore or Satyajit Ray, both of whom frequented the cafe, sitting in the same place for a stimulating debate.
Photo by Biswarup Ganguly courtesy of wikicommons
Film: Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
The other day, I rewatched the restored version of this masterpiece by Dziga Vertov in Belgrade’s historic ‘Kinoteka’, the Yugoslav Film Archive cinema. I was mesmerised yet again by this silent, unscripted documentary, by its ecstasy, beauty and its avant-garde film techniques. We follow a man roaming around Soviet cities with a big camera on a tripod, capturing an ordinary day of ordinary people. The film has shown me the significance of the moment and has influenced the way I see and observe the world. Shot nearly a hundred years ago, it is visionary and prophetic, even, of today’s world where everyone is a ‘man with a movie camera’.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – IMDb
Poem: There is a Pleasure in the pathless woods
A recent all-day event at London’s British Library marked the 2024 bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death and I could not afford to miss it. I first discovered the magic, power and timelessness of Byron’s verse at university. Today, the poet is more real and relatable to me as I spend half of the year in a little, coastal village near Missolonghi, the Greek town where Byron took his last breath. This poem, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, comforts me, particularly with the lines:
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar
Portrait by Thomas Phillips, c. 1813
App: Radio Garden
‘Radio Garden’ is an interactive app that curiously brings together things I love – radio, music, maps and languages. The app, a Dutch project launched in 2016, allows the user to choose from over forty thousand radio stations around the world as they broadcast live. I enjoy wandering and picking up a radio station on the other side of the world, listening to a language unfamiliar to me, testing my geography and discovering some awesome music. The app is banned in Turkey and limited to UK stations for listeners in the UK but you can always use a VPN to enter the lavish and ever-growing ‘Garden’.
radio garden: listen to the world
Art hotel: Museo Albergo d’Arte Contemporanea Atelier Sul Mare
Antonio Presti, a patron of the arts and the owner of this unique hotel in Sicily, says that to fully appreciate art, you have to live and sleep in it, not just look at it. More than half of the hotel’s rooms have been turned into art installations by world-renowned artists. I spent a long and unforgettable night in La Torre di Sigismundo by Raul Ruiz, a Chilean artist and film maker. The room is a tall, black and empty cylinder with a crisp, white, round bed that revolves at its centre. A handle opens the heavy, metal roof into deep skies and dreams with your eyes wide open.
Photo by Marcello Di Fiore
Museum-hotel Atelier sul Mare — Google Arts & Culture
Music: To the Unknown Man
For most of my life, I was somewhat indifferent to instrumental, electronic music. That changed a couple of years ago when Vangelis’ To the Unknown Man unexpectedly blasted through the car speakers during a road trip through the vast, scorching deserts of Nevada. I felt overwhelmed, like a crying, just-baptised infant and a healed adult, merged in one. In the same year, the Greek musician and composer, born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou but known as Vangelis, passed away and I started to dig deeper into the sublime universe of his synthesizer. I even went on pilgrimage to the location of his Nemo studio in London but was confronted by the sight of a nondescript block of flats in its place.
Vangelis – To the Unknown Man (Audio) (youtube.com)
Finally, my favourite WritersMosaic writer is Goran Gocić’, a Serbian writer who has touched the nerve of my generation. My favourite book by Gocić’ is Last Stop Britain.