First BELEF.

Under that name. The atrium of the Captain Miša’s Building. It is evening. My departure for the army was somehow delayed for three months and so, instead of being armed and wandering around vast Bosnian forests after only a couple of days of military training, there I was at the performance. I graduated with honors and entered the faculty I wanted.

There was a girl with me, today’s music theoretician and director. The night before attending the play, we listened to the "Peppers" at the party. The same ones, who would prove 15 years later in Inđija that you cannot turn back the time and that, as the pop singer from "Ko to tamo peva" (Who’s The One Singing over There) says, love is like a song, if it does not come when the time is right, it is as if it never came at all.

We had the song "Under the Bridge" that night unlike the later concert. I played it in an informal competition, when I beat my rival on the guitar by using the accord D-maj7 in the introductory part, for which my opponent was not yet ready. As a priceless prize, I got an invitation from a girl to see a play the following night.

On the first BELEF.

The play with a symbolical title "Ne očajavajte nikad" (Don’t ever yield to despair), which was almost an instruction for disoriented citizens of the agitated capital in the summer of ’92.

How not to despair when only a year before on the very same festival, under its former title of "Beogradsko leto" (Belgrade Summer), as baptized by Gorica Mojović in 1986, we had Tina Turner and two solid "generation" stars – Jason Donovan and Tanita Tikaram? How not to despair when the sanctions were introduced that year to the country we live in, in the areas of sports and culture? In the two areas of life that only matter when you are young? One of the most superior national teams we have ever had was returned from the Championship of Europe in Sweden; the rest of our sportsmen were unable to take part in the Olympic Games in Barcelona; for the same Olympics that our city itself had applied, secretly hoping that it would be given a chance to show its hospitality after the successes of the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and the World University Games in Zagreb.

How not to despair when somewhat spoiled Belgrade culture consumers, who nourished the illusion in the past few decades that they were a world metropolis, will not be visited any more by Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Rubenstein, Miles Davies, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sir Laurence Olivier, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro, Orson Wells, and members of the real world jet-set Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, when names like Bob Wilson and Luciano Pavarotti started their international careers in our city.

The rarely performed Nušić’s play at the first BELEF follows its course. The evening is silent; the space of the atrium of Captain Miša’s building seems surreal in the very heart of the town, the same one where lines of Serbian refugees arrive from everywhere. And you are in another world, in another reality. The power of art. Escapism in action. However, in spite of everything theoreticians precisely and somewhat malevolently define, that evening will remain for the whole life. Really.

The years go by. BELEF constantly survives under impossible conditions. Nebojša Bogunović, the author of the acronym under which the festival is known today, changed its name in 1994 to "Sabor kultura duhovnosrodnih Istocnohriscanskih naroda" (Gathering of Cultures of Spiritually Related East-Christian Peoples), leaving a proof of who gave us a hand of friendship and hope during the miserable moments of Serbian culture and history. Because the guests kept on coming in the years to follow:

The State Acedemic Choir Glinka from St. Petersburg, theatre from Thebes with "Antigone", Nikita Mikhalkov with the world premiere of the film "Anna".

During the second half of 1990s, when the opposition, democratically oriented parties, came to power in Belgrade, the Festival became strongly vanguard and politically engaged with a different concept and programme orientation. The slogans of that time, when the authorial team, led by Milena Dragićević-Šešić, destroyed one tradition and replaced it with another, prolonging at the same time the calendar continuity of the festival itself, speak for themselves: "Povratak gradu" (Return to the City), "Urbane provokacije" (Urban Provocations) and finally, in 1999, just after the bombardment "Fragmenti smisla" (Fragments of Sense).

I just returned from Sutorman, where we spent three months dug in military positions. Unusual experience. Personally experiencing something of what I could, until then, only find in the books of Crnjanski, Vasiljev and Hemingway, really searching for some sense and not finding it around me nor in me, just like that year’s BELEF noticed, I spontaneously evoked my memory of an earlier summer, as a defense of everything.

The first BELEF and "Ne očajavajte nikad" (Don’t ever yield to despair).

And truly, the beginning of the new century brought great changes in the state structure and politics too. This also reflected in the culture sphere, of course. The Belgrade Summer Festival is finally able to fully turn to important international artists from both hemispheres of the Earth, nit forgetting to promote domestic authors and giving special attention to young artists.

Universal enthusiasm results in what we can call the golden age of BELEF. Renowned presidents and council members of BELEF in two sessions, with ambitious and widely recognized selectors, bring the greatest stars to Belgrade once again.

The BELEF audience had the opportunity to see in the scope of the video programme the cycle "Creamaster 1-5" by Matthew Barney, video works of Bill Bayola and William Kentridge and the skills of Chuck Sperry. Here we have again our own, but worldly Mirko Ilić, Nada Rej, Slavimir Stojanović, Dobrila Dengeri and Vladan Srdić. The BELEF music audience could enjoy the music of real rock ‘n’ roll legends like Eric Bardon, Lori Anderson or "Roxy Music", ethno music of Zulya Kamalova, Desert Blues and Tinariwen. Theatre production with as many as ten premiers during only a month or two of the Festival, levels with the number of openings of many repertory theaters throughout a year. Let the titles of some of the BELEF productions and co-productions speak about the quality: "Strah i njegov sluga"(Fear and Its Servant), "Beli beli svet" (White White World), "Elektra" (Electra), "Antonije i Kleopatra" (Anthony and Cleopatra), "Mala trilogija smrti" (Little Trilogy of Death), "Kiseonik" (Oxygen), "Antigona" (Antigone), "Prometej u okovima" (Prometheus in Chains), "Muke sa slobodom" (Troubles with Freedom), "Moja domovina sedam snova" (My Fatherland, Seven Dreams).

City officials decided to call for applications for conceptual design and the position of art director of the festival this year. Darka Radosavljević-Vasiljević was chosen for the position of the BELEF 07 Art Director by the following commission: Milena Dragićević-Šešić, Milosav Marinović, Gorčin Stojanović, Žaklina Kušić, Vladimir Marković, Maja Uzelac and Igor Brakus.

Belgrade cultural summer. Twenty-second in a row and BELEF, by that name on the threshold of its majority. With new people and new programmes . New concept and new initiatives. With the new slogan "Tu i tamo je ovde" (Here and There is Over Here), with a desire to keep young people here.

Making a connection between this year’s slogan and the title of the old play from the first BELEF, I am finally clearly aware of providence: the twentieth and then the twenty-fifth BELEF with programmes of ever higher quality, with ever more reputable performers. I clearly see as well: this year EYOF – European Youth Olympic Festival, 2009 the World University Games, and then, who knows, maybe really one day in 2024 or 2028 the Olympic Games in Belgrade as well.

And then, maybe again a future BELEF, which one in due order, who knows.

And then, maybe again a new programme, with a nineteen-year old boy watching a play with someone dear to him.

And then, surely, that future BELEF, which one in due order, who knows, will be their own common

First BELEF.