Aimless Musings about East and Central Europe

Browsing through some old photos, I found a great example to illustrate my post on the flag of Croatia and Serbia’s own nationalist slogan- “Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava” (“Само Слога Србина Спасава” in the Cyrillic alphabet, hence- C C C C) meaning “Only Unity Saves the Serbs.”  This photo was taken in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and it reiterates how one finds this image all over the Balkans.

The cross has been used by the Serbian states and the Serbian Orthodox Church since the Middle Ages shortly after Dusan the Mighty was crowned tsar of the Serbs and Greeks on April 16, 1345.  The cross is still used today as a national, religious, and ethnic symbol of Serbs.  Although the cross has been used since the Middle Ages, it conjurs up a new meaning since the wars in the 1990s, as I mentioned in the previous post, “Flags Symbolizing Hatred.”  The above photograph is a great example of the slogan in real life written as grafitti.