Ivona Begović

* 1967

  • "In Serbia, every family has a patron, a saint. My family has one, you say Nicholas, we say Nikola. So we have Saint Nikola, which is on the 19th of December. And the family celebrates it. It's passed down from father to son. My dad celebrated it, then my brother took over. Now my brother's not here anymore, so one day my son wants it. The day is called 'slava' and it's also in UNESCO as a non-wealthy, non-material... That a building, the astronomical clock or Prague is protected by UNESCO. And these are material. This is immaterial, but it also fits into the 'UNESCO' categories."

  • "They lived in Sarajevo, they lived on the front line, like the front line, or I don't know how to say it in Czech. And they're Muslim, but they lived in the Serbian part. In the evening a neighbour came and said, 'Run, or they'll come for you tomorrow!' They put a few things in one bag and ran across the bridge. They didn't come back until the end of the war. The flat was hit, the whole house on that dividing line."

  • "We had a mixed marriage, even then we were a mixed couple. In Belgrade, or in Serbia, the majority of the population is Serbian. That Bosnia is mixed. It had... I won't say the exact percentages, but let's say thirty, thirty, thirty. These are the peoples - Croats, Serbs and Muslims. So he was a Muslim. And when it started, he came to see me in Belgrade, and at that time, being a Muslim in Belgrade was not very pleasant. He didn't feel comfortable there because the propaganda on TV had already started."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 24.06.2025

    (audio)
    délka: 01:00:16
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My husband escaped from Sarajevo with one bag

Ivona Begović in Egypt
Ivona Begović in Egypt
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Ivona Begović was born on 30 October 1967 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her father worked as a construction engineer and the family moved frequently. She spent her childhood in Herceg Novi, in what is now Montenegro. She graduated from an architectural secondary school, and at university she focused on urban planning and spatial planning. She graduated from both schools in her native Belgrade. At the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia, she fled with her Muslim boyfriend to Prague, where the young couple settled. They never returned to their native country permanently. In the 1990s, Ivona Begović worked in the Development Department of the City of Prague. Now (2025) she runs several souvenir shops around Prague. She visits Serbia every year. In 2025 she lived in Prague.