PARAGE, Serbia -- I'm not working, I swear. Promised I wouldn't over here, and I'm not.
This one's from the heart.
And not mine.
This village, with a history reaching as far back as 1497 and only as high as the still-tallest structure in this elegant testament to the Orthodox faith ...
DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS
The Orthodox Church of the Nativity of the Holy Virgin, Parage, Serbia.
... has a population of 800-plus, down from about 1,000 a century ago, and it'll soon be back at that stage. There's one market, one ice cream stand, one newsstand, one school and one graveyard at the end of the one significant street. Which, when I was a child and would come here to visit my grandparents, went no further. It was a dead-end street to the truest sense of the term.
Not since my grandmother passed away here in 1985 has any member of my family lived here. But all of us on my mother's side -- the only side I've ever known since my father's parents were killed by Nazis in World War II -- originated in this very place. Grandmother, mother, her two sisters. All gone now. Same goes for my grandmother’s 15-year-old son who took his life in a house rather than get recruited by the invading Germans and, who, by doing so, led to my mother being born here to my grandmother after World War II with the latter at a very late age. The boy was Vladimir, and my mother would thus be named Vladimirka, the feminine version of the same.
My grandmother, sadly, wasn't satisfied. She wanted another boy, the better to replace the one she'd lost. So those two never really meshed as a mother and daughter should. So it wasn't until I was born, many years later, that my grandmother believed she'd finally found her replacement. I looked like the boy, sounded like the boy and, even though I was born in Pittsburgh while my birth father was stationed there as an ambassador for the former Yugoslavia, that was plenty enough for her. She had an entire wall -- a literal entire wall -- of her main room here dedicated to pictures of me.
So sure, when I visited, it was a big deal, even to someone so young. I was welcomed like little royalty. And not really grasping the above dynamic until adulthood, I grew to feel the same way about my grandmother. And this place. And everything about it.
I love it. Always will.
This afternoon marked my second stop in Parage on a six-day visit, and that's ... not convenient. It's 10 miles away from the nearest village, 30 miles away from the nearest city, Novi Sad, and an hour-plus away from Belgrade, the nation's capital. Sure, the main road does actually go somewhere now -- as a matter of fact, it leads to Sombor, Nikola Jokić's beloved hometown about 45 minutes to the northwest -- but it's still not convenient to anything. A visitor's got to really want to come here.
This one always does. I'll go to the graveyard, where my grandparents and young Vladimir are buried under a single stone. I'll go the site where my grandmother's house once stood before a sinkhole claimed it a couple decades ago. I'll have a scoop of soft-serve vanilla ice cream. I'll sit on the bench that faces the above church, long enough for some old dude or other to sit right next to me and ask me how I'm doing because that's just life here.
I sure won't be thinking about work.
And I'm not now, either.
But the other way in which I keep connected with the place is through Facebook and Instagram, where a few among the younger generation here keep everything as vibrant and visible as it can be online. The latest news -- they're finally installing gas lines this year! -- and meetings and school updates are there. A few pictures, mostly of the church or inside the church.
And oh, my goodness, there's a ton about their soccer club.
I'm not about to morph this into a sports column, so I'll condense it to this: These dude-o-vich's can play. They've powered through their league, which is officially third-division in Serbia, two years in a row, often by blowing teams off he pitch. No stars. No names. No one paid more than $30-$50 per game. No real ringers, either, with most of the roster comprised of permanent Parage residents or from other nearby villages.
They're just good. They're tight. They're committed. And they've never had a season like this:
VOJVODINA FOOTBALL LEAGUE
Never mind the tables or translations. That's just good.
Second place. Good enough to clinch competing in what's called a 'barrage' series with another second-place team at the same level for the right to be promoted to the second division. Which, in all seriousness, ought to be unthinkable for any settlement this size. There are small markets, and then there's ice cream sales by the scoop.
But here they were, taking on Tomislavci in the barrage, meaning a two-game, aggregate-goals series, this being the first game and this being on home soil.
I was already here for the vacation, and I wasn't about to miss it.
Neither was anyone else, apparently, as the citizens packed the modest stands that hold no more than 250 but also ringed the place far and wide. One group of the most vocal supporters lit fireworks ... with no real timing at all, just when they felt like it. Probably about 800 in all, I'd guess, if only because, again, that's the population. Not counting all the chicken and geese inside nearby fencing.
Final: Parage 6, Tomislavci 0.
And it wasn't anywhere near that interesting. The visitors not only were schooled in all facets but also had no fire left after a solitary flurry in the first half. As one Parage fan standing near me observed, "We're much stronger than they are. And we want it more. We're hungrier. We want to go to the next league."
Hungrier?
Look, I don't know any more about Tomslavci than anyone reading this, but I know Parage remains among the poorest of the poor, even within Serbia, Europe's seventh-poorest country an average per capita income of $7,400. A home can be had on any of these streets for around $5,000, and even that's seen as exorbitant by most so they simply wait for someone else to die off.
And as for soccer ... I mean, let's never forget that what's made it the world's sport, more than anything, is that all it takes is a ball. Whether that's in Cairo or Cameroon, London or Los Angeles, Pittsburgh or Parage, it's just a ball. Maybe some meshing and a few pipes. That's it.
The hunger here showed. Beyond a Dino Gajdobranski hat trick, there was the toughness, the drive, the bloodied shin of a 40-year-old defender whose name I neglected to note, the bloodcurdling cussing of another player aimed at an opponent who'd cut him brutally late -- there are no English words for some of the stuff he spoke to an opponent, and it's better that way -- and all else made this an epic mismatch, one that'll undoubtedly result in the barrage victory with the second match Wednesday up in Tomislavci.
Loved it. All of it. Absorbed everything through the joint celebration with the supporters, complete with pulsating kolo music pounding through the speakers above the tiny clubhouse that represents the totality of this operation's bricks and mortar:
I wanted to pay. Everyone who approached the field -- sorry, can't call a big patch of grass a stadium -- was asked to pay, even though there are no gates, no fences, not even any sidewalks. The few individuals responsible would simply see someone they hadn't seen already and ask them to pay. When they came to me, embarrassingly, I had zero Serbian dinars. I'd been using credit cards everywhere. That wasn't about to fly here, obviously, so I pulled out a U.S. $20 bill. One of them had his eyebrows shoot up, clearly recognizing that was way more than they'd been seeking, and the other looked as if he'd never seen such a creation.
They asked me to go in for free, and only then asked what in the name of the wrong hemisphere I was doing here. And after I shared a little of what's above, they surrounded me with ... so much warmth and familiarity that it felt like I'd been there for years. Unlike anything I've ever experienced, if I'm being honest. And when one of them left, then soon returned with an official Parage jersey to hand to me -- again refusing to accept anything I'd almost rudely offer in return ... yeah, that did it.
I'll be home soon, my friends. Flying back Monday. Back to the ballpark Tuesday.
I'm so very glad I came. That'll only change when this special place does, which I'm expecting will happen in exactly two thousand and never.
