Written by: Natalija Radović
"I’m a creative based in Sydney, Australia, with Serbian heritage. Having spent time living in Belgrade while travelling around the Balkans, much of my work explores identity, nostalgia and the in-between feeling of growing up across cultures."
We all know too well, the heavy walk along the jet bridge, leaving your home country not
knowing when you will visit next.
Well I accidentally ended up living in the culturally furthest place on earth from the
Balkans...Sydney, Australia.
My background is culturally mixed, which I have found to be both enriching and challenging at times. I was born in Sydney but I’m Serbian by heritage. As a result, most of my early childhood was spent travelling between Europe and Australia. With that, the Balkans were never foreign to me...even if at first glance I seemed foreign to them.
Kengur.
The term I’d often be referred to during my time there. I lived a life torn between two lands and identities, finding it difficult to relate to what I’ve known all my life whilst not relating to the chosen one entirely either.
I spent almost a decade documenting the Balkans. For me, capturing the remnants of
Yugoslavia is an exploration of my own roots and identity.
Each summer, I was searching for the traces of Yugoslavia. The longest stop of my Yugo trip had been an OD of concrete, friendship, and beers: Београд.
Only they didn’t know the Belgrade I knew.
The Belgrade I knew was sunlight bouncing violently off concrete. Bus stops where baba’s narrated the neighbourhood like it was a stage. Conversations that didn’t wait for introductions. Coffee that stretched for hours. A culture where time feels less scheduled and more shared. Flea markets with old Yugoslav books, Tito on the cover, Dubrovnik in faded print. Graffiti of singers my parents once loved. The Yugoslav Drama Theatre, still carrying the name of a country that no longer exists.
I lived in a number of apartments around Belgrade, the kind with exposed wires, cracked
windows and flickering lights. Buildings where the caged lifts felt like they hadn’t been updated since the 1930s, the kind that could give any horror film a run for its money.
And somehow, that was part of the charm. Without it, something felt missing, like you weren’t experiencing the Balkans in its truest form.
If you looked closely, history whispered everywhere.
For years, I photographed those whispers. I told myself I was documenting architecture,
nostalgia, culture. In truth, I was tracing my own roots, proof that identity can be passed down like a language.
My happiest moments on the road are always offline, finding myself in this sort of absurdly beautiful moment, driving through sunflower fields in Serbia in my dad’s 2001 Audi with a broken speedometer, no seatbelt, and a tape deck that skipped through every second song...this is luxury, because I could never have imagined having the freedom or the ability to find myself in such a place, looking at such things.
I loved that wild, beautiful place the way people love other people: selflessly, reverently, without doubt. The kind of love that asks only to be noticed.
In that strange in-between phase of adulthood where you’re both rooted and restless, I decided to book a one-way ticket to my safe place. The Balkans have a way of holding you like that - as if the past is always in the room with you. My parents' stories, the music, the kafana’s where love songs sound like laments. You grow up learning that love is rarely quiet here.
I hold a deep connection to my surroundings. Some places speak softly; the Balkans never really do. They are loud, chaotic, contradictory, alive.
Belgrade in its own way, introduced me to someone who would soon make distance feel
irrelevant. Distance stretched between Australia and Serbia, but
Balkan love is stubborn.
It survives time zones, family opinions, bureaucracy and the quiet fear that maybe you imagined it all. We learned each other through absence as much as presence.
We crossed oceans, continents, time zones. Flights and feelings, folding distance into
something smaller than it looked on a map. I had moved across the world and somehow fate (Sydney, Australia) still found a way to follow.
I used to think my great love story was Belgrade itself. Maybe it still is in a way. Loving that city and the Balkans that shaped it - taught me how to recognise devotion when it appeared in human form...that human form who led to become my husband.
Since being back in Sydney, I’ve now built a home from two geographies. The Balkans still live in my habits, my humour, my longing. Love, I’ve learned, is also geographical. It carries the places that shaped you.
Some people fall in love and then find a city together.
I found the city first.
Belgrade taught me how to love.
And then it led me to you.
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"Nikola and I first met as teenagers and crossed paths for years, but life took us in different directions. It wasn’t until ten years later in 2024, when I moved from Sydney to Belgrade that our story truly began.
He reached out to me and we started talking every day. At first, he thought I was only visiting Serbia for a holiday, but when he realised I had actually moved there, he booked a flight and came to see me. We spent two wonderful weeks together in Belgrade, and from that point on we both knew there was something special between us.
When he returned to Sydney, we tried long-distance, but being apart was much harder than either of us expected. I decided to move back to Australia, and everything fell into place very quickly. Less than a year later, Nikola proposed, and six months after that we were married in an intimate Serbian Orthodox ceremony surrounded by our closest family.
Today we live together in Sydney and are building our life between Australia and the Balkans. We travel back to Serbia and Bosnia whenever we can, and those trips have become such an important part of our relationship. We are currently planning another winter trip to spend time with family, reconnect with our roots and revisit the places that mean so much to us.
Looking back, it feels like our story was years in the making. We met at 18, but we found each other at exactly the right time.”