Way of Life

THE MODE OF LIVING: BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY

The society and the family

The economic and the political situations as well as different conflicts had entirely disturbed the social field. Till lately dear children to the regime , the workers and the employees, had been submitted to the shock therapy applied since two years ago. The working class has still been numerous 27% of the active population-have been scattered between those who remained in the from now privatised enterprises and those who have been working in the uncertain section. Especially the middle class has been seeing their conditions destroyed with the permanent increase of the service prices, while the salaries did not follow them: in Belgrade a professor earned an equivalent to 120 Euro while the prices of the clothes and the imported food products have been the same as in West Europe. The consequence had been an extreme uncertainty. In 2002 the poverty threshold had been concerning 40% population. Only the nouveau riche those who had kept the connections with the rural milieu could go through.

In a rural society in 34% (this could increase to 50% in Kosmet) the place of the woman has been complex. The communist regime had given her the right to the divorce and to the abortion too soon, what made men free. But the traditional function such as the central role of the house had been left intact. Serbia-Montenegro has from that viewpoint been a typical mediterranian  country where the second wife has attached much importance to the hearth, but also to the disposal of the family budget and had the only role in the education of the children.

The family has been basic in Serbia-Montenegro. the patriarchal tradition had left its traces, and it has not been infrequent o see three generations under the same roof in the most perfect harmony. The children have found here the means not to dace too soon the severity of the life and they very often use to leave the family dwelling as late as in the moment of marriage. (the average age at marriage 28). But it has also been the custom to take care of the parents till their old days. It has been nearly unconceivable to have put one’s parents in a home for the aged. This family solidarity had also been explained by the fact that there are few orphan homes, and very often the uncles have taken care of the children abandoned by one of the parents. Another sign of this phenomenon was that you would never find a beggar in spite of the increasing poverty.

A contrast dwelling

The dwelling has been at the same time different from that seen in West Europe, and it has been strictly different in the town from that in the country. The centres of the towns have been agreeable enough with the wide avenues bordered by trees and the ancient tramways. But the communist system and the necessity to reconstruct the whole country destroyed by the war, had made the great buildings shoot like the fungi at the borders of great cities. Seen from the outside this has not got a very merry outlook, but one has been surprised once entered these town vessels by the vitality existing there. the apartments have been generally spacious, comfortable and well furnished. Especially, the komsiluk, a typically Yugoslav system of communication between neighbours had been developed here. They have been frequented and even married one to the other among the childhood friends from the same staircase. In the country there is another story. The villages have been numerous and modern, sometimes even too much. The titoist voluntarism had even given a somewhat surrealist image to certain villages or to the buildings razed by HLM. In the full centres of the nice dwellings and the new romantic parks to be wished. Do not go away, the country has been the very beauty, especially when large peasant houses decorated by the straw roofs the waving hills of Sumadija.

The lodging price has been beginning to increase in the great centres, but very frequently the citizens have been becoming the owners of their dwellings thanks to the policy of the low price selling of social lodgings in the 1990s. in Kosmet and South Serbia the houses destroyed in the bombing 1999 had often been reconstructed frequently thanks to the efforts of the public powers on the contrary the refugee question remained crucial. More than 90% have been living in their families, but sometimes three of them in the same place. the Government has been leading the negotiations with Croatia directed to the property settlement remained in this country, on the contrary, at Kosmet. The refugee return has not been on the Addenda.