Teodora Miladinović studies Spanish in Belgrade, while most of her family live abroad due to Serbia’s poor economy. We spoke to her in early July, the same week protests erupted in the capital.

I was born in Požarevac, which is a small city in eastern Serbia. Požarevac is famous for being the birthplace of Slobodan Milošević, who was the strongman in Belgrade throughout the Yugoslav Wars and died while on trial at the Hague for war crimes. He was overthrown the year I was born but you still get people who’ll say “Milošević’s city, you’re from Milošević’s city”, which goes to show that his legacy lives on.

People in Požarevac still talk about Milošević. I think they truly dislike him and have unhappy memories of his rule. Well, they do in my home at least. My parents went to all the protests back in the ‘90 and when I was growing up they would tell me about the poverty that so many people lived in back then. 

People often compare him with our current populist president, Aleksandar Vučić, who was a minister in Milošević’s government, and argue about which one of the two is worse. A lot of the problems that we live with in present day Serbia are a consequence of our past.

I live in Belgrade now, where I study Spanish at the faculty of philology. I’m in my second year of university and I live with my older sister, who is 24. She’s also at university and studies engineering. I have three sisters in total: two older ones, who live here in Belgrade, and a younger one who is 18 this year and lives with my parents in Germany. They moved there three years ago, but I stayed behind in Požarevac because I was in my last year of secondary school. 

My dad is an electrical engineer and has worked overseas since 2008. He first went to Kuwait and then Canada before settling permanently in Germany. Why did my family move away? They left because there wasn’t any work here. There’s six of us living off one pay packet and that’s expensive, so they had to leave, unfortunately. Now I’m part of a Skype family, because that’s how we stay in touch these days.

There’s a lot of pressure to go to university in Serbia, especially when you’re from a smaller place like Požarevac, because people know that’s the only way that you can obtain a decent quality of life. There’s definitely a stigma if you don’t go. Older people almost see it as something shameful or tragic. But maybe if there was a chance that you could live well by being, like, a waiter, and could afford to rent your own flat and pay your bills without help from your parents then there wouldn’t be that stigma. It puts a real pressure on people. 

In Germany, for example, you don’t have to go to university if you don’t think it’s right for you. You can go to a vocational school and still have a chance to work for yourself and live independently. My dad says that a lot of his colleagues didn’t go to university. Over there no one pressures you to, I don’t know, get a masters in psychology – even if it doesn’t interest you – just so you can afford a loaf of bread.

I’d like to hope there’s a chance I can find a job in Serbia. There are a lot of language schools here, for example, so I can try that. Or journalism. I’d like to try here first, but if I don’t succeed then I’ll probably look at going abroad somewhere. A lot of young people leave Serbia every year to look for work but I don’t think they make that decision lightly. They go because they can’t find work over here, and eventually reach a boiling point where they're like “I really can’t go on like this any longer”. I only want to go abroad if I have to. If I could earn a decent living in my field over here that would be ideal.

I come from a really patriarchal family. My parents are Orthodox to the max. Even to this day they call me to remind me to go to church whenever there’s some religious holiday. My mother would always tell me and my sisters that we need to find a man who’s always a step ahead of us, who’ll always be above us. Whenever I hear that I just kind of roll my eyes and say “alright, alright”. I ignore it, but I don’t think everybody has the strength to do that.

Women’s rights really matter to me, but I still struggle with the stereotypes that exist about feminists: that they all look a certain way, that they’re nags. If someone offends me with a misogynistic joke, I try not to lecture them because I don’t want to reinforce those stereotypes about dull feminists. When we learned about feminism in sociology class in school the guys would immediately complain: “they drone on about women’s rights but they’re already equal”. Those unenlightened attitudes worry me, but I’m not sure how you change them.

This summer is getting more and more uncertain by the day. A month ago I was hoping to go to Pula in Croatia with my sisters, but we gave up on that plan about two weeks ago. After that I started to think about going to the mountains or visiting my family in Kruševac in the south of Serbia, but I’m still too afraid to visit my grandmothers because of this virus. But then seeing everything that’s going on in the country – the riots and the government lies and the violence – I really don’t know what the rest of this summer is going to look like. The protests that erupted a couple of days ago feel like they’ve just begun.

I’ve got my end-of-year exams right now but I really couldn’t care less about them at the moment. How am I supposed to sit and study when there are people with bloodied heads in the streets, choking from all the tear gas in the air? I find myself wondering: did Milošević’s police beat people like this? They probably did.

I’ve noticed at university that the protests seem to have brought us all together, even people who I didn’t really talk to before, or particularly like. One of our professors even said he’ll come with us next time. I’m really glad to see so many young people on the streets. You even have kids who are still in secondary school. There’s such solidarity out there: when someone trips, or they become disoriented from the tear gas, people come to help them up straight away. At that moment it doesn’t matter who they are or whether you agree with their politics or not.

I’m not going tonight because I went yesterday and the day before. I joined in because I’m furious with all the lies, the silence, the completely dysfunctional courts and corrupt institutions where injustice rules. Literally because of everything, to be honest.

I’ve only had four hours sleep and I’m tired and overstressed. The police don’t discriminate; they’ll brutalise anyone who they can get their hands on and even women get beaten up. I need to rest so I’m ready for tomorrow and so I have the strength to run from the cops. But at the same time, I feel so guilty that I’m not there tonight.