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Diaspora Diaries: Danica Smiljanic, Co-Founder of Balkanish

Diaspora Diaries: Danica Smiljanic, Co-Founder of Balkanish

by Balkanish Team in Diaspora Diaries

Diaspora Diaries: Danica Smiljanic, Somewhere Between Sarma and Wonder Bread

Growing up between cultures often means wanting two contradictory things at once: to fit in and to never forget where you came from. For Danica Smiljanic, it meant Serbian at home and English outside of it.

There is a particular kind of negotiation that happens when you grow up in the diaspora. You learn early that the version of “normal” inside your house may look very different from the one waiting outside your front door.

The Culture That Wouldn’t Let Me Forget

My parents did an incredible job preserving my Serbian roots. Despite the moments when being Serbian made me feel singled out at school, I genuinely loved who we were.

My brother and I grew up celebrating slava, going to church, dancing folklore, reciting old Serbian poetry for Sveti Sava, fasting before religious holidays, speaking the language and eating the food. Car rides to school were filled with the sound of us singing along to Zdravko Čolić, Marinko Rokvić or Lepa Brena. I loved helping my mom prepare for slava and watching the house transform as the food came together and family arrived.

In fact, despite both of us being born in Canada, my parents sent my brother and me to kindergarten without knowing much English at all. Their philosophy was simple: We’ll teach them what school can’t. They’ll learn the rest there.

And we did…Although I still remember coming home from school crying to my mom because nobody understood me.

Looking back, I realize my parents weren’t trying to keep Canada out. They knew Canada would find us. English would come through school, friends, television and simply growing up here. What required intention was making sure Serbian came with us too.

Still, being a kid means wanting to fit in.

Sometimes, I wanted a peanut butter sandwich on Wonder Bread instead of Mama’s sarma. Sometimes, I wanted my Canadian friends to understand why I loved Zdravko Čolić as much as whatever was playing on the radio. And sometimes, I just wanted being Serbian to require a little less explanation.

That didn’t mean I loved my culture any less. I simply hadn’t figured out how to carry both identities at the same time.

Different Rooms, Different Versions of Me

For many children of immigrants, identity becomes something you learn to adjust depending on the room.With my Canadian friends, I was Canadian. With my Balkan friends and family, I was Serbian. For years, the two versions of me existed beside each other without ever quite becoming one. The irony is that I came from a family that had spent generations making sure our culture survived.

My father was born in Lika, Yugoslavia, now Croatia, while my mother was Serbian but born and raised in Toronto. What made my upbringing unusual wasn’t simply having one immigrant parent and one Canadian-born parent. It was that my mother had grown up at the very centre of Toronto’s Serbian community.

Her parents came to Canada from Yugoslavia after the Second World War. My grandfather had survived a concentration camp, protected his homeland and eventually found himself building a new life abroad. With that new life came a freedom he did not take lightly. He believed that if he had survived everything he had, he owed it to himself to do something meaningful with that freedom.

So he started a Serbian radio program.

My grandparents became fixtures in the community. There were choir festivals, igranke, church events, fundraisers and cultural gatherings. Their radio program shared news from back home alongside stories and happenings from Serbian diaspora life in Toronto. They understood something immigrant communities have always understood: when you live far from home, familiar music, language and voices can become a lifeline.

Everyone seemed to know my grandparents. (You can read more about them here)

To put that into perspective, when my mother got married to my father, nearly 800 people attended their wedding. Yes, 800. If that doesn’t qualify as being well connected, I’m not sure what does. For my grandparents, community wasn’t something they participated in occasionally. It was part of the architecture of their lives. Without realizing it at the time, I was growing up on the foundation their generation had built.

The Question My Deda Left Me With

When my Deda sadly passed away in 2020, hundreds of people came to honour him, even as COVID was beginning to change the way the world gathered. I had always known my grandparents were important to their community, but grief has a strange way of allowing you to see a life in its entirety. Suddenly, I wasn’t just looking at my grandfather. I was looking at decades of commitment to his family, his culture and the community he helped build.

And I found myself thinking: How could I have this extraordinary example of dedication to our culture in front of me and do nothing with it? What would my contribution be? I didn’t have the answer yet. I only knew that if my grandparents had found their way to serve their generation of the diaspora, I wanted to find a way to serve mine.

“Znam da nije naš, al’ je moj.”

The answer began revealing itself a few years later, in a place I didn’t expect: while planning my wedding. Like many people in the diaspora, I fell in love with someone outside my culture. It wasn’t something I had imagined for myself growing up, and there had always been an expectation that I would marry Serbian.

When I first told my dad about our relationship, he went quiet. I knew exactly what he was thinking, so before he could say anything, I said:“Tata, Znam da nije naš, al’ je moj.” I know he isn’t one of ours, but he is mine. My dad softened and without a world more than “razumjem”, from that moment, he accepted the man who would become my husband as one of the family. Love was love. And ironically, marrying outside my culture would become part of what brought me back to it.

The Kolo I Hadn’t Danced in Years

I had always known I wanted a Big, Fat, Serbian Wedding. So when the planning began, I went looking for everything that would make it feel like one: trubači, harmonikaši, a Serbian-Canadian DJ who could get both sides of the wedding onto the dance floor, roast pig, meze, an Orthodox ceremony—the music, food and beautiful chaos I had grown up associating with a proper celebration.

And somewhere in the middle of planning all of it, I had an uncomfortable realization: I couldn’t remember the last time I had danced kolo. This was something that had once been part of nearly every celebration in my life. I had danced folklore from the age of five until eighteen. How had years passed without it? That question opened the door to others. When was the last time I had visited family in Serbia? When was the last time I had gone to church? When had things that once felt so ordinary become things I only reached for on special occasions?

I hadn’t made some dramatic decision to walk away from my culture. Life had simply gotten busy. I grew up, built a career and got swept into the momentum of adulthood until one day I realized I had stopped noticing how far away from some of it I had drifted. And suddenly I thought about the little girl who had once learned that telling people where she came from could make an entire classroom stare at her. Now here I was, planning a wedding where I wanted my Serbian identity to be impossible to miss. Somewhere between those two versions of myself, something had changed.

I Never Had to Choose

It wasn’t until my late twenties that I finally stopped feeling as though I had to choose.

Today, I can be unapologetically Balkan listening to turbofolk, celebrating slava and living for kafana culture while also letting the dog sleep in the bed, cottaging, Timbits and Canada Day. One does not cancel out the other.

I can celebrate two Christmases. I can dance kolo and feel completely at home in Canada. I can carry the traditions of my ancestors without pretending their experience is exactly the same as mine. Maybe that is what took me so long to understand. My grandparents built their version of diaspora. My parents gave me the language, traditions and roots they were determined I wouldn’t lose. And now I get to decide what carrying those things forward looks like for me.

That realization would eventually become part of the reason Maria and I created Balkanish. Because I know I’m not the only person who has lived between these two worlds. I’m not the only one who has felt too Canadian in one room and too Balkan in another, or wondered whether embracing one side somehow meant betraying the other.

It doesn’t.You are allowed to embrace both sides of your diaspora identity. You don’t have to choose between the country that raised you and the culture that raised you.

Somewhere between the two is a version of home that belongs entirely to you.


 

 

Diaspora Diaries

Diaspora Diaries is a Balkanish series sharing the stories of the global diaspora community—the people growing up between cultures, languages and definitions of home. We tell these stories because family histories deserve somewhere to land, and because sometimes the most powerful reminder that we belong is discovering that someone else has felt exactly the same way.

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Diaspora Diaries: Nora Sokolovic and the Balkan Village She Carries With Her in Her Heart

Diaspora Diaries: Nora Sokolovic and the Balkan Village She Carries With Her in Her Heart

Nora left Vukovar, Croatia, when she was six months old and grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, far from the large Balkan communities found elsewhere in Canada. She remembers almost nothing of the country she was born in, yet somehow knows exactly what home is supposed to feel like. Nora doesn’t remember leaving Croatia. She was only six months old when her parents packed two bags, gathered up their baby daughter and boarded a flight to Canada. She would grow up in Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, meaning nearly every childhood memory she carries was made on Canadian soil. And yet, ask Nora where she’s from and there is absolutely no hesitation. “I always enthusiastically reply that I’m Croatian.” Vogue pose included. She was born in Vukovar and returned with her family every year until she was four, then every few years afterward. Croatia remained part of her life, but much of what connected Nora to it had to be built from a distance. Maybe that is why her relationship with home is so interesting. Canada is the country she knows best. Croatia is the country she carries in her heart. Two Bags, a Baby and a Snowstorm Nora may not remember her family’s arrival in Canada, but the story has been told enough times that certain details have become part of the family mythology. For one thing, Canada welcomed them with a massive snowstorm. Her parents arrived in Nova Scotia without speaking English, with barely any money and two bags. “One was just my stuff,” Nora points out. They had left behind family, friends, pets and the familiarity of a life they understood for the possibility of something safer. Two years later, they would have another baby while still trying to establish themselves in a country whose language, climate and customs they were learning as they went. Her mother found certain freedoms in Canada that surprised her. Back home, she had felt pressure around how women were expected to dress and present themselves. In Canada, some of that pressure seemed to disappear. She could let her guard down a little. Other adjustments took more time.The weather was awful, the bread was strangely sweet, and there was no Vegeta. For a Balkan family trying to rebuild its life on another continent, discovering that even the seasoning you instinctively reach for isn’t on the grocery-store shelf can make an unfamiliar country feel just a little more foreign. For my mom, learning to cook without it, Nora says, was “rough.”Eventually her mother felt Canada had been the right decision. Her father never felt quite as certain. There is something revealing in that difference. Two people can make the same journey, build the same family and live in the same country while carrying completely different relationships with the place they left behind. Nora grew up somewhere between both of those perspectives. The Things That Made Her Different There wasn’t a large Croatian or Balkan community surrounding Nora in Nova Scotia. In fact, it often felt lonely and isolating. There were a few families from the former Yugoslavia whom her parents befriended, and those relationships became important. Visits gave the adults people with whom they could speak their language and remember home. For the children, they created a small circle where their families didn’t seem unusual. Because outside of it, Nora was constantly reminded of how different she was. At home, her parents spoke Serbo-Croatian to her. Nora understood everything, although she usually answered them in English. She ate the food her parents cooked, absorbed their expressions and learned English partly through two people who were learning it themselves. At school, children noticed. They noticed her lunches. They noticed her clothes. They noticed the way she pronounced certain words because she had first heard them spoken in her parents’ heavy accents.They even had a name for her. “The Immi.” Short for immigrant. In seventh grade, Nora once commented on the colour of another boy’s yellow sweater, remarking that it reminded her of mustard. His response was to tell her to go back where she came from. That stuck with her and childhood  has a way of making seemingly small moments feel enormous. When you already know your lunch smells different, your parents sound different and your family does things differently, it doesn’t take much to reinforce the feeling that everyone else has been given instructions for how to belong that somehow never made it to your house. Still, Nora never stopped wanting people to know she was Croatian. The difference embarrassed her at times. The identity itself did not. How Do You Miss Somewhere You Barely Remember? This is where Nora’s story becomes harder to explain. 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To Nora’s family, they weren’t. “I think that’s healed my family a lot.” she says.  Healed. It is a powerful word for something as seemingly simple as being able to walk into a shop and find the food you grew up eating.But maybe that is exactly the point. Homesickness isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it accumulates in tiny absences: the ingredient you can’t find, the joke nobody understands, the language you hear only inside your own house, the family members who live an ocean away. And sometimes healing happens in equally small ways. A familiar product on a grocery-store shelf. A cousin living nearby. A restaurant where the menu doesn’t need explaining. A stranger speaking your language within earshot. Stoney Creek could never replace Croatia. It didn’t have to. It simply allowed Nora’s family to feel less far away from it. What Her Parents Built From Almost Nothing As a child, Nora saw the life her parents were creating. As an adult, she sees what it cost them to create it. Nora remembers how much they struggled while she was growing up. Today, the picture looks very different. Her parents have a house. They have good careers. They have community. They can travel back to Croatia, regularly, and are now in a position to send money back home. The people who once arrived needing to rebuild everything can now help the people they left behind. “They’ve done so well,” Nora says. “I’m so proud to call them my parents.” That pride complicates her desire to leave Canada someday. Because wanting to return to Croatia doesn’t mean she believes her parents made the wrong decision. Canada gave her family safety and opportunity. It gave her parents the chance to build what they have today. You can be grateful for the life immigration gave your family and still grieve what immigration took from it. Both can be true. The Culture Made It Through Walk into Nora’s home today and you can see what survived the journey. Guests are not simply welcomed. They are hosted. Before anyone arrives, Nora stress-cleans a house that is already clean. Then come the cookies, snacks, coffee and drinks, because apparently allowing someone to sit in a Balkan home without immediately offering them three different things to consume is a violation of international law. There is a cold storage room that actually serves its intended purpose, something Canadian families may simply use for storage is used for rakija, suvo meso, preserves and other staples. And hanging at every entrance is a ring of dried garlic. Her Croatian credentials remain strong. Ask what the most Croatian thing about her is and Nora debates between her “full-blown Croatian/Balkan palate” and her temper. The palate might win. Fritule. Ćevapi. Seafood. Burek. Kulen. She refuses to pick a favourite because, according to Nora, Balkan food is simply “the best food in the world.” Case closed. Even her music refuses to stay neatly inside national borders. Croatian artists sit alongside Slovenian, Bosnian, Albanian and old-school Yugoslav music. For Nora, loving Croatia has never required pretending the cultures surrounding it are strangers. Which makes the person she eventually married rather fitting. A Croatian Girl and an Albanian Guy Fell in Love Nora had a feeling she would eventually end up with a Balkan man. And then she met an Albanian and the rest is history. The relationship did not exactly begin as a Balkans-united success story. Her now-husband initially wasn’t sure about dating her. She was Croatian, she had family in Serbia, he was Albanian, and he worried about how his family might react. So at first, he wanted nothing to do with it. Fast-forward a few years.His family adores her. They got engaged and married a few months later. What Nora discovered while dating was that shared culture mattered to her, but not necessarily shared nationality. 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Diaspora Diaries: Sophie Steger, A Makedonsko Devojče Living in Canada

Diaspora Diaries: Sophie Steger, A Makedonsko Devojče Living in Canada

The Zelnik in the Lunchbox Growing up diaspora is strange: as a child, you notice all the ways your family is different; as an adult, those are often the things you hold onto the tightest. For Sophie Steger, a Macedonian-Canadian born and raised in Mississauga, Ontario, that journey began in a loud Macedonian home filled with grandparents, food, traditions and a culture that followed her far beyond the front door. There is a particular kind of childhood embarrassment reserved for children of immigrants, and it usually arrives at lunchtime. Around you, other kids begin pulling out the foods that television commercials have assured everyone are normal: crackers arranged neatly beside slices of processed cheese, juice boxes, individually wrapped snacks and, if the universe has truly smiled upon them, a Lunchable. Then there is you, unwrapping the tin foil. Inside: zelnik. “Sometimes I would be a bit embarrassed when my mom would pack me Macedonian food for lunch,” Sophie remembers. “I would be opening up a tin foil wrapped zelnik and my friends would be having Lunchables, which were much cooler at the time.” At eight years old, there is no explaining to your classmates that one day they will pay $14 for something “artisan” wrapped in brown paper while you will spend your adult life trying to recreate the exact taste of something your mother casually packed into aluminum foil on a Tuesday. Childhood has a funny way of making us want what everyone else has. Diaspora life has an even funnier way of making us spend adulthood longing for what we once tried to hide. Somewhere Between Mississauga and Bitola Sophie was born and raised in Mississauga, Ontario, but inside her childhood home, Canada could occasionally feel very far away. Both sides of her family come from the Bitola region of Macedonia—her father’s family from the village of Grešnica and her mother’s from Budimirci. Her grandparents lived in the same house as Sophie and her parents, so Macedonian wasn’t a language reserved for holidays or occasional phone calls to relatives overseas. It was the language of home. In fact, Sophie learned Macedonian before she learned English. The house itself operated according to a volume and pace familiar to many Balkan children raised abroad. It was, in Sophie’s words, “very LOUD.” There was a garden “the size of a hockey rink”—a reference only a Canadian would make—peppers hanging in the basement to dry and others being pickled for winter. Saturday mornings meant watching the Macedonian program together, followed by soap operas with her grandparents. And, of course, there was always food. “There was always food on the table and usually someone stopping by for coffee,” Sophie remembers. Family wasn’t something scheduled into life; family was life. Meals were shared, weekends involved relatives, and plans became family discussions. School, friendships and seemingly minor decisions could suddenly require the participation of an informal Balkan parliamentary committee. Sophie remembers her Canadian friends having a little more independence. At her house, “there were more rules and a lot more questions.” Anyone raised Balkan already knows them: Where are you going? What are you going to be doing? Who is going to be there? Have I met their parents? What exact time will you be home? A spontaneous Friday night plan could require the diplomatic skills of a United Nations negotiator. Staying out late, going to parties or taking trips with friends weren’t necessarily impossible; they simply required a full proposal, supporting documentation, character references and several rounds of negotiations. “Where Are You From?” For many Canadians, this can be a simple question. For children of the diaspora, it rarely is. When someone asks Sophie where she’s from, her answer is Macedonia. Growing up surrounded by her grandparents and Macedonian culture, she considered herself Macedonian. It was only later, as an adult, that “Macedonian-Canadian” began to feel like a more accurate description. Her maiden name often started the conversation: Terzievski—or Terzievska, depending on whether there happened to be another Macedonian in the room ready to correct you. People struggled to pronounce it throughout her childhood. They would ask how to say it, give it a try and inevitably get it wrong. Then came the question: Where are you from? Macedonia. And often: Where is that? Rather than diminishing that identity, those conversations have made Sophie more conscious of its uniqueness. “It makes me realize that my Macedonian identity is unique and not familiar to many,” she says, “which makes me somehow even more proud.” Maybe that is one of the quiet transformations of growing up diaspora. As children, we desperately want our differences to require no explanation; as adults, we begin to understand how precious they are. Too Macedonian. Too Canadian. We asked Sophie whether she has ever felt “too Macedonian” around Canadians but “too Canadian” around Macedonians. Her answer required exactly three words: “All the time.” Three words that probably have more than a few people nodding as they read this. You learn to move between worlds without consciously realizing you’re doing it. It looks like English and Macedonian in the same conversation, Top 40 followed by the dramatic opening of Svadba Golema on your Spotify playlist, bacon and eggs for breakfast and tavče gravče for dinner. Sophie learned Macedonian first, but today English is the language in which her brain instinctively responds. She still understands Macedonian better than she speaks it, and she knows the classic diaspora experience of having a relative speak an entire sentence to you in Macedonian, understanding every word perfectly…and answering in English. And yet there are certain words English simply cannot replace. Like lele. Go ahead. Try translating that one. We’ll wait. Growing up in Canada may have changed which language Sophie reaches for first, but Macedonian has left its little linguistic fingerprints behind. There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Food When we asked Sophie what her Canadian friends would immediately identify as “very Macedonian” about her, she didn’t mention language, religion or national history. Her answer was much simpler: “Always preparing WAY too much food.” Few things explain Balkan culture more efficiently. You are expecting six people, so naturally you cook for fourteen. Guests insist they’re full; you become personally offended. Their objections are disregarded, and more food appears. Hospitality in the Balkans is rarely subtle. It is edible. That same sense of abundance shaped Sophie’s childhood. Traditional meals kept Macedonia present at the family table, while church, community and the calendar carried the rest of the culture forward. Her family attended Macedonian dinner dances and picnics, went to church and volunteered at Mississauga’s Carassauga Festival of Cultures. At home, traditions marked the passing of each year: a coin hidden in the zelnik for New Year’s, Easter eggs coloured together, roast pig for Orthodox Christmas, Kolede, fasting before Christmas and Easter, Macedonian music, oro and video calls with relatives back home. None of these things carried the entire weight of preserving a culture on their own. Together, however, they built a world—a little Macedonia recreated in Mississauga. Perhaps that is one of the beautiful things about growing up abroad: your roots find ways to reveal themselves. We put on folk costumes and dance the dances of generations before us. We sing songs whose words have travelled farther than we have. We prepare the same foods, repeat the same traditions and, for a moment, feel connected to people and places thousands of kilometres away. It is a feeling difficult to explain unless you have been lucky enough to inherit it. “Understanding My Culture Is Understanding Who I Am” Culture follows us into adulthood in ways we don’t always anticipate, and relationships are one of them. Growing up, Sophie says there was an expectation that she would eventually end up with someone Macedonian. Today, what matters most isn’t simply whether someone shares her background, but whether they understand how deeply that background shaped the person she became. “My Macedonian culture is something that is very important to me and plays a huge role in my life,” Sophie says. “Understanding my culture is understanding who I am, how I was raised and why I do certain things.” Participating in that culture, she adds, is a bonus—another way to make sure traditions aren’t lost. Introducing someone to the Macedonian family, however, is another matter entirely. We asked Sophie which is harder: introducing someone to her family or explaining her family to them. “Definitely introducing them to the family!” she answered. “Too many questions will be asked! Too many opinions will be made!” Some cultural traditions, apparently, are in absolutely no danger of disappearing. The Macedonia We Inherit Through Stories Nostalgia is rarely grand. We imagine we’ll miss countries and cities, but sometimes what we really miss are sensations. For Sophie, Macedonian childhood can be summoned through the smell of ćevapi on the barbecue, tulumbi for dessert and the sound of Makedonsko devojče. Some of her connection to Macedonia, however, comes not from her own memories but from those handed down to her. Her father would tell stories about Mount Pelister near Bitola and its natural springs, a place Sophie came to associate with the Pelisterka mineral water she knew growing up. She still wants to visit it. There is something profoundly diaspora about wanting to stand somewhere simply because someone you love once stood there. We inherit geography that way: villages through our grandparents’ stories, mountains through our fathers’ memories, songs before we understand their words and places that somehow feel familiar before we have ever seen them. When we asked Sophie what part of being Macedonian makes her proudest, she didn’t say the food, the music or even the traditions. She said: “The community connection.” Perhaps that is the thread running through all of it—the zelnik in the lunchbox, the peppers in the basement, the two-hour coffees, the questions before going out, the Macedonian words that refuse to leave, and the stories of places still waiting to be visited. Growing up between cultures can make home difficult to define. Sometimes, though, home isn’t a country at all. It is the people, rituals and memories that continue to find us wherever we happen to be. And, more often than not, there’s something waiting for us on the table. Diaspora Diaries Diaspora Diaries is a Balkanish series sharing the stories of the global diaspora community—the people growing up between cultures, languages and definitions of home. We tell these stories because family histories deserve somewhere to land, and because sometimes the most powerful reminder that we belong is discovering that someone else has felt exactly the same way.

Learn more
Diaspora Diaries: Anastasija Perincic Lopes, The Place You Live Isn’t Always Home

Diaspora Diaries: Anastasija Perincic Lopes, The Place You Live Isn’t Always Home

Diaspora Diaries: Anastasija Perincic Lopes, The Place You Remember Isn’t Always Home Anastasija Perincic Lopes was three and a half years old when her family left Trebinje for Canada in 1996. She remembers almost nothing of life before they left, yet she has always had a deep sense of belonging tied to the home she left. Anastasija Perincic Lopes doesn’t remember leaving Trebinje. There are no vivid childhood scenes of Bosnia and Herzegovina before Canada, no remembered final morning or journey she can reach back and retrieve. She was three and a half when her family immigrated in 1996, and although she has returned many times since, her earliest memories belong almost entirely to Canada. Ask her where home is, though, and the answer becomes more complicated. When she returns to the Balkans, she says it feels like going “home" and that "I sometimes feel like a guest in Canada.” It may be an unexpected answer from someone who has spent almost her entire life here. But memory and belonging are not always the same thing, and many diaspora stories don’t fit neatly into a single box. A Family That Couldn’t Fit on One Map When people ask Anastasija where she is from, she often gives the answer that leaves the most room for the truth: Former Yugoslavia. Her family tree travels across borders that have shifted more than once. Her father’s paternal roots reach to the Dalmatian island of Rab in Croatia, with an Albanian ancestor further back in the family line. His maternal side was Serbian, from Topusko in Croatia, with roots reaching into Montenegro. Her mother’s family is Serbian and has been in Herzegovina for generations. Anastasija describes herself as “Serb, Canadian with a sprinkle of Croatian,” but adds one important qualification: “Balkan first, always.” It isn’t difficult to understand why. Her family arrived in Canada with very little family nearby. It was Anastasija, her parents and her older sister, with extended relatives living farther away. So her parents did what immigrant families often do when relatives are separated by geography: they found people who eventually stopped feeling like friends and started feeling like family. Her parents built friendships with other people from the former Yugoslavia, and Anastasija remembers looking forward to weekends spent with those families and their children. Canada may have been where they were rebuilding their lives, but inside that newly built community, there were familiar customs and people who understood where they had come from without needing the story explained first. The Weird Balkan Kid School was different. Anastasija was bullied. Other children thought her name was strange. Her food smelled unfamiliar to them. They noticed her clothes, her family and the language they spoke. Even the way her mother dressed her stood out. Her mom had European taste, which meant that before Anastasija could explain why her family was different, sometimes she simply looked different. Her older sister experienced it too. As a child, Anastasija resented being moved somewhere that made her feel like “the weird Balkan kid.” At home, there were fresh, home-cooked meals over the processed foods she saw in her Canadian friends’ homes. Serbian was present in everyday life. There was slava, Vidovdan, folklore and a social circle built largely around families from Ex-Yu.These were ordinary things in her house. Eventually, Anastasija began trying to make one part of that identity less visible. “I was embarrassed to say I was Serbian,” she remembers. Serbia, in her experience, came with negative associations she was too young to control. It didn’t receive the easy recognition she saw attached to other European identities. It wasn’t received with the same excitement that other kids got when sharing their cultural background,”It wasn’t cool like saying, I’m Italian.’ People love Italians and Italian food.” Serbian was harder to explain. So, for a while, she tried to hide it. Now? “I’m proud of it.” Please Don’t Tell Me Who I Am There was another side to growing up between places that left Anastasija feeling othered just as much. People would call her Canadian. On paper, that conclusion made perfect sense. She had arrived before her fourth birthday. She couldn’t remember her life before the war. Canada was where she went to school and where nearly all of her conscious childhood unfolded. But being told she was “basically Canadian” by her Balkan family never felt like a compliment. It felt like someone else was editing her story. “It would bother me when people would call me Canadian and reduce my identity into what they thought it should be,” she says. “It’s like they were telling me how I ‘should’ feel.” That distinction matters. Anastasija wasn’t rejecting the country where she grew up. She was rejecting the idea that geography and memory gave someone else permission to decide which parts of her identity were legitimate. She may not remember Trebinje at three years old, but she remembers the visits throughout the years and how she feels at home in a country so far away from her home. “In my heart, I was always Ex-Yugoslavian.” Belonging, after all, isn’t something another person gets to calculate for you based on the number of years you have lived somewhere. What Our Parents Leave Behind Anastasija understood her parents’ decision to immigrate differently as a child than she does now. Her family was mixed; Serbian and Croatian and the war had made them feel as though there was no longer anywhere they were entirely comfortable. Canada offered safety, but beginning again came with its own cost. Her parents took jobs that did not reflect what they had studied or the lives they had known before immigrating. Their beginnings in Canada were humble. As a child being bullied for being different, Anastasija couldn’t fully appreciate the trade they had made. She knew what immigration had cost her: familiarity, extended family and the comfort of not being the strange kid at school. Adulthood gave her another view. “I understand their struggle now as immigrants, and I have more empathy.” That may be one of immigration’s quietest truths. Children grow up inside the life their parents fought to create without yet understanding what had to be dismantled for that life to exist. Appreciation grows through the years. The Grandfather Who Connected Her to Another Side For someone whose family history crosses so many places, identity has also changed with loss. Anastasija was close with her Croatian grandfather, and through him she felt a strong connection to that part of herself. After losing him, she felt that connection weaken and found herself identifying more strongly as Serbian. It is a reminder that heritage isn’t always inherited evenly. Sometimes one branch of a family tree feels close because a particular person keeps it close. A grandfather tells the stories, speaks the dialect, and embodies a place strongly enough that knowing him becomes a way of knowing it. When that person is gone, the connection can change too. Building a Family Across Cultures Anastasija eventually married outside of her culture. Her husband is Portuguese, which makes the question of “dating within the culture” considerably less important to her than whether a partner respects and participates in the culture you bring with you. For Anastasija, that matters very much. And she is grateful that her husband does. Perhaps that has become even more significant now that Anastasija is a parent herself. Her daughter is growing up with more than one cultural inheritance, just as Anastasija did. And rather than seeing that mixture as a reason to dilute the Balkan side of her identity, motherhood has made preserving it feel even more important. “Even though my daughter is only half Balkan, it’s still important to me that she understands her culture fully.” Anastasija grew up frustrated when other people tried to decide how Balkan she was allowed to feel because she had spent most of her life in Canada. Now she has the opportunity to give her daughter something different: the freedom to understand every part of where she comes from without being asked to rank them. At the end of our conversation, we asked Anastasija to finish one sentence: Being part of the Balkan diaspora means… “I have to represent my people well.” For Anastasija, heritage isn’t something to prove. It’s something to carry—with pride, with intention, and now, into the next generation.     Diaspora Diaries Diaspora Diaries is a Balkanish series sharing the stories of the global diaspora community—the people growing up between cultures, languages and definitions of home. We tell these stories because family histories deserve somewhere to land, and because sometimes the most powerful reminder that we belong is discovering that someone else has felt exactly the same way.

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