The hymnal songs of 1945 [...] cold sublets. Empty shop windows. A big plaster head of Maxim Gorky in a bookstore shop window.

After Jovan Popović, a poet, returned from Paris to devastated Belgrade in 1946 he lectured on hunger and squalor in France.

It took little for guilt.

Shop windows were empty. Advertisements did not exist back then.

‘Spend time with architects’, Krsto Hegedušić tells us at the end of our studies at the Academy, ‘they are better dressed than you, more intelligent, they know languages [...]’

Josip Vaništa. Skizzenbuch 1932–2010. Iza otvorenih vrata (Sketchbook 1932–2010: Behind Open Doors). Zagreb, 2010, p. 31