After Milošević's fall in 2000, and the assassination of the Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić in 2003, the Serbian political scene has been characterized by the struggle of contending political groups to legitimate their visions of Serbian identity. One common method is to entrench these visions in political rituals situated at particular dates and places. As anchors for collective memory and narratives of national origin, both the calendar of official holidays, and the map of ‘famous historical places’ become battlegrounds for contesting agendas.

On the other hand, widespread concerns with pollution and purity, alternative healing methods, and various ‘energies’ – long associated in anthropological literature with anxieties over social boundaries or intrusions of global capitalism – tend to be anchored in the places purportedly endowed with special energies – the ‘places of power’.

By ‘places of power’ I mean named places that have become widely shared symbolic tokens in a particular polity because they accumulated many and varied layers of meaning. For instance, such places of renown or ‘power’ tend to act as ‘pegs’ or ‘anchors’ not only in the ‘national geography of the mind’, but also in the ‘social frameworks of memory’ on very intimate, personal and familial scales. In short, we need places to hang our life memories on, and the powers that be always seek to insert their ideology through these locations on which we drape our memories.