One of the most prolific screenwriters of the last few decades, Siniša Pavić, died at the age of 92 in his home in Vlasotinac.
The multi-awarded author left behind some of the most famous Yugoslav series - "Theatre in the House", "Otpisani", "Hot Wind", and he also wrote scripts for the films "Tight Skin", "Laf u srcu", as well as " Cherry on Tašmajdan" from 1968, which was based on his book.
With his script for "Bolji život", at the end of the eighties, a new era of television will begin, not only a series where the audience follows the fate of a family in dozens of episodes, but also their reruns, which are still broadcast on Serbian Radio and Television.
Among them are Pavić's "Happy People", "Family Treasure", "The Dollars Are Coming", "The White Ship" and lastly - "Heroes of our Age".
Siniša Pavić understood well the time he lived in and that is the secret of his success, says actor Vojin Ćetković.
"Along with great talent, that was the reason why the series was so watched.
"His characters are quite realistic, no matter how much it seems that they are in some strong colors, they were from the time we lived in," explains Ćetković and adds that this is sometimes lacking in contemporary series.
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Ćetković's first major role in a TV series was the character of the young goalkeeper Brando in Pavić's "Family Treasure".
"They told me, if you are good in the first ten episodes, Siniša will give you a role and that's how it was, I played in almost every episode of that big series," he recounts with a smile.
A less pleasant period soon followed, when Ćetković joined the army during the NATO bombing in 1999, but then Pavić showed him what kind of man he is.
"He found me and asked 'Son, how can I help you', he was one of the few people who called me then and asked if I needed anything.
"I will remember him both as a man and as a great screenwriter," Ćetković told the BBC in Serbian.
The news of his death also saddened the great Yugoslav and Serbian actress Svetlana Bojković, who was the star of several of Pavić's series - from Emilija Popadić in "Bolje život" to sister Antonija in "Happy People".
"He left behind a great and significant work that is precious and will continue to remind us of who we are and how we are doing in life," says Bojković.
The characters from the series "Happy People", which marked the nineties in Serbia, three decades later are also a hit on social networks.
Clips featuring, among others, Radmila Savićević as Riska and Velimir Bata Živojinović as the Archangel have tens of thousands of views.
Šojić, Pantić, Šurda, Đoša, Tika Špic as a picture of domestic reality
He penetrated deeply into the mentality of the Balkan man and created a variety of timeless characters, whose witticisms people have known by heart for generations.
One of those is Srećko Šojić, an uneducated, greedy director of a state-owned company, who becomes even richer under capitalism and continues his career in politics, played by Milan Lane Gutović for decades.
As if in a mirror, he made the audience laugh with an honest, but eternally unsuccessful, family man like Dimitrije Pantić, played by Nikola Simić and later Petar Kralj.
Šojić and Pantić will remain examples of many Balkan privatizations and transitions.
He also immortalized the eternally distressed lover of Greek music, a barber with low blood pressure - Šurda, played by Ljubiša Samardžić.
"There are both Šurda and Šojić in each of us.
"If I hadn't done stupid things like Šojić or if I hadn't been dissatisfied like Šurda, those characters probably wouldn't have been believable," Pavić told News.
Life path
He was born in Sinj, in Dalmatia, on January 22, 1933.
His father was a sailor in Austria-Hungary and participated in the revolt in Boka Kotorska in 1917, he told in one interview.
When Siniša was five years old, his family moved to Belgrade, where he would spend the war and post-war years.
Since he was born on the territory of today's Croatia, and spent his life in Serbia, albeit for decades in a joint state, he noticed the similarities between Serbs and Croats.
Apart from a short memory, Croats and Serbs have in common the renunciation of all that is good, like great artists.
"Both of us attack our best people and that's exactly what they were best at.
"For example, Krleža was denounced in Croatia because he turned that Croatian, purger society against the establishment, but here he resented the Serbs because somewhere one of his literary heroes says 'you gypsy Serbs', and then it was identified with the author's attitude, which is nonsense," Pavić said at the time.
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He graduated from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade in 1956 and spent his working life as a judge.
Before he was employed in the court, he was dissatisfied with the work he was doing, just like the main character of the series "Hot Wind".
The menial jobs he had to do after college, to help his father, inspired him for numerous pieces and he put himself into many of them.
"In 'Diplomci', I shared my experience during my internship at the large company 'Invest-import', and I wrote the theater piece 'Poltron' based on what I experienced at the company 'Srbokoteks', which was engaged in buying leather," said the writer.
He is the winner of the award Dositej Obradović for life's work in 2020.
Pavić spent a quarter of a century in retirement and lived in Vlasotinac, in the south of Serbia, for the last years.
His wife Ljiljana Pavić was also his collaborator on the scripts.
He repaid the people of Vlasotin by promoting their dialect through the characters Đoša and Tika Špic in the series "Family Treasure".
"He was our fellow citizen, our friend, the son-in-law of Vlasotina, a man who loved the people of Vlasotina so much, besides his wife, that he spent the last almost three decades there," said the president of the municipality, Bratislav Petrović.
The screenwriter will be buried in this city.
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