Katabaza: My complicated relationship with the series Black Wedding

An investigation into a mass murder in a village in eastern Serbia, spiced with a horror atmosphere, folklore and, above all, whispers about the black wedding, an old Vlach custom of marrying girls and recently deceased men who were not married

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Toni Mihajlovski as Monk Tikhon in The Black Wedding, Photo: Firefly productions

Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

24.11.2025. 15:18h

Slobodan Maricic

BBC in Serbian

K A T A B A Z A!

If I were to tell you how many times in recent years I have exclaimed the famous phrase from Black weddings you would think that they would have me, like the characters in series, occupied by dark forces.

Because I'm really a fan. first season.

And it seems to me that I'm not the only one, since I don't know if I've heard or read a bad comment or rating somewhere, and my "katabaza" - fall, downfall, or descent into the underworld in ancient Greek - has almost completely entered everyday speech and, more importantly, into mimes.

The story is quite simple.

An investigation into a mass murder in a village in eastern Serbia, spiced with a horror atmosphere, folklore and, above all, whispers about a black wedding, an old Vlach the custom of marrying girls and recently deceased men who were not married.

All this with flashbacks to socialist Yugoslavia in the 1970s, in the character of sports commentator Mićo Đurić (Filip Đurić), who is left without a voice, to see how it all began, which also had a certain charm.

I found it enjoyable, interesting, I wondered what would happen to the missing girl Ida (Anastasija Đurović), and at times - truly scary.

Slavko Štimac was terrifying in the role of Mitar, Ljiljana Blagojević as Grandma Mikula as well.

And the footage of the black wedding, where we see the wedding guests, in the darkness and fog, dancing around the grave on which the bride in a white wedding dress is kneeling, gave me quite the chills.

Without music, smiles, or any emotion on their faces, their dance seems somehow... dislocated.

Who are the Vlachs?

The Vlachs are members of a group of Romance language speakers who live south of the Danube in the territory of present-day eastern Serbia, southern Albania, northern Greece, parts of North Macedonia, and southwestern Bulgaria.

They are mostly Orthodox, and many pre-Christian elements have been preserved in their religious and ritual practices.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

How I got lost in the story

Afterwards I googled all that, read what it says ethnologist Aleksandar Repedžić, found the supposedly only footage of a real black wedding, which was recorded by RTS in 1967, and I thought it would be great if I could write a text or report about it.

Accompanied by a great version of the song The bar is full of goodies. from the series, performed by Bilja Krstić and the Bistrik Orchestra.

Since that 2021, when Black wedding premiered, I watched it again a little later "drunk", but also almost every time I came across it on television.

And I was really impatiently waiting for the second season, whose final episode on November 23rd passed with a lot of my clucking and snorting.

Yes, if you thought that after the whole introduction there was one "but", you were right.

"The second season has serious qualities and shortcomings, I believe it will perhaps divide the audience even more than the first," says writer, film and literary critic Dejan Ognjanović, known for horror films, for BBC Serbian.

"The first one convincingly - not by a spear, but by several spears - jumped above Professor Mišković's notebooks, Kalkan circles and similar series that have recently flirted with horror, so it raised the bar of expectations."

Let's go in order.

Second season

They pretty much lost me in the first few episodes.

From something local, somewhat realistic and tangible, with a dose of horror and fantasy, we moved on to the ultimate battle between good and evil to save the planet and humanity.

Even I, a fan of both epic and science fiction, thought "really, are we going that far?"

"The second season goes to various extremes, it is much more genre-specific," says Ognjanović, author of the books The Poetics of Horror i The Arrival of Horror: Literature.

"It's definitely supernatural horror - it's going into fantasy, which may not be as close to the general audience as the touch of reality from the first season, with allusions to mass crimes."

The first season was written by Strahinja Madžarević, who also worked on The will of a son.

The second is signed by Aleksandar Radivojević, whom Ognjanović describes as "a big fan of Western horror."

"It may be questionable how many Western formulas he managed to smoothly and imperceptibly use in our environment," Ognjanović believes.

"Although there are some excellent scenes and detailed solutions, I have some reservations about the overall success of this grafting, but hey, it's still a fairly pioneering attempt... as a tendency I support it."

My second biggest problem - that creepy atmosphere from the first season is gone, while the Black Wedding and Vlach magic are only mentioned in traces.

What's wrong?

Well, everything.

Instead of the 1970s, we now flashback to 2002, right during the World Basketball Championship in Indianapolis, where Inspector Petar Ćirić (Uliks Fehmiu) investigates a series of teenage suicides linked to a mysterious sect.

Somewhere there are also the Serbian Orthodox Church on the bastion of the defense of humanity, the litanies, the State Security and the Security Information Agency (BIA), the Hague defendants and convicts, Saint Sava, the mermaid fairies from Slavic mythology, the bombing of Belgrade on April 6, 1941, and the burned library on Kosančićev Venac.

Finally, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The author of the series, Nemanja Ćipranić, previously stated that the black wedding motif from the first season was used only to "drive the story along", and that everything is "much deeper and broader".

"In the second season, they tried to introduce a little more of that political dimension, the service, the National Assembly...

"I'm not the happiest with how it was executed," says Ognjanović.

I see on the internet that many people are criticizing the visual effects too - They even mentioned that it looks like the series Charmed, right from the 2000s - but I'm tolerant here.

It would be too much to hope that domestic production, no matter how good it is, looks like Dina, which I think many here really expect.

The world at the end, you won't believe it, hasn't disappeared.

However, the second season has also ended. klifhengerom - with an uncertain moment and a last-minute twist, but it is unknown whether there will be a third.

No one has announced it yet.

Actress Monika Romić, who plays Inspector Krivošija in the second season, Blic said that "there's always room for a sequel," but that it's up to production.

Will I watch it if it happens?

Even though I didn't like the second season - I will.

Because - catabase!

Watch the video: How the first vampire in history 'appeared' in a village in Serbia

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