Identity, Stability, Lifestyle: Why FishingBooker’s Diaspora Decided to Stay

FishingBooker Recruiter Vedrana Gnjatić knows there’s one question she’ll never be able to avoid when she tells people that she relocated from Australia back to the Balkans: “But why?!”

“Serbians who were born and raised here, and haven’t lived elsewhere, automatically know that I’m not ‘one of them,’ even though I speak the language and was raised with plenty of Balkan culture in my household,” she says. “People have reacted in all sorts of ways – from slight confusion to straight-up asking what’s wrong with me for coming back!”

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Things I Never Thought I’d Learn from Living in Belgrade

Moving from a small, relatively-unknown town in the middle of England to a small, relatively-unknown country in the middle of Southeast Europe wasn’t something that I ever thought I’d end up doing. I also never thought I’d end up working as a Partner Content Specialist for the world’s largest online platform for booking fishing trips (“the AirBnB of fishing!”, I still often tell my bemused dad). 

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Young Expats Are Kicking Off Their Careers in Successful Serbian Startups

Belgrade has long been known for its friendly people, pastry shops, varied architecture, and nightlife. In the nineties, its reputation suffered; but during the last century, the city has reinvented itself, casting away its status as a failing, former communist capital and becoming one of the region’s most significant cultural and economic hubs.

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From Oxford To Belgrade: How I Landed My Perfect Job Where I Least Expected It

When I tell people in the UK that I’m living in Serbia, their reaction is usually fairly predictable. It ranges from the mystified “is that in Russia?” to the concerned “is there still a war on?” to the downright dismissive “my husband drove through there on the way back from Greece. He said it was awful”.

When I tell Serbs I am working here, they are often equally disgruntled. Like many countries in South and Central Europe, Serbia has a serious problem with unemployment. This has resulted in a brain drain of some of the country’s most ambitious young people, who are fed up with the clunky bureaucracy and nepotism that is rife in most of the country’s largest companies and go abroad to look for brighter opportunities elsewhere. This means the idea of a foreigner coming to Belgrade from the safe haven of Oxford University can take some getting used to. It just isn’t usually done.

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