The popular Serbian weekly magazine Politikin Zabavnik, which celebrates its 85th anniversary this year, published a comics in Romani language.
The comics by Lazo Sredanović and Nikola Lekić features the adventures of Dikan “the youngest Ancient Slaw”, which were extremely popular across the whole Yugoslavia. In its last two issues, Politikin Zabavnik includes an insert with two episodes of the Dikan comics, for the first time in parallel in Serbian and Romani languages.
April 8 is recognized as International Romani Day, used to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Romani people. The day was officially declared in 1990 in Serock, Poland, the site of the fourth World Romani Congress of the International Romani Union.
“In cooperation with the Ministry of Information and Telecomunications, this and the following issue of Politikin Zabavnik will publish an insert with the comics about Dikan, the Ancient Slav, in Serbian and Roma language,” announced the magazine on the front page of the insert added to its 3764th issue.
Dikan is often compared to the French comics hero Asterix, which served as inspiration to the author Lekić when he created the character. The comics depicts the adventures of two Ancient Slavs, Dikan and his trusty companion Uncle Vukoje. The stories take place during the time of Great Migration of the Peoples, usually in the Balkans. The protagonists meet humorous versions of historical tribes, peoples, locations and personages, including Emperor Iustinian.
The first issue of Dikan comics was published in April 1969.
This is the second Romani language comics by Politikin Zabavnik. In 2004 they published a Romani version of an episode of the adventures of Tintin by Belgian author Herge, titled “The Black Island.”
Alongside the French magazine Spirou, Zabavnik is one of the oldest European magazines that contains comics as dominant or hallmark part of their contents. Since their first issue, published in Belgrade in February 1939 by a group of progressive left-wing intellectuals, it featured comics by Walt Disney, as well as other American and Yugoslav authors. Over the years it introduced many classics of the medium from all over the world, from Flash Gordon and the Phantom, to Modesty Blaise and Tintin, as well as newspaper comics such as Hagar the Horrible and Garfield.
Zabavnik paused publishing in 1941 during the Nazi occupation, and continued in 1951 after overcoming some censorship tendencies within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, as some officials considered comics unwanted Western influence. However, according to legend, Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito himself gave approval to renew comics imports, stating that he, like many others is also a fan of Donald Duck.
At the end of the 1990s, during the Yugoslav Wars, Disney discontinued the cooperation with the Politika publishing house, which used its other publications besides Politikin Zabavnik to support the regime of Slobodan Milošević. In the jubilee edition the Politikin Zabavnik newsroom stated they will renew the relations with Disney at some point in the future.
