The Attic

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Danilo Kiš was born on February 22, 1935 in the northern Serbian city of Subotica. This city, known in Hungarian as Szabadka, has long been a crossroads of cultures; it lies in the northern part of the region known as Vojvodina, on the great plains that characterize central Hungary and lap over into eastern Croatia and western Transylvania as well. It has been a polyglot border town since the end of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. In Subotica and throughout the Vojvodina one would have noted in the interwar period the presence of Slovak, Ruthenian, German, Jewish, and Croatian minorities as well as the larger Hungarian and Serbian populations. This region, arguably the most diverse in all of the former Yugoslavia, was also home to two small, little-known population groups: the Šokci and the more numerous Bunjevci, who are Roman Catholic by tradition and are generally held, on the basis of their dialects, to be Slavic (possibly Croatian) settlers from points south and east.

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