My Agro-digital Nomadism in the Balkans (for the ‘Politika’ Magazine)
This month I had a chance to give an interview about my experience in the Balkans for the last two years to the Serbian oldest newspaper ‘Polititka’ (120 years — including all the times of Yugoslavia).
The paper format has limitations, so here below are my full answers with a bit more details, comments and links. My gratitude to Dragoljub Stevanović. (‘Politika’) and Marko Vučetić (the Serbian IT Association) for approaching me to highlight the topic of how remote work could positively affect rural areas. During the days we were making the interview the news came:
Spain will pay digital nomads and remote workers in tech up to $17,000 to move to a rural region.
So the convergence of life in the countryside and remote work from there could be rewarded by municipalities.
How long did you live in Russia before becoming a digital nomad?
From the very beginning of my career in the industry, I already had flexible working hours. At that time, I was a final-year university student and worked part-time as an engineer at the mobile communications development center of Siemens. Three years after obtaining my master’s degree in radiophysics, I once again moved to a part-time schedule to focus on my pet projects, which allowed me to have a flexible schedule again. After that, I worked for another three years at the development center of another corporation (which was later acquired by the IT giant DELL), where the nature of the work allowed for remote work.
Can you describe your life and work in Serbia and other countries?
I began practicing fully remote work when I transitioned from employment to social entrepreneurship at the intersection of education and IT. However, these were short intervals of about a month, during which I worked from the countryside by the shores of the Gulf of Finland and from Tallinn in Estonia (back then, the euro-to-ruble exchange rate was very favourable). Additionally, several times I organized off-site ‘coworking days’ for friends in rural areas for a few days.
Gradually, I re-evaluated my attitude toward the values of modern civilization, and my nomadism became more agro than digital. I discovered the international world of ecovillages, organic farms, and permaculture projects. I became interested in the benefits of simple rural life, exchanging help on farms (usually 4 to 6 hours a day) for food and lodging. Such cooperation usually lasts one to two months, but there were instances when I stayed for the entire winter to look after the farm while the owners went to the cities. I had to chop wood, feed dogs, cats, chickens, geese, milk goats, harvest crops, and so on.
Before COVID, I practiced this lifestyle in several countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as in Finland and Sweden, combining it with teaching English, mathematics, physics, and programming to children, and writing articles about how such alternative ecological lifestyles in rural areas are organized.
When did you arrive in Serbia?
In 2021, I conducted a long-read interview for the Magazine of Ecovillages and Eco-Initiatives of Russia with the Slovenian ecologist Nara Petrović (he also claims himself ‘fecologist’) — a practitioner of luxurious simplicity and the author of seven books in Slovenian, among which he is best known for the bestseller Man: Instructions for use). I was also aware of Nenad Maljković, an active participant in the Permaculture Center in Croatia, and I realized that I wanted to spend about six months to a year exploring rural formats in the Balkans, as well as better understanding the diversity of Slavic culture in the former Yugoslav countries.
However, I had to act faster than originally planned. At the very beginning of March 2022, I flew to Belgrade, and a few days later, several of my friends, for whom IT is their main field of activity, arrived here as well.
Do you know other people — digital nomads in Serbia?
For thousands of IT professionals and other specialists living in the Russian Federation who had already learned to work remotely thanks to COVID, 2022 became the year of exploring (often out of necessity) the life of a digital nomad. Many of my friends highly appreciated Serbian hospitality; some fell in love with Belgrade and even bought apartments here, while others settled in Novi Sad. There are acquaintances who moved to the countryside, bought houses, and are experimenting with gardening.
Some of my friends visited 15 countries in a year and chose Serbia, but in winter, the air quality in Belgrade was so unacceptable to them that they decided to go to South America for a while and ended up staying in Buenos Aires (where one of them even found a job at a local biotech venture fund), and now they are planning to obtain Argentine citizenship (but they are continuing to learn Serbian).
Some are still nomadic, some only within the Balkans, others around the world. A significant number are now in London thanks to the UK’s Global Talent Visa. This is not to mention those who have been digital nomads for over ten years.
How does your day look on Fruška Gora (Serbia)?
I don’t have a typical day. Much depends on the season, weather, and current activities. Ideally, I spend about five hours helping with eco-projects, using both my hands and my laptop. However, in this heat, almost all my time has become computer-based again. But I live in the mountains and am writing these lines from Zlatibor, where a small Russian-speaking community is holding an art residency, and I was invited to work on one of my articles here. Recently, I introduced several colleagues from environmental and high-tech projects to the Priboj area (there is an initiative to run an international astronaut training and rehabilitation center).
My day also depends on specific events. In the summer of 2022, I spent a few days at the Digital Nomad Festival in Tirana (here is a note about my whole Albanian experience). The Albanian government is paying significant attention to attracting digital nomads (I lived there for a total of three months before they closed the visa-free entry).
Recently, I was in Ulcinj, Montenegro, for one of the days of an international ecological school focused on creating nature reserves — thanks to two local NGOs — EnvPro and MSJA. I also explore Serbia through various events. In Požega, I attended the Terrestrial Forum organized by the Ministry of Space, and in Mošorin, I participated in a conference ‘We are All Made Made of Mud’ on ecological construction by GAIA Kosovo at the Center for Earth Architecture ‘’earth&сrafts”.
Moreover, the structure of my day and place of residence depends on the projects I’m involved in. For example, I spent five weeks of the winter before last living near Tivat, as I was consulting on a development project in Žabljak, where there were ideas to create something at the intersection of an IT hub and an eco-village. Interest in such projects is gradually growing.
In Belgrade, I helped friends with an informal home conference; the last one was in English to facilitate better integration of expats from different countries into the local context.
We invite active people to talk about what truly concerns them and topics they usually don’t have a platform to discuss. For example, Veronika Tasić Vusurović (who was the first director of the Serbian Digital Initiative) talked about her hobby project of an English-language book club, and the neurophysiologist Ilya Zakharov shared his observations on contemporary music.
In July, during the heatwave, I was in Šumadija at the invitation of Elena Božić, who, after many years of living in Belgium, returned with her husband to her ancestral village, where they are now developing the permaculture project Mamin Gaj. In Šumadija I also often stayed by the Bukulja Lake and visited once Božidar Mandić — a writer and an artist. He is one of the pioneers of the Serbian back-to-the-land movement as a part of Porodica Bistrih Potoka. This group of families started to experiment with simple life in 1977.
On Fruška Gora, something like an ecological cluster is emerging, centered around the Šumska1 ecotourism homestead, the forest school, and the informal Forest University. Each initiative there is independent, but they have substantial cooperation, such as a collective garden and mutual assistance in building houses using traditional cob technology. Within this cluster, I have several informal roles, mainly as a researcher and communicator, and I do little manual work.
I was the first to try out the Forest University art residency, where I wrote an article for a scientific journal about my experiences in new, living educational formats.
For me, it is important to actively involve universities in eco-village-related projects, so I came up with the concept of Symbiocenic Environments and an understanding that the Balkans are the best fit to run a pilot. With this initiative, I participated in an ERASMUS+ event in Stara Planina, where we worked on creating the Southern Eastern Ecovillage Network (SEEN).
That was a year ago, and now, together with the Serbian NGO Zeleno Doba, we are organizing Zoom meetings to establish connections with universities.
While visiting rural Serbian Orthodox Monasteries made me think that they also could be long-term partners for biodiveristy restoration for rural areas both with their traditional gardening and care for the nearest natural ecosystems. That idea appeared during the talks with igumen Teofil of Osovica monastery. Within their numerous agricultural activities they also cooperate with one of the local seedsavers.
In the IT world in Russia, I was heavily involved in industry-university collaboration, and now that the Serbian IT Association has emerged, I think I can occasionally be useful in that role here too. I am discussing a couple of initiatives with the association’s director, Marko Vučetić.
My other Balkans ‘reports’
- Reflections on Summer School on Environmental Activism and Climate Change. 2022 Novi Sad, Serbia
- Social-eco-art-tech. Serbia and Croatia
- Reflections on Tivat Tourism Think Tank 2022 — Regeneration for Montenegro and the Western Balkans
- Serbian Ecologists
- Expats in the Montenegro Countryside (in Russian).
- Unaware (Unconscious) Violence and Seeds of In-action. Deep Live Gathering 2022 in Montenegro
- Universities and Climate Resilient Communities in the Western Balkans and the EU (1FUTURE Project and Beyond)
- Social Slow Travel: Lowcost&Zerowaste (it’s a more general overview, but it’s heavily based on the latest experience in the Balkans)
