Jelena Šantić

Jelena Šantić ( Serbian - Cyrillic Јелена Шантић ; born July 18, 1944 in Belgrade , Yugoslavia as Jelena Jovanović ; † March 18, 2000 in Belgrade, Serbia ) was a Serbian prima ballerina and peace activist.

Life

Jelena Šantić began her dance and acting career in Belgrade in 1963, where she got a job at the National Theater after completing her training. Her ballet skills included both classical and modern ballet. She worked with Olga Lepeschinskaja , O. Jordan, Peter Darrell , A. Kuminisnikoff, A. Seh, B. Shaw and M. Atanasiou. She was soon dancing on the stages in Paris, Copenhagen, Lausanne, Moscow, Madrid, Berlin, Dresden, Budapest, Tehran and Quebec. In 1969 she married the actor Gojko Šantić, from which the daughter Irina Ljubic emerged in 1978. Jelena was the founder of Group 484 and one of the most important peace activists in Serbia. From 1991 she initiated many peace demonstrations. She established communication between various independent peace organizations in Serbia and led aid projects for refugees. She participated in the establishment of a pro-Europe movement in Serbia and a center for anti-war actions. In 1996 the Catholic Peace Movement Pax Christi International presented her with the Peace Award for her peace-making commitment .

As a ballet dancer, she also had a high standing: she played the most important roles in numerous performances. She also worked as a choreographer for many theater performances and films.

She was also a member of UNESCO (CID), the Dance History Scholars and ELIA .

Publications

Jelena Šantić published numerous articles in Serbian and international journals with her reflections and ways to a world without wars. She also went public with reviews of new ballet performances. She also wrote the monograph Dusan Trninić about one of the greatest Serbian ballet dancers and the book Magi Magazanović , in which the work of the dancer is presented, who especially preferred modern ballet.

Honors

Berlin peace activists have founded the humanitarian organization Gruppe 485 in recognition of Jelena's work . At their impulse, the Rohrbruchpark in Berlin-Hellersdorf was given the new name Jelena-Šantić-Friedenspark a few days after the third anniversary of her death in 2003 .

Quotes

• “Humanitarian activity is another side of my personality. In my life, intuition and rationality, stability and instability, silence and ardor have always been mixed up. Then, in an instant, I felt the desire to help people in war. This humanistic line of mine is in a certain way tied to art. Because both the one and the other unite the worlds. "
• “There is no more killing, but there is no real peace. Peace means normal human, economic and political communication; this communication does not exist because people are separated everywhere. I believe that one has to look for peace a long time. Peace also means that the peoples must be reconciled. I am working on it!"
• “My philosophy of life is not violence. War is the worst possible way of solving any problem. You can't solve anything with war. The misfortune that the war brought to ex-Yugoslavia is so great that everything we do seems small. "

Web links

• Lexicon from AZ on Berlin history and the present
• Website of group 484 ( Memento of February 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "PCI is a Catholic peace movement working on a global scale on a wide variety of issues in the fields of human rights, human security, disarmament and demilitarization, just world order and religion and violent conflict." Homepage of Pax Christi International (English) ( Memento of the original from February 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.