October 25

Roma Policy Officer in the European Commission, Marta Garcia Fidalgo and Project Manager for Social Inclusion and Minority Rights at the EU Delegation to Serbia, Mirjana Maksimovic paid a half-day visit to Niska Banja City Municipality and the project “Establishing Housing and Financial Autonomy of Roma Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons through Cooperation on the Local Level” funded by the European Union, and implemented by the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence, the Roma League and the City of Niska Banja. During her visit to Niška Banja, the Roma Policy Coordinator and Project Manager got acquainted with the project and the results achieved, but also visited three families from the readmission group. She ended her visit with a visit to the first Roma Cultural Center in the Balkans, which opened in May this year. “There is a lot of work being done to integrate Roma through the documents, but it is very important to know the situation in the field. My general impression after today is that there are many more problems and needs, but I will leave with the impression that there are people here in the political sphere and in the donor community who are willing to help and that there is real potential in the Roma community, ”said European Commission Roma Policy Coordinator Marta Garcia Fidalgo. European Commission Roma Policy Coordinator Marta Garcia Fidalgo added that they have been working a lot on the situation of minorities, and especially with regard to the Roma minority. They want Roma integration to become an important part of the political agenda. “In the political sphere, we can make a connection between Roma integration and EU accession because we want those politicians who are not very interested in the Roma issue but are in favor of EU accession to understand that Roma integration is one of the conditions for this”, said Fidalgo.

August 10^th

Nis City Mayor Darko Bulatovic submitted a two-year report on his work and the work of the City Council to the members of Nis City Assembly. The most significant result was the stabilization of city finances, regular settlement of all financial obligations, and repayment of debts from the previous period in the amount of 2.6 billion dinars without taking any new loans from the banks, neither for current liquidity nor for the allowed bank overdraft. Also, according to him, this period was marked by the great support from the President of the Republic and the Government, both in financial and investment segments, facilitating the city to become a major regional center of this part of our country, through the implementation of the projects such as: completion of highway corridors, reconstruction of the railway line, investment in the airport, completion of the Clinical Center, activities on the construction of a roundabout and reconstruction of the railway line from Nis to Dimitrovgrad, a new plant for wastewater treatment, 6 new factories, reconstruction of schools, support for reconstruction of facades. Bulatovic pointed out that both the President and the Government were in Nis several times, as well as numerous ambassadors, whose visits aimed at providing support for the development of this part of Serbia. “New jobs, employment, a better standard of our fellow citizens, more satisfied people, this is all what we striving for,” Bulatovic said. The Mayor said that there were things he was not satisfied with:” “The debts that we inherited from the previous period, which we had to return, burdened us, and at the same time we had to settle regularly the current bills and financial commitments.  Until this moment we have successfully dealt with this, and I am confident that we will continue to solve these problems successfully. Never before has the City of Nis had such big investments, big projects. In solving the communal problems for Hum, Brenica and other parts of the city, in the next year, we will allocate at least one billion dinars more than this year, and that is why we need more project designers. We have allocated 6.5 million dinars for projects design outside the jobs entrusted to the Institute for Urban Planning, so that we would be more prepared for the projects that are ahead of us,” the Mayor concluded.

April 7^th

In memory of the victims of the bombing of Nis on April 8^th, 1941, the flower wreaths were laid on the Memorial at the Old Nis cemetery. 400 citizens of Nis lost their lives in the ruins caused by the bombing by fascist Germany. On the behalf of the City of Nis the tribute to the victims of that day was paid by Ms. Jelena Mitrovski, the member of Nis City Council for Culture.

November 20^th

The novel If You Look Long Enough into Abyss by Enes Halilovic was awarded with the prestigious literary award Stevan Sremac. The award-winning novel was selected by the jury as the best of the submitted novels, and characterized it as a real Greek tragedy in the Novi Pazar way. The writer Enes Halilovic described the biography of the heroine Neira Bugarin with the quill pen dipped in the torment and ruin of his native region. The book is written without the desire to calculate, or to humor, without the need to exaggerate this or that literary strategy on its pages. The testimony left in the novel If You Look Long Enough into Abyss is there to excite, shake and inspire to thinking. On behalf of the City of Nis the award was presented by Nis City Council Member for Culture Jelena Mitrovska. This is the second literary award for this writer, since in 2012 he received the Branko Miljković award for the book “Poems of Disease and Health”.

November 20^th

On the occasion of the 45^th anniversary of the founding of the Academic Choir of the Student Cultural Center of the University of Nis, the gala concert will be held on Wednesday, November 22^nd at the Officers’ Mess Building in Nis with the performances of the Chamber Choir of the University Adam Mickiewicz from Poznan, Poland and the Nis Symphony String Orchestra. Nis City Council member for Culture Jelena Mitrovska met today with the representatives of the Polish Choir, the founder and the conductor of the Chamber Choir Krzysztof Szydzisz, the guest conductor from Ecuador Fernando Hill Estrado. On this occasion, Mitrovski said that the concert was the part of the bigger project that had yet to come to life and that the work of the Student Cultural Center Academic Choir was important not only for the University of Nis but for the whole city. She added that it was the great honor that the city could host such renowned choir and conductors.

November 16^th

The representatives of the Traffic Safety Agency donated 20 seats for children of the members of the Association of Persons with Disabilities and the Association of War-Disabled War Veterans. Agency data show that car seats for children are not often used in Serbia or that 90% of parents use them in the wrong way. The introductory lecture was held in which the common obligation of all segments of the society to take care of the safety of children in traffic was emphasized.For this reason, the mission of the entire society, and especially parents, is to show children in a comprehensible way what safety is, because it is a prerequisite for their happy childhood.

Nis City Council Member Mrs. Jelena Mitrovski met today with the participants of the scientific conference Nis and Byzantium which, on the occasion of the city festivity days celebrating city patron St. Emperor Constantine and St. Empress Helen, was held in Nis.
It is a prestigious scientific conference which has been organized in our city for 16 years, and, which brings together world-renowned scholars studying Byzantine period. This year’s scientific symposium Nis and Byzantium was the central Serbian scientific conference dedicated to the most important event in the history of Serbian statehood , i.e., the 800^th anniversary of the First Serbian Kingdom and the coronation of Stefan the First Crowned. It is a great tribute to the efforts of the organizers to keep this conference going for so many years and to be a good host and preserve initial scientific and organizational level.

According to Nis City Council Member Mrs. Jelena Mitrovski the goal was set 16 years before to set the profile of the symposium Nis and Byzantium profiled as a respectable international congresses Byzantium studying scholars, after which the City of Nis would be recognized outside our country. She thanked the participants and invited them to come and take part in this prestigious scientific meeting again.

April 13^th

Nis City Council Member Mr. Bojan Krstic has opened Outdoor Science Classroom today at the Regional Center for Education which is part of the Corporate program “Together for the Community 2016” supported by NIS.

Seven projects from Nis were supported by NIS Programme being selected as beneficial for the local community. Outdoor Science Classroom is the part of the project Nis Has Knowledge Park. The project established Outdoor Science Classroom in the courtyard of the Regional Center for Education where the children, students and youth from Nis could learn more about science in a more popular and fun way. The teaching tools such as Pascal Throne (Fakir Chair), Archimedean Spiral Notebook, Magnetic Tunnel and Galileo’s Pendulum were installed in the courtyard.

These installations will be used for organizing public classes for children and students of Nis preschool institutions and schools. Outdoor Science Classroom will complement the work of the Center Science Club. The Installations in the outdoor classroom are unique because they are interactive encouraging visitors to participate.
“The City of Nis will always support such projects and I sincerely hope that this is a good start of something much more complex and larger, where students and all those interested will find their own scientific playground” as Councilor Krstic said during the opening ceremony.

Nis City Council Member Jelena Mitrovski met with the team that has been working on the preparation of the documentary dedicated to the “Hippie Valley” in Nis. The producer of the film is Mr. Oliver Paunovic, General Manager of the Nis City Marketing Center and the film director is Mr. Bobi Rajkovic.

“I have no doubt that the city needs the film” memory “of this street. I heard from my friends who are older than me about this street and their stories were always interesting. I hope that while preparing this documentary we will meet many more people who “grew up” in this street and thus witnessed some more carefree times as some would say@, as Paunovic said at the reception at Nis City Hall.

Nis was the only city in the former Yugoslavia which had a unique place where the young used to hang out in the evenings, the famous Hippie Valley, which was known about from Vardar to Triglav. Back in the seventies Vladimir Nazor Street was for everyone Hippie Valley. The tourists who visited Nis at those times were confused by the number of young people strolling every night or just hanging out.

The script for the film was written by famous Nis actor and playwright Miriljub Riki Nedovic while the moderators in the film and the contemporaries of Hippie Valley are Bane Miljkovic, former most famous DJ in the city and Dragan Arandjelovic Ara, who launched the campaign that special Board would be placed in Vladmira Nazora Street as a reminder that once it was the Hippie Valley.

Nis City Mayor Darko Bulatovic and Nis City Council member Sasa Zivic spoke today at a reception at the City Hall with participants of the International Symposium “Living with Autism-from the perspective of the patient, parents and professionals” held in Nis. Mayor Bulatovic said that the local government will do everything in accordance with its capabilities to facilitate the social inclusion of people living with autism and participate together with the professionals in creating programmes that could help them achieve maximum individual progress. He pointed out that autism represented a condition that required greater care of society and all of us have to develop tolerance and raise awareness of the children, but also parents and the community in general about the need and importance of cultivating love, understanding and acceptance of diversity by providing support to those in need. Andy Shih who heads the association “Autism Speaks” pointed out that it community involvement was extremely important and the existence of high-quality multi-sectoral collaboration to ensure that people with autism may become members of the community who can contribute to its development. There are more than 500 people in Nis with diagnosed autism. Most of them are children. Their parents founded the association trying through its activities to improve their quality of life.