Belgrade’s The Orthodox Celts Put Twist on Irish Standards

See a slideshow of The Orthodox Celts here.

Irish rock music in the heart of Serbia is what the Belgrade-based band, Orthodox Celts plays.

Their tunes are all in English, but they carry a uniquely Serbian imprint.

In a packed, smoke-filled club in Nis, just about everyone is hoisting a pint as the Orthodox Celts take the stage. They’re chanting the chorus to one of the band’s most popular tunes, “The Drinking Song.”

This isn’t some Irish standard. “The Drinking Song” is straight from Belgrade. It whips the crowd of 20-somethings into what resembles a massive brawl. Though no one seems to mind.

“Maybe it’s a little bit weird, but when we say Irish music I really think of it as my music,” said lead singer Aleksandar Petrovic. On stage, he goes by the name Aca Celtic. Petrovic said Celtic and Serbian music have a lot in common. They share rhythms, and then there are the lyrics themselves.

“The themes that Irish people sing about have the same story, the same messages as our old ethno and folk songs, hard things that are interpreted in lyrics in so optimistic ways. And that’s something people in Serbia can recognize and find themselves in it. To talk about hard times but in some kind of, in a weird way, totally cheerful,” Petrovic said.

“Far Away” is just that sort of cheerful dark song. Petrovic said he wrote it imagining a man fleeing war in the former Yugoslavia. The man goes to the US in search of the American Dream. Instead he finds himself stuck and broke.

“When you think deeply about it, it’s not the story of a Serbian who went somewhere,” Petrovic said. “It’s also the story of an Irish immigrant who went to America. It’s also the story of any immigrant who went to America who never made alive his dream.”

While the Orthodox Celts draw lyrical inspiration from Serbia, Petrovic’s vocals do sound kind of Irish. Petrovic said it’s not intentional. He said a few years ago he received a letter from a professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois.

“He claimed the accent I am singing in is some kind of very rare north Dubliner accent, which I didn’t know, of course, and that was a real compliment from someone who knows what he’s talking about.”

But perhaps a bigger compliment for Petrovic is that the Orthodox Celts have inspired a few younger bands in Serbia to take up Celtic music.

Like the Irish’s Stew. The band is fronted by Bojan Petrovic, who’s 26. No relation to Aleksandar Petrovic. Tin whistle-player Bojan is also the Orthodox Celts’ newest member. When he first heard the band 10 years ago, he didn’t realize they were Serbian.

“It was really strange, and I was like, ‘Is there a possibility for someone to play that kind of music in Serbia – the music that I really like?’” Bojan Petrovic asked. “I could not believe it.”

To Aleksandar Petrovic, it’s not a huge leap. He said human experience, not nationality, is the heart of Irish music.

I don’t have to be Irish to be Irish. And of course, you don’t have to be Serbian to be Serbian. You just have to be a man, Petrovic said.

Americans won’t have to wait long to get a taste of the Orthodox Celts. The band plans to tour the US next year.

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