Who is Silvana Armenulic, Zdravkovic's love in the movie "Toma"?

silvana armenulic toma zdravkovic
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Have you heard of Silvana Armenulic or did that name first come out of the "fog" when you watched the movie "Toma"?

I heard about the name Silvana Armenulic when I was a child, from the stories of my mother, while she tells how my grandfather went on a business trip to Belgrade, so she and her brother brought her a Deep Purple record, but she will not leave out honor yourself - with a record by Silvana Armenulic, his favorite singer. And while that young and rock and roll generation then grows up today, a generation of wide and diverse senses for music genres, regardless of personal preferences, each of us has heard but also recognizes and sings the verses "my heart beats" and "what will my life without you dear ".

 

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Stories of successes, tragedies and absurdities have always followed the lives of pop artists, both then and now. Knowing the sadness of Toma Zdravkovic, the arrogance of Silvana Armenulic, the spontaneous directness of Lepa Lukic and the joking openness of Tozovac through the latest biographical Balkan hit film "Toma", a new intrigue arises for the new generations - who were these characters really?

 

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So who was Silvana Armenulic?

Here is some interesting information that is not shown in the movie "Thomas".

Who is Silvana? She is Zilha.

An ethnic Muslim woman born Zilha Bajraktarevic in Doboj, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, she was the third of thirteen children in a Bosnian Muslim family. Her father, Mehmed Bajraktarevic, owned a local patisserie and was a bohemian, from whom she, she says, inherited her voice.

Zilha had a brother named Hajrudin, who died about two weeks after being bitten by a dog in the 1940s. After her brother's death, her father finds solace in alcohol and loneliness, neglecting his family and his business. After her father's patisserie closes, the family suffers a lot, and Zilha will start singing at a young age. Some of her earliest memories were of her father's absence and World War II, when mother Hajria and children were hiding in the basement of Ustasha troops.

Silvana and her father

Bajraktarevic started singing at an early age. As a child, she sang to her father as she sat on his lap. But when she considered pursuing a professional singing career, he resisted and did not support her.

One day he would return home after an evening drink, and waving his hand would say, “Go! "If you really want to be a singer, go." Nurturing the musical talent continuously throughout the school years, by the time she reached the eighth grade, all interest in the school was lost and she was celebrated as a singer in a local pub.

Thomas and the park bench

On a cold night in Leskovac in the spring of 1958, Armenulic was walking through the park before performing in the garden of the Hisar restaurant at the hotel, when he saw a young man sleeping on a bench. That is Toma Zdravkovic. She approaches him, wakes him up, sits down next to him and starts a conversation. She asked, “Where are you from? "What are you doing?", And he told her that he was from the village and that he had come to the city looking for work. Unable to find work, he fell asleep on the bench, broken without a way to pay for a home ticket. Armenulic, wanting to help him, takes him to his performance, and at one point even hands him the microphone.

According to "For company in a man", written by journalist Aleksandar Gajovi., Silvana was surprised to hear Toma sing, and then begged the hotel manager to help Toma find work. Toma started singing with her, and later she provided him with his own record, after which he started recording on his own and went on tour. Later, he inadvertently retaliated by giving her a legendary song, and the two became legends of the former Yugoslavia.

Seven years of love… and infidelity

Bajraktarevic met her husband, tennis player Radmilo Armenulic, in 1959 when she sang at the Grand Casino in Belgrade. They were married two years later, on October 26, 1961, and their daughter Gordana was born on January 13, 1965. After seven years of marriage, Radmilo allegedly cheated on Armenulic with her close friend, the singer Lepa Lukic, after which Silvana will then record the song called "Seven Years of Love".

She and her husband were believed to have divorced, although many years later, Radmilo discovers that they only divorced, but remained legally married until her death.

Between marriage and family…

Armenulic was a Muslim and her husband Radmilo was a Serb, making their marriage ethnically mixed in a multiethnic Yugoslavia. Radmilo's mother, Gordana, disapproved of the marriage, as did Armenulic's father, Mehmed, who even refused to talk to his daughter. In fact, Armenulic was not allowed to enter his home until his death in 1965, when she returned to Doboj for his funeral.

 

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The real Baba Vangja

In the last few years of her life, Armenulic became more and more obsessed with researching her own destiny, so much so that she learned everything she could about astrology, telepathy, and talked to self-proclaimed prophets. At the beginning of August 1976, just two months before her death, when she was on tour in Bulgaria, she decided to take the opportunity to meet the mystical Baba Vangja.

The meeting is unpleasant. Vangja, who was blind, just sat and looked out the window with her back to Armenulic. She did not speak. After a long time, Vangja finally spoke: "Nothing. You do not have to pay. I do not want to talk to you. Not now. "Go and come back in three months." As Armenulic turned and walked towards the door, Vangja cut her: "Wait. In fact, you will not be able to come. Go, go. "If you can come back in three months, do it." Silvana sees this as confirmation that she will die and left Vanga's home in tears.

After Armenulic's death, friends said she was often worried about her fate. In October 1971, Silvana had a car accident that nearly took her life, and which is indisputably reminiscent of the tragedy that actually took her life five years later. Three months after the accident, she said: "I am very pessimistic. I'm afraid of life. The future. What will happen tomorrow. "I'm afraid that, for me, there may not be tomorrow…".

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