How to get a visa, and a wedding
"Just remember: if ever you feel weighed down by the bureaucracy and often mundanity of modern life, don't fight the frustration. Let it be the catalyst for whimsy." - James Veitch
Bear with me. The first part of this newsletter details my problems in getting a visa, spiced up with a little historical and cultural background. Unless you’re up for the story of an ordeal with bureaucracy, it could be where I lose you. Please persevere - the second part is joyous and has more pictures: the wedding of our niece Ana.
I won’t blame you for skipping down to part two. But how the two parts are related will only be clear if you read part one!
Part 1: The Visa Process
Getting a visa was supposed to be easy. After all, I was married to a Serbian citizen (Olivera is a naturalized US citizen and holds dual passports). I was informed, before I came to Serbia, that I only needed to bring with me a certified copy of our colorful Galveston county marriage license.
No problem:
If I’d thought about it, requiring our US marriage license should have seemed a bit odd. After all, we were actually married first in Serbia, in a monastery on May 29, 2004. As a participant, I can verify that these Eastern Orthodox marriage ceremonies are powerful and moving events. We had a second wedding for my family a few months later, in July, 2004, in Galveston.
Flashback: Our Serbian Wedding
Our Serbian wedding was in Hopovo, an ancient monastery - very romantic and historic. Although Olivera is not religious, she’s always respected monasteries as the repositories of Serbian culture during the 500-year Ottoman occupation.
After the Ottomans invaded the Balkans in the 14th century, they tried to force conquered peoples to adopt the Muslim religion. The Ottoman conquerors were a fearsome bunch and destroyed many monasteries or converted them into mosques.
Northern Serbia (where we are) was never conquered by the Ottomans, although the invaders roamed freely throughout the territory, all the way to the gates of Vienna, Austria. Monasteries were often re-created in the north that were, essentially, duplicates of destroyed monasteries in the south.
Today, like most things Balkan, religions are a hodgepodge, yet most geographic regions have a tradition of being predominantly one sect. At the risk of vast oversimplication, Serbia itself is Eastern Orthodox, the westernmost countries like Croatia are Catholic, and Albania and half of Bosnia are Sunni Islam.
Flash forward to the present…
The ordeal began when we found out that the Serbian government does not recognize a church wedding as an official marriage. Whoa! That’s true separation of church and state.
Therefore, the first step in the visa process was to get our US marriage certified by the Serbian government’s marriage bureau. Certification requires an “apostille”, a term I’d never heard before in my life. I learned that an apostille is a certificate issued by the Secretary of State of one’s home state that authenticates a document for use outside the US. Typically, these are birth or death certificates, or some condition in between, like a marriage license (did you know Texas had a Secretary of State? I didn’t).
If you’re in Texas and need an apostille, here’s the link to the Secretary of State’s office of Authentication.
Folks, are you still reading? If your eyes are glazing over, feel free to skip down to part two and look at the pictures. Won’t hurt my feelings.
The upshot is, I had to send the Texas marriage certificate back to Texas, to the Secretary of State for an apostille, along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope and a check for $15. With no access to US stamps in Serbia, I had to lean on my son Will, a busy corporate lawyer who has better things to do. That interchange took a month, because the Secretary of State’s office was “backed up”, in their words (they also recorded the date of our marriage incorrectly, but fortunately no one noticed).
Another side note: the postal system is notoriously slow and unreliable between our two countries. I think it’s because Serbia is still on some kind of a US watch list, and all postal shipments must go through a customs inspection, which is also “backed up”. For example, my sister’s birthday card took over a month to get here.
FYI: the fastest and cheapest private courier is DHL, at $70 each way - and that’s a bargain, compared to FedEx and UPS, which charge up to 50% more.
Meanwhile, I had exceeded the 3 months allowed for an automatic tourist visa. Was I going to be deported? I had to get an intervening document showing my visa was “in process”. Not that anyone cared; I never had to show it.
So it was a joyous day when we finally got the license back, with apostille. And that led to the only interesting part, a trip to the Marriage Bureau office to get registered. It’s in a beautiful old building, the former residence of a wealthy citizen in the heart of Novi Sad’s old downtown:
Of course, the marriage bureau itself was in a dingy, cramped room in the back hall (was the clerk using a typewriter, or did I imagine that?). Nevertheless, it was fun walking up the grand staircase and through those marble halls.
From that point on, it was relatively quick ’n easy to get the visa itself.
Oh wait… first we had to get all documents translated by an official translator - in Cyrillic, of course - for a hefty additional charge. And then there were a couple more trips to the dreary police station, headquarters for most of the public’s unpleasant interactions with the state bureaucracy. On the first floor we waded through long lines of disgruntled people paying traffic and other fines, trudged up four flights of stairs and down a dark hallway painted institutional green and lined with broken chairs. There, outside Room 37, the line was shorter, but the cases were more complicated and took longer to resolve. I half expected to find myself sitting next to Franz Kafka, gloomily pondering his next story. We always seemed to arrive around 10, during the sacred time when the officials were taking their lengthy breakfasts.
On August 26, it finally happened: the visa was ready! We immediately celebrated where all good Serbs congregate: at a sidewalk cafe:
Part 2: Speaking of weddings and celebrations…
Below are a some pictures from our niece’s wedding celebration in July, delayed from last year because of Covid. The pictures were shot by Vasilije Bajilov of Novi Sad. Contact him through his website.
Like us, Ana and Ognjin held their ceremony in a monastery. Unlike us, they had somewhere between 170 and 190 guests - that’s a moderate-sized Serbian wedding - followed by a reception party in the outdoor garden of a Novi Sad restaurant. When the music began, and it got dark outside, things started to get wild…
Life has taken a bad, bad turn here in Texas lately. I'm okay, but whimsy is not possible. And I'll read this a bit later. Looking forward to the escape, actually. All best to you.