"Oh, look at that papak!” is a phrase quite often heard in Sarajevo. It appears to be very well integrated into the Sarajevo vocabulary. But who is ‘papak’? Considering that in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian the word papak means a hoof (as in a pig’s hoof), the phrase would definitely not seem to be an expression of extreme politeness.
Is the Papak a Peasant?
Who is a papak? Mostly it is used to describe someone wearing a leather jacket, golden jewelry and, sometimes, (black) shoes with white socks. Some may add that papak is someone who drives around in a car with very loud music (local folk music, of course). Or as Zvonko, a 28-year-old student from Sarajevo simply explains: "a papak is usually someone who does not have normal city manners.”
When it comes to papak, according to Zvonko, it’s all about the sort of thinking and manners that could be described as "primitive.” In practice, however, newcomers to Sarajevo society are also often deemed to be papak. Such emigrants are usually coming from other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Sandzak region (the predominantly Muslim area stretching across the Serbia-Montenegro border). However, papak can be also someone born in Sarajevo.
The word papak can be used interchangeably with the word for peasant (seljak). Yet as Igor, another student from Sarajevo explains, a papak is not really a peasant because of his way of living, but a peasant because of his primitivism. (Unfortunately, peasants seem to be always at the bottom of the social hierarchy.)
Also, Feđa, a young graduate thinks that it is not correct to connect the phrase papak with a seljak, since "a peasant is a person who lives honorably in a village.” He adds that a papak is someone who is "behaving impolite and inconsiderately. A papak is also someone who is a jerk and an imbecile, one who doesn’t know how to behave and to speak. The papak is one who, by his behavior, wants to show to others that he is dominating, one who goes to a bar and spits, screams and smashes the glasses to the floor. A papak is someone who is not behaving appropriately.”
Feđa also mentions that everyone has his own papak.
Being Different
All this having been said, it appears that the notion of papak is tightly connected to the norms that are valid in a certain group. Emir, a 21-year-old law student, explains that in Sarajevo everything that involves stepping out from a certain daily routine can be referred to as ‘papanian’ (papansko). It can therefore happen that when somebody, for example, goes to an exhibition his friends would say: "look at that papak, what will you do there?! Oh, what a peasant, look at him, he is going to the exhibition!” Yet isn’t going to an exhibition usually part of an urban lifestyle, and in this way represents something of a city norm?
It also seems that the word papak says something about the set of values that are prevailing today in Sarajevo. Some locals say that there has been a certain shift in the value system in Bosnia-Herzegovina and more broadly in Southeastern Europe in general. Hence, not only does the alleged papak not have the usual ‘city manners’, but these manners today in Sarajevo mean something other than in, for example, Vienna. Most of all, they mean something different than they had meant before the war.
Therefore, the point seem not to be really so much as regards city manners, but in the fact that a person referred to as papak does not match the particular norms of the person using this word.
Further, Emir explains that papak can be anyone who does not fit in with some group. Thus, even though the context in which papak appears is complex and flexible, it can be said that the main intention of using this word is always the same: to mark a person who is different than the one using this word.
One anecdote retold by Zvonko explains all of this in simpler terms. A guy named Bruno from Sarajevo and his group of friends went to the Croatian seaside for holidays. There they got acquainted with one Chinese tourist. While hanging out together, Bruno and his friends were explaining to him some events from Sarajevo; since they used the word papak very frequently, they had to explain what kind of person they actually were referring to by this word. In the end, the Chinese fellow had to prove that he understood who is papak. He thus took out a paper and wrote something in Chinese letters. Aware that Bruno did not understand Chinese, the tourist explained what he had written. It said: ‘BRUNO IS NOT PAPAK!’