Viktor Lazić befriended pirates, crossed thousands of kilometers in a Lada Niva, and spent 15 years traveling. His literary works are not the fruit of imagination but the result of real adventures that erase all boundaries between the real and the literary world.

Viktor Lazić is a travel writer, an untiring traveler, and an explorer of the world around us, a lawyer, and the founder of the Museum of Books and Travel “Adligat.” His books breathe with adventure, personal experiences, and deep reflections on the places, people, and cultures he encountered on his journeys.

His life is full of extraordinary experiences – he befriended pirates in Sumatra, sat with kings and sultans, spent nights on the street with beggars, and crossed incredible routes from London to Vladivostok and from Norway to Iraq in a legendary Lada Niva.

Viktor revealed to us what guides him when choosing his next destination, where he has already spent fifteen years, the beginnings of his literary work, how he views literature today, and where the core of his authenticity lies.

When did you first feel the need to write and what did the beginning look like?

– I wrote my first lines as a child, I was six or seven years old. I mostly wrote poems and plays. I published my first travelogue in a high school magazine about Ephesus, by which I was sincerely fascinated. After traveling to Thailand when I was 18, I knew that the travelogue form would define my life. Since then, I have published more than a thousand travel texts and nine books. I have traveled through about a hundred countries on six continents, spending a total of about fifteen years on the road.

How do you decide on the themes you will cover in your works?

– I often feel that themes find me. Sometimes I am fascinated by people and their life stories, sometimes by nature or historical monuments. Everything that sincerely inspires and moves me, I want to share with others. I consider it a special blessing that on my travels—thanks to the Museum of Books and Travel that I lead, but also my legal profession and the work I do in international relations—I have the opportunity to meet exceptional artists, professors, and people who participated in the creation of their states and world-important projects. My travelogues are thus enriched with deeper knowledge and subtle threads of art, existence, and the past that I absorb during these friendships, as well as visits to a large number of museums and historical sites.

You are known for your long, adventurous journeys – which destination changed you the most?

– I love volcanoes, deserts, and jungles, but also landscapes of eternal snow and ice. Every journey changes me; on each one, I learn and develop my personality. Befriending pirates in Sumatra taught me that people on the other side of the law are not monsters but caring parents. In Greenland, I toasted with the Inuit (Eskimos) with a cup full of seal blood; on the island of Sulawesi in Sumatra, they served me rat and dog meat, but the most disgusting thing was eating semi-formed duck fetuses in the Philippines. No insects, snakes, or bats on a plate can compare to that. I have sat at the table with kings, sultans, princes, and ministers, and then, sometimes even the next day, spent the night on the street with beggars. This taught me to value the essence, to respect and love diversity. I no longer feel repulsed; now I respect and understand. Every day on a journey is an accelerated existence – what doesn’t happen in an average static life in a year, happens in a few days on a journey. Every day and every encounter affects my identity, so I could even say that I am the sum of all my travels. They have conquered me so much that I now always feel as if I am traveling, even when I am in Belgrade – for me, it is just a station on the journey of life, equal to Vladivostok, Jakarta, or Panama City.

How do you choose your next destination – does instinct, inspiration, or research guide you?

– Travels choose me, and not I them, just like the themes I write about. I have spent my whole life reading about different countries and peoples. Reading and traveling – those are two sides of the same coin, different manifestations of the same acquisition of knowledge. Instinct leads me on journeys. Often, I suddenly feel the urge to go to a certain place, seemingly for no reason. I have never been wrong in following that instinct; on the contrary, that is how I encountered inexplicable wonders. Of course, instinct, inspiration, and research are an inseparable package of travel. Through reading, I have accumulated knowledge that is useful when instinct kicks in, because I know at least a little something about almost every corner of the planet.

How do travels influence your literary expression?

– Travels are my literary expression. Although it is the orphan of Serbian literature, the travelogue as a genre offers unseen possibilities. Everything can fit into it – the inner world and feelings, even poetry, descriptions of nature, historical landmarks, descriptions of encounters and experiences, psychological states of both my own and other people, even entire nations, endless associations, and autobiographical reminiscences – from one’s own childhood to the imagination and visions that flare up in certain places, such as the beauty of nature; there is a place for everything in a travelogue. It is unbelievable to me that in Serbia there has been no writer who completely dedicated himself to the travelogue form in the same way I do. Most of our best travel writers became so by accident, when life took them to other regions and they decided to write it down; thus, they did not travel to write, but wrote because they traveled. Furthermore, they engaged in travel writing only briefly; they did not dedicate their whole life, or even a significant part of it, to it. In the opuses of, for instance, Crnjanski or Andrić, even though the travelogue as a genre reached its peak, it is actually only an episode in their overall work.

Have you found yourself in a dangerous situation during a journey, and how did you react?

– I was unjustly imprisoned in South Ossetia for about ten days; in Iraq, they shot at me and a bullet shattered the headlight of my Lada. I have been robbed at least a hundred times. I have had stomach issues on journeys dozens of times, and there were more serious physical injuries – on Iceland, the ligaments in my leg on a rocky field; in Egypt, I strained my spinal vertebrae, it’s possible I had a fracture but there was no doctor anywhere to confirm it. In one desert, I experienced a terrible kidney stone attack, but even under the greatest pain, I visited archaeological sites. My journeys always last long; I rarely head outside of Serbia for less than a month, so it is no surprise that this carries many troubles that are somehow always at the epicenter of media interest, although accidents are actually a small percentage of the time spent.

Which place has remained in your most beautiful memory and why?

– I do not like superlatives, and when someone insists, I always link the best and worst things to my own country. It makes little sense to get to know the planet if we do not know ourselves, our roots, our people, and our state. Nowhere else in the world have I been bombed or threatened with being slaughtered in the name of God, as happened to me in Metohija. But nowhere else in the world have I felt spirituality woven from beauty as in Dečani, Gračanica, Manasija, and Studenica.

In a Lada Niva, you crossed a path thousands of kilometers long from London to Vladivostok and from Norway to Iraq; how did you come up with those ideas and would you repeat similar journeys? Do you already have a next route?

– I would repeat the route immediately, and probably one much longer and crazier than I have done before, because more experience and knowledge, as well as advanced technology, offer much greater possibilities. I came to the idea spontaneously – I wanted to go somewhere, I had no money for hotels, and if I travel by car, I can spend the night in the vehicle. The path imposed itself; at that moment, it was one of the few safe car routes without excessive bureaucratic obstacles for entry by car. The inflatable doll I carried with me then, Mileva, became a TV star in some countries, and I would gladly take her around the world again.

How do you see the role of the writer in modern society?

– Writers are the sharpened senses of a people – the eyes, ears, and touch of a nation. Writers are the closest kin, friends, and neighbors. Teachers and doctors of the soul. That role is permanent and unchangeable, equally in ancient and modern society. Only the media differ – whether we write on papyrus or read on a screen – and the quality of the writer-teacher and doctor. It is somewhat frightening that robots and artificial intelligence are already among writers. I read somewhere that artificial intelligence is better than natural stupidity, and I agree with that. It is sad that modern programs already write better than most writers, but that does not speak poorly of the programs, but of our writers. Professor Mihailo Pantić told me: “Viktor, at least artificial intelligence knows grammar.”

What drives you to continue writing and exploring the world?

– Curiosity to learn and experience something new, along with the belief that what I do has meaning because it will be shared with others. I never travel alone; with me is my whole country and all my readers. I immortalize the people and places I encounter – I am aware that many significant stories and historical data would be lost forever if I hadn’t, often by chance, found myself in the right place at the right time and written down what I learned and observed. In the middle of the Sudanese desert, before a large stone emerging from the sand, I felt nostalgia for home. Verses began to flow, so I wrote:

Under a stone I found – Serbia.

“How come you are here, my native land?

“I came with you,

on your back,

in your eyes.

It is not you who travels, my faithful son,

It is I who travels, your Serbia.”

Can you tell us more about your new book of travelogues, “Good Souls of Sudan” – how did the idea arise, what are the main motifs and messages you want to convey to readers?

– I crossed eight thousand kilometers from the far north to the far south of Sudan and fell in love with the Sudanese desert and those proud, brave, and honest people who taught me what hospitality means. Four and a half thousand years of a turbulent past about which the world knows little were brought closer to me by the good-natured Sudanese, who still shine in my soul like stars over the wide, endless desert. The book was created in one breath, at the beginning of a new civil war that displaced most Sudanese, as a thanks to the people I met there and whom I consider the best people on the planet, but also as a reflection of admiration for cultural treasures that are peerless. Eight years have passed since my journey through Sudan, yet it seems to me as if I never left that country. Now, 20 million refugees and 3 million malnourished children are scattered in the desert, while all schools and most hospitals have been closed for two years. One of the greatest tragedies on the planet since World War II is currently taking place in Sudan. Professor Dr. Darko Tanasković, an oriental philologist, Islamologist, and diplomat, a man of indisputable expertise and my role model, compared my Sudanese experiences and descriptions with the travelogues of Rastko Petrović and Zuko Džumhur. I am not sure how much I deserved such praise, but my Sudanese certainly deserved it – the people whose destinies I describe, as well as the extraordinary history of their country, which on several occasions was the center of world civilization.

“Before us is the whole and entire Sudan. Through Lazić’s vivid descriptions of stages and stops on the journey through Sudan, we receive a true wealth of data about the past and present of this great country which history did not treat kindly… Every writer knows how important, and not at all easy, it is to find an appropriate and eloquent title for their work. Viktor Lazić has achieved a total success in that regard. The partnership of good souls and a brilliant travel writer represents the most harmonious co-author synergy,” wrote Darko Tanasković in the book review.

Kristina Ljubisavljević

Source: Večernje novosti

Photo: private archive, Viktor Lazić

Viktor Lazić – Adligat,

Source: P.U.L.S.E

P.U.L.S.E World edition

  Pulse, Travel, Viktor Lazić – Adligat