Now (march 2023*) I got to read the sequence of events as they were. Yesterday Tito went to visit Gadafi, so the whole top gathered to wish him farewell, on the military airport in Batajnica. When he left, they split, and Džemal Bijedić flew with a Learjet to Sarajevo, where he was to attend a session of the central committee of the bosnian Party. „At 10:54 the airplane lost connection with flight control in Sarajevo and Belgrade, and according to findings of the committee for finding the cause of the accident, by pilot error or instrument malfunction the airplane veered 6km off the route provided by procedure, after which, because of lowered height of flight below the prescribed for this sector the accident occurred --- it hit the Inač mountain, near the Bjelovići village, by Kreševo.“
The version which circulated as soon as today was that the black box was found, and that the recording has a clear „now let me drive a little“. We were always fast to crack a joke.
These years I don't really remember where we went in the evenings. In the summer it was mostly the terrace of the hotel, but in the winter... what came after the once disco was in some big room in an old building at the end of the main street, which didn't last long, perhaps only the winter 74/5, and Sleš was the deejay. We were pals for quite a while already, even Arpi told him the story of the spirits/ghosts (same word in serbian) of the old place. There he hid behind the hung coats, of which there was a lot, because many didn't want to bother with the wardrobe, and waited. When it was all over, he came out, and took the pickup off the record player, and walked out. Sleš was convinced it was ghosts, as he was positive that he did lock the cabin door. Sure he did, on his way out, but not every time he went for a pee.
They charged admission, with a simple rule - if you want in, you pay, and any stories that you just went out to buy cigarettes and are coming back simply didn't work. Scratch for some if you run out, or if you want some fresh air (as they ramped up the heating, had one of those tall oil furnaces and ran them hot), there's the backyard. And there it was, nothing much, a walled around place of perhaps 3x6 meters on the wider end, less than 2m on the narrow, and on the other side of the long wall was the churchyard (orthodox). There's some rule to the positioning of such a church, its apsida must point east, if I remember correctly. The lot doesn't have to be parallel with its walls, but in this case it almost was, and then the street bends there to follow that, and on the other side the main street also bends to follow the river, so the church and this house were on either side of the corner, yet adjacent. We could peek over the wall whenever we wanted, it wasn't too tall, and so it happened that one evening there was a procession, perhaps forty people led by a priest dangling his smokepot and a guy with a banner hung on a large death sign... whatever they were doing, and why were doing it near midnight in a winter night, nobody cared. Someone just shouted „look, they're running around the church!“, and all of a sudden we all started pretending that we're watching a formula one race, rooting for this or that guy.
But that gig ended and then we didn't have a place where everybody will be. Part of the scene moved into the new, as if, disco bar in the hotel basement. The space is still there, but just as a spacious hall leading to the anterooms of the toilets, made so when the hotel was pushing for the third star.
At the time someone did run a disco there, not Sleš nor any of his two predecessors, possibly Trle but I wouldn't know - the crowd and smoke were so thick there that the waiters barely managed to pass the drinks. I never even saw where the deejay's stuff was, let alone who he was.
There's a legend that some managed to fuck in there, on (or under) a pile of coats in some corner, and I believe it to be true. It's impossible that it never crossed anyone's mind, and it was quite feasible.
The place was nicknamed The Hole.
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* prompted by someone on burundi, after I posted, in the „istorijski fragmenti“ theme, the story of 02-XI-1993., „Give some short stripe of the dax when Džemal Bijedić died“. With the same kind of typo.