Ćana

Ćana is a Serbian folk singer, born Stanojka Bodiroža in March 1968 in the village of Gornja Tramošnja near Sanski Most. She went to primary school in Tomina and to an agricultural high school in Sanski Most, and already as a child she sang at school shows and local events. Her parents had lost three children before her and gave her the name Stanojka by an old custom; as she tells it, she stopped answering to Stanojka and Stana, and people began calling her Ćana.

Her career began when she was nineteen, singing in a kafana in Subotica, where she was a bartender and sang songs of Vesna Zmijanac and Šemsa Suljaković. A band from Novi Sad took her on tour around Vojvodina and Montenegro, and in 1989 she toured Belgium, Sweden and Denmark with a folk ensemble from Titograd. During the Yugoslav Wars she worked abroad, in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Canada.

In 1998 she recorded her first album, Nadam ti se, whose title song became one of her biggest hits. In 2000 she recorded "Brat i sestra" with Sinovi Manjače. Her albums since are Imam dokaz in 2002, Nedostižna meta in 2004, Dođi, sine in 2007, Mostovi in 2010, Biće svega in 2013, Kad zatreperi duša in 2015 and Kako to in 2017.

At the Moravski biseri festival she won with "Božić" in 2008 and with "Teške godine" in 2012, and at the Lira festival of new folk songs in 2011 she took the award for stage performance with "Rođena u znaku čekanja". She also won an award at Zlatni melos.

On 20 October 2001 she married Dragan Mitrović Relja, and the couple moved from Doboj to Belgrade; their son Luka was born in 2003. Ćana is known above all as a singer at weddings and celebrations, where her song "Moj rođeni" became a favourite and her unusual arrivals have spread online. Her one unfulfilled wish, she has said, is a solo concert of her own, ideally at the Sava Centar.