Jordan Nikolić

Jordan Nikolić was a Serbian folk singer, remembered above all as an interpreter of the traditional Serbian songs of Kosovo and Metohija. He was born on 11 May 1933 in Prizren, Kosovo, and died on 26 April 2018 in Belgrade. His father Marko, whose family came from the Sredačka župa, played the gusle, and his older brother Rade became a poet and writer.

He finished primary school and grammar school in Prizren, where he also went to music school and studied solo singing, and he later graduated in Yugoslav literature and Serbo-Croatian at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. His first success came in the mid-1950s in his home town, where he took first place singing "Buongiorno tristezza". Singing Neapolitan songs for Pristina at a contest of Serbian towns, he won again and was nicknamed "Jordan Napolitanac".

He made his first recordings for Radio Pristina in 1961 and for Radio Belgrade in 1968, with Duško Radetić's sextet, and went on to sing with the Great Folk Orchestra of Radio Belgrade. His first record, for PGP RTB, was of Greek songs, among them "Zašto nisam ptica", and in 1968 he recorded "Ovih dana reče meni Jana" as a duet with Danica Obrenić. From then on he sang only folk songs from Kosovo, many of them from the collections of the ethnomusicologist Miodrag Vasiljević, and with Mara Đorđević he sought out old songs and saved many from being forgotten.

Turning down a job at Radio Belgrade, he went back south and worked for 18 years as an editor in the music programme of Radio Pristina. In 1976 he sang "Tvoje ruke su miran san" at Jugovizija in Opatija, and at the Akordi Kosova festival in Pristina he sang a duet with Nexhmije Pagarusha. In 1979 the family moved to Belgrade, where he worked at the Vuk Karadžić cultural centre and then, until he retired in 1996, as a journalist and proofreader for the newspaper and radio station Goša. He sang across Yugoslavia and Europe, and at the Days of Yugoslavia in the Soviet Union he was called back for an encore of "Večernji zvon" in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow.

His albums include Razgranala grana jorgovana (1982), Simbil cveće (1998), the three-CD Zapisano u vremenu (2007) and Srpske pesme sa Kosova (2009). Radio Belgrade keeps 73 of his recordings of 59 songs, and the last one he made for it, "Udade se Jagodo", became his best-known. Other favourites are "Oj, golube, moj golube", "Oj, devojko dušo moja" and "Marijo, deli, bela kumrijo". In 1997 his "Usnila je divan sanak" won the folk music evening of the festival in Banja Luka.

Jordan Nikolić received the December Award of Kosovo (1973), the Estrada awards of Serbia (1978) and Yugoslavia (1981) and a lifetime achievement charter from the city of Niš (2005), and in 2019 the President of Serbia posthumously awarded him a gold medal for preserving traditional music. In April 2023 the RTS National Orchestra gave a concert in his memory at Radio Belgrade, titled "Orpheus from Prizren".