Sanja Ilić & Balkanika

Sanja Ilić & Balkanika was a Serbian ethno group from Belgrade, led by the composer Aleksandar Sanja Ilić (born 27 March 1951 in Belgrade, died 7 March 2021 in Belgrade). Its young musicians played old Balkan instruments, among them the kaval, džumbuš, tapan, darbuka, saz, oud and gadulka, beside a rock band line-up, and Ilić described its mission as preserving, reviving and modernising Serbian medieval and Byzantine musical traditions.

Ilić had long been a hit composer: he formed the rock band San in the 1970s, wrote songs for Yugoslav stars and composed "Halo, halo", with which Aska represented Yugoslavia at Eurovision 1982. At the end of the 1990s he started looking for completely new music inspired by the melodies of Serbia and the Balkans, and the name Balkanika came from his brother, Dragoljub Ilić of Generacija 5. The first album, Balkan 2000, was recorded mostly in Ilić's home studio with more than 90 musicians, including the St. George strings and the RTS choir, was given to PGP and became a best seller. It also inspired the RTS television show Ostrvo Balkan.

The group's first official concert was on 26 June 2000 at the Lent festival in Maribor, and over the years Balkanika gave more than 500 concerts on every continent: Shanghai in 2001, a tour of Mexico in 2002, Lahore in 2005 and the opera houses of Cairo and Alexandria in 2008. On 21 September 2005 they played Putem Teslinih misli at Belgrade's Kalemegdan fortress with a choir and a symphony orchestra, released on DVD in 2006.

The second album, Balkan koncept, brought a new version of Ilić's "Plava ptica", and Ceeepaj (2009) moved towards a Balkan brass sound, with a brass band joining and 24 musicians on stage; it included a cover of "Maljčiki" by Idoli. From 2014, with producer Boris Krstajić and the group's first male singer, Mladen Lukić, Balkanika turned towards pop rock and recorded the English-language album Stand Up, released in 2020; its song "Don't Cry" also became "Za kraj" in Serbian.

In 2018 Balkanika won Beovizija and represented Serbia at the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon with "Nova deca". The same year they won both the audience and the jury prize at the Ohrid Troubadours festival, and in January 2019 "Nova deca" brought them the best ethno group award at the MAC Music Awards Ceremony. The group came to an end when Sanja Ilić died in 2021.