#morethanagame

 

Museum item: Roman board game accessories – tokens for playing.

Digital item: Pencil case with marbles from 1976.

Donor of digital item: Ivan Stančić*

My father’s goods (note from donor):
One of the first schools in New Belgrade was May 25th and one of the first students to attend this school was my dad. In 1957, my grandfather gave this pencil case to my dad for his first day of school. In 1994, my dad then passed it on to me for my first day at the same school, which was then called Duško Radović.

Inside it, instead of pencils, were his marbles; an exquisite dark green glass one, a pair of colorful porcelain ones and besides them a heavy, jumbo glass one. In the beginning I had no idea how to play marbles, all I knew was that I had to cry out “There is a “dzitranje”!

“Dzitranje” is when you shake your hand and then shoot out a marble, and since I did not have the power to thrown down a marble like that with my thumb, I would be automatically disqualified. Other rules like, “There are no Germans,” “There is no American”, “There is no shot before a roll …” – I was not interested in, because as long as there was a “dzitranje, if I used my big heavy glass marble it was not hard for me to beat any other player… Then I lost it to another kid.. This little wise guy who is still my neighbor today and now works in a Norwegian call centre after having studied Swedish for 5 years. With his salary he is supporting a wife and two children. It was 1995 when I asked dad to get another big marble. He didn’t know where he would even start looking for another one, so instead of a glass marble he brought me large ball bearings – kuglagers from the factory where he was working, which were used there for who knows what.

Kuglager was a metal ball, twice the weight of any of the glass marbles. “Dzitranje” from that moment on worked superbly in my favour. My kuglagar would smash all other marbles in its path including my old glass marble, which I no longer had interest in retrieving from my neighbor. From that moment on dad’s and my collection of marbles was greatly enriched from using these metal balls. I only used the jumbo metal ball, the other smaller ones that my dad brought from the factory I shared around. Until the day that the factory my father worked in blew up, with my father inside it. First I stopped with “dzitranje” and afterwards I did not play marbles at all. I did not hand them out, nor did I collect them. This pencil case with marbles usually adorns the window parapets wherever I move, and even today, upon reflection it seems to me that I cannot play without a “dzitranje”

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*More stories from the Stančić family scan the following items: