This small work (only 35 cm high) is one of my greatest works. I even won the second prize at the sculpture competition in 1993 in Lipik, where the Germans built a new neighborhood after the town had been destroyed in the war. I got a large sum of money, some 1500 German marks, which was around ten monthly wages then. Ivan Kožarić was a member of the jury and the first prize went to my professor Marija Ujević, while the other professors didn’t win anything. After the award ceremony in Lipik, Igor Zlobec and I went to Prekopakra, a village where we threw a terrific party for the entire village. This is a well-known village between Lipik and Pakrac that didn’t fall into the hands of Četniks, and I remember meeting a man whose head was half-blown by a grenade, but he was nevertheless very vivacious. On our way back, we partied some more with the soldiers from Jordan on the border of the then UNPA zone, who thought I was a king because I told them how one of my relatives was the midwife to Muammar al-Gaddafi’s children. Later, we barely managed to get back home alive in our old Yugo and the next day we were already on our way to Venice to visit my friends Robert Sošić, Damir Tripar, and Ljiljana Vlačić.
