Personal
On Đurđevdan (St. George's Day) in 2005, he was baptised into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica (Немања Кустурица) in Savina monastery near Herceg Novi, Montenegro. To his critics who considered this the final betrayal of his Bosnian Muslim roots, he replied that:
| “ | My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks. | ” |
Kusturica has said that when his mother was on deathbed, he wanted to find out his ancestry; he found out from books that the origin of the Kusturica family stem from two Orthodox Christian lines. He traced his family origin before the conversion to Islam, to the Babić family, precisely to a Kusturica that helped build the Arslanagić bridge in the 18th century, that hailed from Bileća (He took the surname Kusturica when Islamized). Аccording to scholar Jevto Dedijer (1880-1918), when he researched the Bileća region (1902): the Kusturica family lived in a čopor (grouped area, literally "pack") in the village of Plana; they had 8 houses next to the Kozjak family (4 houses), northwest across a field from the Avdić family (23 houses). In Pandurica, there were 13 houses of the Avdić family and Kusturica family. In Granica, there was a Kusturica family that had left Plana 80 years earlier. An Avdić tale went that Avdija Krivokapić, an Islamized Montenegrin and progenitor of the Avdić family, had been honoured and enriched by the Sultan for his military service, and on the way home to Herzegovina, in Kyustendil, had bought a gypsy and brought him to Plana; this gypsy was allegedly an ancestor of the Kusturica family.
At the 2007 parliamentary elections, he gave indirect support to Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and his center-right Democratic Party of Serbia. In 2007, he also supported the Serbian campaign Solidarity - Kosovo is Serbia, a campaign against the unilateral separation of the Serbian province of Kosovo.
He is currently living in Drvengrad, Serbia, the village which he had built for his film Life Is a Miracle. Kusturica holds Serbian and French citizenships.
Kusturica received the Order of St. Sava, First Class, for his selfless care and presentation of the Serbian nation in the world, on May 12, 2012.
Read more about this topic: Emir Kusturica
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