The Black Rose

There is hardly a person under 50 who has not heard of the most famous sect of the ex-Yugoslavia (and beyond), the mythical Black Rose, an alleged Satanic secret organization that engages in a wide range of activities - from ritual suicides to desecration of cemeteries, from animal sacrifices to listening to Punk Rock and Death Metal, drug use and orgies - and all in the glory of the Evil One who is hungry for the fragile and innocent souls of teenagers.

Non-existent but omnipresent, when it comes to Black Rose, it is always about `knowing` about sectarian activities at first hand, a friend of the mother-in-law of the neighbor's wedding party told how a high school student got lost somewhere after a long-term experience in Black Rose...However, all roads to the beginnings of this cult-status Cult lead to Zagreb. There are several versions of the emergence of the elusive sect, and they are all fascinating in their own way.

One version is that the most distant trace of the term Crna Ruža (Black Rose) led to a café of the same name in Zagreb, sometime around the time Tito died, and at that time there was an infestation of metalheads, punks, and other sectarians who, dressed shockingly and scandalously, frequented the Crna Ruža café, a name that later became a symbol of blackness, cemeteries, listening to opaque vinyl records, and yellow candles. The moral citizenry was disturbed by such a place where their children gathered and sold their souls to the devil en masse. It was allegedly located in a basement room (logically, underground, closer to Hades)...The fate of the catering facility that bore that name is unknown; some claimed that it collapsed during the `Homeland War`, and some that the cult café was eaten up by the transition... at least that is one of the theories about the origin of the sect.

Another version talks about a heavy metal band called Crna Ruža, formed in the late seventies and early eighties in Zagreb and fronted by Nancy, a young female vocalist. The media at that time created an umbrella term for all new manifestations of anti-social behavior coming from the rotten West (Punk, Metal, New Wave, Post Punk, Hard Rock) at that time. That term was ``Darkers'', probably because of the black color that prevailed in the dress code of the fans of the aforementioned trends. The band and Nancy had limited success with gigs in second-rate clubs and allegedly later, under the burden of unfulfilled dreams, drugs, alcohol and sex - Nancy committed suicide by jumping from the eighth floor, which gave rise to the legend of the suicidal norm that the members of Crna Ruža had to fulfill. The Black Rose was promoted from a metal band into a sect through the media of the time and the rest is history...

A third version is that of the UDBA, a ubiquitous and unfortunately existing organization that, in an attempt to preserve the tradition of socialist self-government of the working class of Yugoslavia from the constant threats of Western influence, invented the story and through its media exponents placed it among the public. All this was helped by Nancy's suicide, which was used to create the suicide myth. A fourth variant tells of the famous adventurer and host of a dubious talk show, Željko Malnar, who was allegedly the founder of the Black Rose. Željko was the owner of a cafe (or pub!?) where alternative youth gathered, whom he recruited for membership in the Black Rose. One of the members was Nancy, who in this version was not a band singer but just a metalhead, the daughter of a high-ranking JNA officer who, in his socialist realist rigidity, forbade his daughter from associating with dubious characters and listening to bad music.

Since the teenager was stubborn, smoked, drank, had a bunch of aces on her head (and maybe lice) - the officer decided on a dramatic step - he locked Nancy in the apartment. After some time, Nancy, closed and isolated, went crazy, as they say, and threw herself from the eighth floor. Radio Rumor was the main news broadcaster at the time, so in the Zagreb area, the hysteria around Crna Ruža reached its peak after Nancy's suicide when a furious crowd of worried believers noticed a priest dressed in a black robe coming out of  a car. Who knows why, that situation seemed to them to be somehow `sectarian` and the people beat up the priest, thinking he was `Darker`...and he was neither guilty nor obliged, he was just wearing a black priest's uniform! This was not the only attack on an employee in the church ranks, and there were similar attacks on other people who wore black clothing...

The fifth clue leads to Zagreb Satanist and `Nepo baby` Aleksandar Miles, a red-bourgeois kid who is known for organizing the theft of thousands of rare books from the National University Library in Zagreb, worth millions of marks at the time, which were later smuggled and sold to private collections in Austria and Germany. It is said that the Black Rose was a criminal, not a religious, organization that Miles founded and developed as a network for the theft and smuggling of rare books, although over time the group reoriented itself to other lucrative fields, such as drug trafficking, for example. Miles was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison along with part of the group. After a failed escape attempt in which Miles even managed to take a cop hostage, the Satanist fell into depression and committed suicide in 1994. The group allegedly survived after the death of its leader and even developed into a significant factor in the criminal underworld in the Balkans, and the murders disguised as suicides during criminal encounters, together with the Satanism of the perpetrator, were the reason for the birth of the media story about a sect called the Black Rose...

The six hundred and sixty-sixth version accuses the church of being the organizer of the Black Rose myth. In an attempt to scare the flock and return the youth to the right path, a group of Catholic priests hired several godly journalists to publish stories about the presence of the devil on the streets of Zagreb and beyond, hoping that the youth would be horrified by the wave of alleged suicides caused by the unbridled lifestyle and general immorality, and their parents would have a new `Baba Roga` with which will scare their children. Later, these stories, following the principle of `broken telephone`, spread throughout all ex-Yu countries, where they are still present in the printed media and internet portals. That the road to hell is not paved with black roses but with good intentions is best evidenced by the fact that today almost every suicide of a person under 30 years of age in any of the ex-Yu countries must be associated with a Black Rose in at least one media outlet, a testament to the durability of mass hallucination, to the need for a hidden enemy lurking in the darkness and who, although diabolical - will take upon himself all the parental and systemic sins that led a young person to take his own life...

(Roger Mortis, 068)