Red flowers bloom all through Serbian folk songs. In „Crven cvete“ the flower is never just a flower. It is a way of saying what is hard to say directly.
A symbol, not a decoration
In traditional Serbian songs, red is the color of life, love and youth, and also of sacrifice. A red flower can stand for a beloved girl, for a young life, for a heart, or for memory. Singers in the villages often spoke to a flower, a bird or a river instead of speaking openly to a person.
That is why so many of these songs begin by addressing nature, as „Crven cvete“ does, and only slowly reveal the feeling behind the words.
How we sing it
In our arrangement, the voices answer one another the way women once sang together at gatherings and in the fields. The children in Zlatni Vezić and Zlatne Niti learn songs like this one first by their melody, and then by what the flower in them really means.