A Prayer in Serbian

MAY 15 2007 · 12:00

Marija Šerifović · "Molitva" · Serbia · 2007 Placement: 1st · Language: Serbian · Composers: Vladimir Graić, Saša Milošević Mare · Venue: Hartwall Arena · Host: Helsinki, Finland · Type: national debut · Broadcast: HD On the same night that Verka Serduchka stomped through 'Dancing Lasha Tumbai', a very different performance won the 2007 contest. Marija Šerifović walked onto the Hartwall stage in a dark suit, surrounded by five female backing singers also dressed in suits — an unusually austere visual for a late-2000s Eurovision — and sang 'Molitva', a Serbian-language ballad whose title translates as 'Prayer'. There were no costume changes, no dancers, no pyro. The staging rested entirely on vocal performance and on the quiet visual statement of a queer-coded, non-glamorous female artist backed by an all-female group in menswear. Šerifović's voice was unusually powerful, gospel-inflected, with a lower chest register than most Eurovision female leads of the era. The song built slowly, folding in Balkan melodic intervals beneath its pop-ballad frame. When the votes came in — under a revised system that combined televote results across the participating countries — Serbia won, becoming the first country to win Eurovision in its first year competing as an independent nation, following the dissolution of the Serbia and Montenegro union the previous year. It was also the first winning song since Dana International's 'Diva' in 1998 not sung in English. Context Serbia's 2007 debut as an independent Eurovision participant came less than a year after the May 2006 Montenegrin independence referendum dissolved the Serbia and Montenegro state union. Kosovo's own declaration of independence was still less than a year away. The Western Balkans were, in other words, in the final phase of the long post-Yugoslav realignment, and Serbia's Eurovision identity was being constructed in real time. 'Molitva' was written by Vladimir Graić with lyrics by Saša Milošević Mare, and its distinctive Balkan-ballad character drew on the same regional traditions that had produced winning entries from neighbouring countries in earlier iterations of the Yugoslav-successor landscape. Eurovision that year was also navigating its maximalist televote era, and 'Molitva' stood out precisely by refusing the prevailing grammar of spectacle. Legacy The win brought the 2008 contest to Belgrade, a significant soft-power moment for Serbia. 'Molitva' remains one of the most respected non-English winning entries of the modern Eurovision era, frequently cited in arguments for preserving linguistic diversity at the contest. Šerifović came out publicly as a lesbian some years later, retrospectively adding another layer of significance to her staging choices, and became a prominent cultural figure in Serbia and across the former Yugoslav region. The song's success is often credited as helping re-legitimise non-English entries in the televoting era, a debate that would resurface repeatedly through the 2010s and 2020s. Mythology Šerifović's staging is sometimes described as an overt political statement about LGBT rights in Serbia; at the time, the artist had not come out publicly, and the staging's queer coding was read differently by different audiences. The song is also occasionally described as the first non-English winner in Eurovision history, which is incorrect — it was the first since 1998.