Cassandra Phenomenon

"I decided to lie down after work and get some rest. All of a sudden my mother wakes me up in total distress. "Get up! She says, "Cassandra was knifed!" I jumped half a meter from the bed. "What knives? Who's Cassandra?" This is how a young Belgrade citizen describes his first "encounter" with the fatal Cassandra, the heroine of the Venezuelan hit series bearing the same name with 150 episodes. For the past ten weeks, each working day, the Third channel of RTS has been "treating" their domestic viewers to it.

Judging by the hysteria incited by this series, the most unlikely detail of the story from the beginning of this article is the claim that there are still those who have not heard of Cassandra. As a local psychologist stated, people are divided into those who watch Cassandra and those who lie that they don't. Therefore, for those unenlightened few, who is, or even better, what is Cassandra?

This thus-far greatest achievement of Latin America's melodrama production is a story of a rich heiress whose mother's evil stepmother (the mother having died in childbirth), in order to make sure that the favorite of her two twin sons would be the sole heir to the fortune of Cassandra's grandfather, collaborating with the wicked maid, replaces her while she was a newborn baby for a still-born gypsy child from the circus which was visiting that Venezuelan town at the time. The circus then leaves town and returns 18 years later along with Cassandra, who has grown to become a beauty and is earning her daily bread as a target of the knife thrower, a Gypsy prince she has been promised to. Believe it or not, this is when the plot really thickens.

This genealogical nightmare has made not only the local public delirious but also the public in Russia, Indonesia, Bulgaria and Italy. "In Bulgaria 40.000 people came to the stadium to see the main actress in person," says Daliborka Elezovic, marketing director of the Narodna Knjiga publishing house, one of the main players in this grand marketing project, having published the novel which was written following this series. How is the novel faring? "Excellently", says Mrs. Elezovic in high spirits. Posters are also selling brilliantly, as well as albums with self-adhesive pictures... Even Easter egg stickers have appeared with Cassandra's image. The market places are reverberating with: "Cassandra on eggs! A hundred Cassandras for one and a half dinars!" The church launched a fierce protest over this since, according to the words of Miroslav Ilic, an expert at the Museum of the Serbian Orthodox Church, it is "profanity and blasphemous of the holiest Christian holiday".

What makes Cassandra so irresistible to bring people to the point of almost losing their jobs by arriving an hour and a half late, having hopelessly tried to console their tearful mothers whose hearts are breaking out of concern for the main heroine since, as it appears, she has fallen victim to a deadly disease in one of the last episodes?

"People are in need of intense drama. They need to enter a different world, whose problems touch upon them only in the most banal way. They are in need of an illusion that something is going on, anything, since their real lives are completely empty," interprets Jovanka Matic, a sociologist at the Institute of Social Sciences. One regular viewer, who has gracefully complied to acquaint us with the contents of the series free of charge (since even retelling Cassandra has its market value, at least at the Zajecar flea market where, so legend has it, Bulgarian black market dealers are capitalizing on the fact that Cassandra runs ten episodes in advance to ours in their country), between her story-telling confides: "The last thing I got in my company was 180 dinars of guaranteed earnings for January. These soaps are for 'letting your minds go'".