My first memory of Treće Oko (Third Eye) magazine was with my grandma at Hotel Palisad in Zlatibor. It was just after my grandad passed away, and I begged her to buy it, as I was intrigued by various mysteries it claimed to uncover. I remember being very unimpressed with that issue, though. The only article I remember from it claimed we would all be allergic to something in the near future, which turned out to be correct (allergies were becoming hot topic in the 1990s in Serbia and I guess since 1980s in the US, at least based on Todd Hayne’s “Safe”). I do not, however, remember any of the more ambitious articles about the paranormal and ancient mysteries.
Since then and up until 2020, I have never bought Treće Oko. I did occasionally buy the more lurid and funny Zona Sumraka (“Twilight zone” part of the Color Press tabloid empire of Robert Čoban), which leaned more heavily onto the alleged sexual magic of Vlachs and even featured a storyline about a baby angel and baby devil fighting each other.
But Treće Oko was too serious for its own sake and even had parts dedicated to holistic medicine and self-help, along with prophecies of Baba Vanga and writing about “Tesla’s weapons”.
And yet, I returned to it when the COVID pandemic started. Partly out of amusement – I took the first lockdowns very seriously and was very bored – but some part of it was the fact that Treće Oko’s homely brand of wacky was an excellent corrective to the rest of the media, which was sinister in their attempts to seem normal and educated while bringing ever more outlandish news and demands.
Unsurprisingly for a publication of conservative Novosti, Treće oko rarely changed and its cast of astrologers, numerologists, tarot readers and other clairvoyants always carefully hedged their predictions. On the other hand, in other media, there was aggressive certainty on self-evidently strange topics by established experts (e.g. which protests are safe to go to?).
I did not stop with Trece Oko as I went down various conspiratorial rabbit holes of Twitter during COVID. Neither did my mom, who started watching multiple YouTube channels, which speculated about lab leaks and, later, the quality of vaccines, as our physical world shrunk and turned almost magically. Before March 2020 we used to travel constantly and would be regularly out and about Belgrade. In that one year of COVID, we were stuck together, mostly in our flat, and my mom even developed a contradictory belief that the whole COVID thing was a lie but still abstained from going out to cafes for fear of getting it.
It also affected us professionally. My dad works in the airline industry, and I used to specialize in what is travel writing, so our life completely changed. Obviously, some guidance, even supernatural, was more than needed. That was even truer after I thought things were finally over after we all got vaccinated, only for my mum to turn out to have stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which added another layer of abnormalcy.
After her passing, I became an even more of an avid Treće oko reader, wanting to read some good news and projections in a world that no longer made sense. I remember being impressed by Trece Oko’s end-of-year issues.
They not only provided detailed predictions for next year but sort of made corrections to their previous predictions and explained how things all fit together. As a former risk consultant, I was impressed by the diligence and accuracy of their back-testing methods, while as a writer and journalist, I could not believe the honesty. Did anybody comment at the end of 2021 on how they were reporting on COVID-19, the vaccines, and lockdowns? Of course not.
The silence around what we have been though in those twelve months still reminds me of a similar bizarre thing, where Treće Oko also played a part, 11 August 1999 solar eclipse in Serbia.
That date coincided with the date that Erich von Daaniken (an obsession of mine in those daus) said that ancient aliens had arrived on Earth to jumpstart civilization. While I was expecting aliens, Serbia, recovering after the 1999 bombing, was living out its trauma with the media insisting that we all needed to stay inside the whole day as the eclipse could be dangerous. Thankfully, my dad, ever a crusader against obscurantism and a man of common sense, took me out to watch the eclipse through a photographic film, as the whole of our Zvezdara neighbourhood was eerily quiet. The day after and even the years after, people rarely speak about this event, and even now, twenty five years later, it is a bit of a national embarrassment, cloaked under a veil of silence. The way we (don’t) talk about COVID feels the same way
After February 2022 and Russia’s attack on Ukraine, especially the initial five months of speculation around the potential use of Nukes, made Treće Oko even more indispensable to me, especially as I descended into a bit of doomer nihilism by then.
The last issue of Trece Oko that I bought was their year-end prediction in 2022. I do not remember anything apart from them highlighting the importance of Pluto’s transit into Aquarius and its retrograde into Capricorn during 2023. Pluto is a planet of change with immense energy, while Aquarius is the sign of media and creativity. Last May, just as Pluto started going retrograde, Treće Oko ceased to exist.
I realized that a few weeks ago, when I wanted to find their 2024 forecast. Maybe their astrologers knew their end was coming. In any case, it is a significant loss for the Serbian media.
The Nutshell Times is an independent project and a work of love – but it still requires money to run. If you like the content you can support it on Paypal or Patreon.