Hari Mata Hari in Niš on June 7 - The Sarajevo Pop Legends Bring Eurovision Hit Lejla to the Summer Stage

Hari Mata Hari, one of the most successful Balkan pop bands and the third-place finishers at Eurovision 2006, will play the Summer Stage in Niš on June 7. The show starts at 20:30 and is part of the band's summer tour across the former Yugoslavia, where their ballads have stayed wedding-and-restaurant standards three decades on - the kind of catalog that outlives most of what climbs the charts in any given year.

The group formed in Sarajevo in September 1985 around singer Hari Varešanović, whose stage name became the band's name. Varešanović was born in Sarajevo's Vratnik neighborhood into a musical family - his grandfather was a known sevdalinka singer. Hari began performing at six in local cultural centers, and by ten he was already part of bands like Omi and Sedam šuma. Before founding Hari Mata Hari he played with the group Baobab.

At Eurovision 2006 in Athens, Hari Mata Hari represented Bosnia and Herzegovina with Lejla, written and composed by Željko Joksimović together with Fahrudin Pecikoza and Dejan Ivanović. Lejla scored 229 points and finished third out of 24 entries - still Bosnia and Herzegovina's best ever Eurovision result. In the years that followed, the song became one of the most recognizable Balkan hits, played at weddings and sevdalinka nights across the region.

The Niš show will run through the band's biggest ballads and pop hits from over 35 years on stage, with a full band line-up. Tickets are available through tickets.rs, and the concert takes place at the open-air Summer Stage in Niš, an amphitheatre that holds several thousand.