Lepa Brena is coming back to Skopje. On Friday, December 18, from 8 p.m., Fahreta Jahić will take the stage at the Boris Trajkovski Arena, and the organisers are selling the concert with a single line: after an eight-year break, in front of the Skopje audience again.

The numbers behind her name are of a calibre rarely seen in the Balkans. With around 40 million records sold, she is considered the most commercially successful musician of the former Yugoslavia. She started her career in 1980 with the band that would soon become "Slatki greh", and her first album, "Čačak, Čačak", came out in 1982. Then came the film trilogy "Hajde da se volimo" and the concert in Sofia on July 24, 1990, when she landed on stage by helicopter in front of 122,000 people. The region still tells that story today.

Her business has done as well as her stage career. In 1998, together with her husband Slobodan Živojinović and Saša Popović, she founded Grand Production, the company that for years set the pace of the folk scene in Serbia, and which was sold in 2019 for 30 million euros. In recent seasons Brena has been taking the tour "Imam pesmu da vam pevam" around the cities of the region.

For Skopje the organisers promise timeless hits and a big spectacle. The audience that grew up on "Čačak, Čačak" and "Sitnije, Cile, sitnije" knows what it's buying. How many stars from the eighties still fill arenas four decades later?

The price range speaks for itself: from 1,260 denars for the cheapest entry to 16,800 denars for the most expensive, and there's also a VIP voucher. Tickets are sold via karti.com.mk and mktickets.mk, and the show is scheduled to start at 8 p.m.