The second, Social Center Rog, also contains a shitload of art and -- bonus! -- a giant skate park.

Magenta Vaughn

Magenta Vaughn
No one built it. It just sort of appeared.

Why doesn't the government just come and tear it down? They totally tried.

Metelkova was built over the rotten corpse of an old Yugoslavian military base. As the military pulled out, the area was promised to local artists as a work space by the government. But the government almost immediately decided "fuck that" in lieu of bulldozing the whole thing and selling the land to developers. One of our sources for the article, Natasha, was there when the demolition started. "They brought all these machines, wrecking balls as well ... but by coincidence, someone passed by, saw what was happening, and informed all the other members. People gathered and decided to attack to protect the buildings."

This "attack" took the form of dozens of artists rushing the demolition site and setting up in buildings as they were being torn down. The basic logic was, the government probably won't kill us all for this land. The squatters erected barricades to keep the government out (which obviously wouldn't hold them off for long) and started covering everything with art. "Artists just gathered and started gluing ceramic tiles on the wall. The purpose was to protect the building with art ... then maybe they won't demolish it."

Magenta Vaughn
"After all, you never see them bulldoze a spraypainted building, right? Right?!"

OK, so that sounds like about the hippie-dippiest bullshit imaginable. "If we cover the walls with enough art we can melt the government's hard hearts!" It's the kind of plan that could have been dreamed up only by people too high to remember that the government has access to things like tear gas and truncheons.

But it worked.

Magenta Vaughn
Like the old saying goes: "The Illuminati-baby humping
a soccer ball sculpture is mightier than the sword."

Next, local artists started donating paintings and sculptures, and the squatters began hosting as many concerts and art shows as possible. "In two months, like 200 different events happened." Natasha's job during all this was to take clippings from newspaper articles about the squat and different events it held. Several Slovenian intellectuals teamed up with an American architect named Kevin Kaufman and produced the Metelkova Development Plan, a detailed blueprint for the future expansion of the squat.

All of this was meant to establish the squat as a legitimate piece of cultural heritage, rather than just a place where young hippie kids got fucked up. And it worked: The government relented, declared Metelkova a cultural heritage site, and pulled back the wrecking balls and the cops.

Magenta Vaughn
Having a spider-tank on their side didn't hurt.

After more than a decade in operation, Metelkova inspired another squat -- Social Center Rog -- which began when a bunch of artists started occupying an abandoned communist bike factory. But the Rog had to fight for its existence against a different foe: junkies.

"Wait," you're probably thinking, "aren't all of these people junkies?" Shockingly, no. On our second night in the city we attended a "wild" party thrown by the Rog as a fundraiser. The publicly available drugs were beer and wine ... that was about it. Nobody got shitfaced, nobody started fights, and, on the whole, it was considerably tamer than Cracked's annual company Christmas party.

Magenta Vaughn
They only had one beer in that fridge, and it belonged to Ganesha.

So folks at the Rog aren't teetotalers, but it's not a drug-soaked den of inequity, either, partly because the residents are dirt poor, but mainly because the first big stumbling block in the Rog's existence was kicking out the dangerous junkies who squatted in the abandoned factory before the artists arrived. One long-time resident told us, "At first it was half artists, half junkies. Some on drugs, some just alcoholics. We kicked out the worst of them until eventually just one old alcoholic was left."

The squatters managed to force out most of them via a concerted campaign of passive-aggression: making them feel unwelcome and ostracized until they packed up their shit and left for another abandoned building. But that one old alcoholic didn't respond to social pressure. "Then he got some woman drunk, and we found her outside in the middle of winter -- she had turned blue."

Joshua Lott/Getty Images News/Getty Images
"They can't attack me if I turn my skin into art!"

The woman nearly died, but the squatters were able to get her medical attention. That near-death gave them the motivation they needed to physically force the last of the former tenants out of the factory. That's the sort of thing you have to do yourself when ...

So, the squatters of the Rog decided to handle the perp themselves. "We dressed up in masks and gloves and showed up in his room in the middle of the night and threw him out. We gathered up all his stuff and tossed it out too." Oh, hey, it's starting to look like there might be an ugly side to the squatter artist life ...

But they didn't want to sit down for an interview, and they pointed out several times that "no one is allowed to make money from the art they make here." They warmed up to us eventually and even offered to sit down with us over coffee and explain their viewpoint.

Magenta Vaughn
Their coffee table was an old TV.

They all respected what Metelkova, the older squat, had done for squatter's rights in the city. But they didn't like what it had become ("It is in every tourist guide to Europe.") and they all worried that the Rog would get too popular and become another hip concert venue for rich kids from London and Berlin to use as a backdrop for selfies. One resident pointed out that international companies have already started eyeing the Rog as a location to shoot ads. "Garnier Fructis wanted to pay us to film a commercial here."

Magenta Vaughn
As you can tell from their non-table TV, they aren't big fans of commercials.

Despite the fact that Garnier put thousands of dollars on the table, and despite the fact that most Rog residents are literal starving artists, they said no. Partly because Garnier tests on animals, they said, and partly because they're straight-up terrified of getting too popular.

But that's just how it goes. Over the years idealism melts away, money starts flowing in, and pretty soon what was once an enclave of the counter-culture becomes a commoditized chunk of the regular culture. In the beginning, Metelkova was host to dozens of squatters: Now just one person lives there full-time. The Rog is currently host to anywhere from eight to a few dozen residents, depending on the time of year. But every year they get a little more established, a little more money trickles in, and, eventually, the Rog will likely find its way into tourist guidebooks and become just another place where rich kids pay to party.

Magenta Vaughn
"115 of your friends have checked in here!"

And when that happens, a new generation of young artists who can't afford to pay $50 to see a concert or drink $4 beers at a gallery show will find another abandoned building, fill it with art, thumb their noses at the cops, and the whole cycle will continue on.

Robert Evans runs the Personal Experience section of Cracked, and he has a Twitter.

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