From Dubai skies to BiH soil

We didn’t plan any of this (or did we?) but not so fast!

Hola and zdravo, Denise is from Córdoba, Argentina and Jovan is from Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina here! We met while working as flight attendants for Emirates Airlines (Denise for ten years, Jovan for six) while living out of a suitcase, learning a new culture every few days and constantly, quietly practicing something we didn’t have a name for yet: adaptability and resilience.

The ability to walk into an unfamiliar place and figure out how to belong there, fast.

And it turns out that skill would become the whole foundation of our life together here in beautiful BiH.

We happened to be neighbors before anything else and once we officially started dating, we got to change our flights and travel the world together almost every month, to a new destination. It kind of became obvious we weren’t just compatible travel companions but that we wanted the same things in life.

Then the pandemic hit and Denise lost her job, along with 30% of the airline’s staff and Jovan made the call to leave his too. Dubai had been stable for years but suddenly the ground was moving under everyone and so we asked ourselves the question a lot of couples in our position asked then: if we can live anywhere right now, where do we actually want to build a life?

In September 2020, we took our first trip to Banja Luka together and not as tourists but as two people seriously considering whether this could be home. Ten years of travel across the region meant it wasn’t unfamiliar territory for Denise and more than that: after years of airports, time zones and short stays everywhere, we were both craving the opposite.

Quiet. Nature. Connection. A place where, if we had kids one day, family would actually mean something in daily life and not just on holidays.

That trip was not about sightseeing, it was pure research! What would residency actually require? What would work look like? What would a normal Tuesday feel like? We wanted to picture it clearly enough that moving wouldn’t be a leap into the unknown but a decision made with open eyes.

From there it moved fast! We flew to Argentina to sort out Denise’s documents, packed up our life in Dubai and in January 2021, we officially moved to Banja Luka. We got married two months later, in March 2021 and that’s when the real work, the paperwork, the systems the learning-everything-from-scratch and the adapting actually began.

We’d agreed early on that remote work was non-negotiable because being from two different corners of the world, we wanted to keep exploring it together so location independence would be our main goal but it wan’t always the case (we’ll share more about that!)

So we went looking for remote roles, and in doing that, we ran into the same wall almost every foreigner relocating here runs into: there was barely any real information out there and nothing written by someone who’d actually lived it.



So we started documenting our journey because it is truly the ride of a lifetime. The adaptation for Denise as a foreigner and for Jovan as a local returning to his homeland, the paperwork, the constant challenges, the wins, the funny impressions and the very human struggles we come across with the hope that it might help someone else considering the same leap we took.

That’s how Balkatinos was born.

Our walks of life have made us believe truly in human connection with the idea that everyone has a story worth telling and that relatability moves people more than anything.

And with our family growing and our conscious decision to plant seeds in this magical place, we wanted to help rewrite the story the world tells about Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is a warm, welcoming, underrated corner of the world with so much more to offer than most people assume. We want to help bring the right people here and people who’ll appreciate it the way we’ve learned to and help this community keep building toward its full potential.

What surprised us was how fast this resonated and how people were drawn to Denise’s outsider perspective for the appreciation for small, ordinary things that are easy to take for granted when you didn’t grow up with them. In a world that feels increasingly disconnected, there’s something people are hungry for in seeing a place where family still comes first, community still exists and kindness is still the default.

That’s what we get to share through our content and our growing community online. Thank you for being here!

With love from the Balkans,
Denise & Jovan