‘Charlie Kirkovich’: Serbians Honor Assassinated Conservative Leader with Belgrade Street Art Murals

BELGRADE, Serbia — Charlie Kirk, the assassinated Turning Point USA founder, has fans here in Serbia.

Late last year, street artists made a mural on the side of a highway overpass honoring Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination. While Kirk himself was not Serbian, Serbs consider him an “honorary Serb” because when he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago he played on a basketball team with a bunch of Serbian-American players. A mural of Kirk in a basketball jersey, with the text “Charlie Kirkovich, 1993-2005 RIP,” appeared in Belgrade.

Cronkite News of Arizona PBS published a story in late 2025 on the phenomenon of Kirk’s posthumous popularity in Serbia, writing that “his death didn’t just shake his conservative colleagues; it impacted many corners of the world.”

“One of those corners was 6,000 miles away in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, a country that has historically sat at a cultural crossroads,” Henry Smardo wrote in the December 2025 piece. “An artist, upon hearing the news, decided to paint a mural of Kirk. The controversial conservative kingmaker was depicted in an Illinois White Eagles basketball uniform.”

The piece also quotes Kirk himself talking about Serbia before he was killed.

“I grew up with a lot of Serbs in Chicago, I have a soft spot for Serbs, they’re awesome,” Kirk said on his show. “I played on a Serbian basketball team, actually; my name was Ševa Kurković, I kid you not. I have a jersey that says Kurković.”

The original Charlie Kirkovich mural has since been defaced by leftists. Serbian officials provided Breitbart News with photos of it after leftists in Belgrade defaced it:

Despite the original one getting destroyed, when Breitbart News was in Belgrade late last month to interview President Aleksandar Vucic street artists had just finished a new mural of Kirk to honor him again and Serbian officials took Breitbart News over to see it on the side of an overpass and talk to the artists who made it.

The artists, Dusan Curich and Dario Radich of BalkanWatch.com, were there to greet Breitbart News and talk about the mural they had just completed honoring Kirk,

“It’s not the first time we are doing this — it’s the third time in Belgrade — some leftists and Antifa were destroying the last time we did it,” Curich told Breitbart News. “Charlie represented the same values that are common in Serbia and bonded with the Serbian people, like patriotism, Christianity, and freedom of speech. He’s so popular in Serbia, but also he lived in Chicago where there is a lot of Serbs and he played for a basketball team with a lot of Serbs and that is some kind of an extra connection that we had with him. He sang the Serbian songs after the matches.”

“He’s very popular in Serbia and this is not the first time we have done this but the Serbian people stands with Americans and we must promote that in Serbia,” Radich added.

Neither Curich nor Radich met Kirk when he was alive, but both sang his praises.

“We promote the ideas and principles that Charlie supported and we want to continue the work that he’s done so everybody is able to speak openly and freely and say whatever he wants or whatever he thinks,” Curich said, adding too that a big part of why Kirk is so popular in Serbia is because leftist protests in Belgrade infuriate conservatives. “A big part of our motivation is to stand up against that — and with everything Charlie had done, after he was assassinated was just extra motivation for us.”