The most horizontal person wins (Picture: Getty/Reuters)
Life can be hard sometimes. Your alarm clock screams into your ear every morning and you have no choice really but to get up. It’s not ideal really.
Yet for five people in Montenegro, the sound of their alarms buzzing or beeping is all but a distant memory as they compete to be the country’s ‘laziest citizen’.
For the past 12 years, people have laid down for as long as is humanely possible in a bid to poke fun at the stereotype that people from the Balkan country are ‘lazy’.
The only rules? No sitting or standing up. (The one exception is being able to have a 10-minute toilet break once every eight hours.)
Held at a holiday resort in the village of Donja Brezna, this year’s contest kicked off in August and now entered its record-breaking 30th day on Monday.
With participants having been in bed for some 720 hours, they all but shattered the previous 24-day record.
Nearly two dozen people entered the contest (Picture: Milos Vujovic/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Contestants are allowed to use their phones – but getting up is out of the question (Picture: Milos Vujovic/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Snoozing is in no way losing (Picture: Reuters)
Just five out of the 21 people hoping to bag the €1,000 (£860) prize for being horizontal remain, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) reported.
The bookies’ favourite is a 21-year-old from Serbia.
Contest organiser Radonja Blagojevic told reporters: ‘It is a very psychological competition, and the participants are interesting personalities.’
‘They are a great team and some friendships will remain there,’ Blagojevic, who owns the resort, added.
While the competition was founded to fight Montenegrin stereotypes by embracing them, competitors have also included people from Serbia, Bosnia, Russia and Ukraine.
The contest was even tougher back then, Blagojevic said.
The satirical contest was founded to mock a popular myth that labels Montenegrins as lazy people (Picture: Reuters)
The winner will not only take home the slothfulness crown but a cash prize too (Picture: Milos Vujovic/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Meals are served by the resort (Picture: Milos Vujovic/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
‘Earlier we had a rule that there was no getting up, not even going to the toilet, so who could last the longest,’ she said.
‘But since 2021, we introduced the innovation that every eight hours they can take a 15-minute break to go to the toilet.’
Organisers monitor the health of participants throughout.
They’re also given three meals a day and are free to use their mobile phones or laptops and read books to stay busy.
Dubravka Aksic, 38, who won the contest in 2021, said that this year’s competitors are healthy and feeling ‘good’.
‘They are pampering us,’ he told Reuters earlier this month, ‘all we have to do is to remain lying down.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.