Remembering Yugoslavia

In the last 75 years, two Yugoslav-born women were the First Lady of their respective countries: Jovanka Budisavljević was the third wife of Josip Broz Tito and Melania Knavs is the third wife of Donald John Trump. A look at similarities, differences, and legacies of two most famous ex-Yugoslav women. 

With Sonja Bjelobaba, Sandi Gorišek, and Mirjana Menković.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that n...

Generations of Yugoslav women fought for Yugoslavia and then against the patriarchy in it. Many of them were artists, whose primary medium for their work were their own bodies. Art historian Jasmina Tumbas took the image of Jugoslovenka (Yugoslav Woman) from Lepa Brena’s eponymous song to tell the story of women’s emancipation within and through art in her new book, I Am Jugoslovenka! Feminist Performance Politics During and After ...

Thirty-eight years ago, on February 8th, 1984, 50,000 spectators attended the opening ceremony of the 14th Winter Olympic Games at the Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. For twelve ensuing days, 250,000 spectators and 2 billion television viewers watched nearly 1,300 athletes from 49 countries compete for medals…or simply participate. 

Sarajevo 1984 was the greatest sporting event in Yugoslavia’s history and the first Winter Ol...

When it comes to travel writing and the Balkans, the vast majority of literature is by Western authors; travel writing about the Balkans. What’s much less known is a significant body of travel writing literature authored by people from the Balkans, including the former Yugoslavia. In fact, Balkan (and ex-YU) writers have been traveling and living to tell the tales for some 150 years now. What’s all this travel writing from the Balk...

The Yugo car headlined the inaugural episode of Remembering Yugoslavia. A part of the little Yugoslav car's story remained unexplored, the part that made the Yugo one of the best known automobiles in history—and turned it into a legend.

Out of the 794,428 Yugos made between 1980 and 2008 in Kragujevac, 141,651 were sold in the U.S. In America, the Yugo went from fad to farce in just a few years.

How did Zastava manage to sell th...

Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein gives a short lecture on Yugoslavia's history in an attempt to answer the question, "Was Yugoslavia good or bad for its peoples?"

The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

There was Yugoslav cuisine the same way there is European cuisine. At best, Yugoslav cuisine was an amalgam of cuisines of Yugoslavia’s constituent peoples, all of which can, in turn, be easily subsumed under a grander umbrella of Balkan cuisine. 

There is nary a more representative, metaphorical, and even iconic Balkan dish than sarma, or stuffed cabbage. Irina Janakievska, a Macedonia-born, London-based chef walks me through the p...

Yugoslavia continues to disintegrate. There’s Kosovo, there’s lingering territorial and financial disputes among successor countries...and there’s Republika Srpska. Last month, Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency and Republika Srpska’s strongman leader, announced the entity would annul a number of state laws and withdraw from the country’s institutions in order to establish the entity...

In 2016, a cantonal government decided that, in one of the secondary schools in Jajce, which was following a Croatian curriculum for all the students, a separate school would be established on the premises for Bosniak students with a parallel Bosniak curriculum. The students in the integrated school rebelled and mounted a campaign to prevent their school from being segregated. After two years, the students prevailed and pressured t...

A sea of ink has been spilled documenting the life and times of Josip Broz Tito. But Tito's biographies place his life against that of Yugoslavia, so that reading a biography of Tito means reading the history of the country. If you want to know about Tito the man, you’ll get a broad strokes picture, an outline, a composite, if not a caricature, that everyone fills with the story they want. For details that reveal his human side...

Yugoslavia lives. It lives, among other things, in the architecture and infrastructure built during its existence. Buildings, roads, and monuments from the Yugoslav era keep that country and the memory of it not just alive but an integral, if sometimes invisible, part of everyday experience in Yugoslavia’s successor countries. The same goes for Czechoslovakia and its progeny. 

But the two countries also live on in a more poetic way,...

Eighty years since its publication, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia remains the most authoritative (and longest) book of travel writing on that former country. The book, which documents West’s travels through Yugoslavia in the second half of the 1930s, has been described as “astonishing,” “brilliant,” “remarkable,” “a supreme literary monument,” and “one of the most important books written ab...

Few travel books have had as big a real-world impact as Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert Kaplan. Published in 1993, this account of Kaplan’s travels through Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia in the late 1980s and 1990 purportedly influenced President Clinton’s policy in the region during the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Kaplan’s portrayal of the relations among the peoples of former Yugoslavia created “the s...

Yugoslavia was the most aggressive among socialist countries in using assassinations as a means of protecting the state and the communist party. Over its 45-year existence, the UDBA, the Yugoslav State Security Service, dropped at least 80 bodies of its political enemies, mostly Croats, abroad. Some with the contracted assistance of Yugoslav mobsters. And after the death of Yugoslavia, members of state security services and their o...

Bosnians are leaving their country in droves. Why? And what can be done about it?

With Samir Beharić, Elma Hodžić, Danijela Majstorović, and Nela Porobić Isaković. Featuring music by Dubioza Kolektiv.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

Yugoslavia was a one-party system, and not everyone there liked it. One might get an impression Milovan Djilas was the only Yugoslav dissident. But there were thousands of Yugoslavs who criticized the regime, including Svetlana Slapšak who got involved in human rights advocacy in 1968 and has worked as an activist under Tito, Milošević, and Janša. 


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer ex...

From July 2018 to January 2019, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. The exhibition introduced socialist Yugoslavia’s architecture and architects to international audiences. It generated a ton of positive press and its impact continues to reverberate. What was Toward a Concrete Utopia and why was it such a big deal? How and why did the exhib...

In July 2020, a series of eighteen essays appeared on the Disorder of Things blog under the umbrella title, Yugosplaining the World. The project brought together 30 former Yugoslavs in the West to reflect "on what their lived experience can teach the US and other countries that are facing outbursts of nationalism, violence, and racism and help provide some avenues for addressing it or understanding it better." The Yugosplai...

For some two decades now the 1980s have been a rich referential resource for culture-makers across ex-Yugoslavia (and globally, of course). Re-releases and reunion tours. Music echoing the ’80s sound. Documentaries. TV shows. Movies. Theater productions. Art retrospectives. Exhibitions…

Now that we’ve entered the temporal territory of 40th anniversaries of this and that from the era, it’s clear the “cultural virus of the 1980s” cont...