Museum of the History of Yugoslavia
The Museum of the History of Yugoslavia ( Serbian - Cyrillic Музеј историје Југославије , Muzej istorije Jugoslavije) is located in the Dedinje district in the south of Belgrade . It was founded in 1996 by the Yugoslav Ministry of Culture and Media - through the merger of the Museum of the Revolution of the Peoples and Nationalities of Yugoslavia (Muzeja revolucije naroda i narodnosti Jugoslavije) and the memorial "Josip Broz Tito" (Memorijalni centar "Josip Broz Tito") .
The director of the museum is Neda Knežević.
Collections
The collections of the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia include around 200,000 objects in twenty different sub-areas and essentially come from two collections:
- The Titos collection brings together a wide range of memorabilia from the long-time head of state of Yugoslavia. The numerically largest parts of the collection represent on the one hand the more than 22,000 relays that were dedicated to him or his successors, on the other hand the numerous gifts he received on his state visits around the world or from people and organizations in his own country. The majority of this collection consists of donations.
- The collection of the Museum of the Revolution is much smaller and from the beginning had the task of documenting the history of Yugoslavia from the end of the 19th century to the 1990s - with a clear focus on socialism and the politics of non-alignment . Most of this collection consists of purchases.
Although the museum has a comprehensive collection of the gifts that Josip Broz Tito received during his reign, only some of them are on display for reasons of space. The museum also hosts a number of special exhibitions and sees itself as a place of research, a platform for art and an educational institution. Furthermore, curators of the museum also offer activities outside the site, for example bicycle excursions through the Novi Beograd district .
Structure of the museum
The museum consists of three complexes:
- the Museum of May 25th (Muzej 25th maj) , built in 1960,
- the Old Museum (Stari Muzej) , built in 1964/65, and
- the House of Flowers (Kuća cveća) , built in 1975, the mausoleum for Josip Broz Tito and his wife Jovanka Broz .
The three buildings have a floor space of 5,253 m² and are located in a park area of 3.2 hectares. The museum is located in the immediate vicinity of Tito's last Belgrade residence and the Partizan Stadium ( Serbian - Cyrillic Стадион Партизана ), the former stadium of the Yugoslav People's Army (Stadion Jugoslovenske narodne armije) . Since Josip Broz Tito in his shelter with the May 25, 1944 Drvar to access German paratroopers had narrowly escaped, this day was during his lifetime as an alleged birthday of Marshal, as Victory Day of the partisans and the Youth Day with the ceremonial closing of a nationwide relay race committed. Following the pattern of the Olympic flame, “the so-called youth relay, in which there was a symbolic letter from the youth with birthday wishes to Tito, was carried across the whole country for months.” This relay race ended in Belgrade's Partizan Stadium until Tito's death the handover of artistically designed relays to him. "This ritual was supposed to express the enthusiasm of the youth and to publicly demonstrate their identification with and intimate relationship with Tito."
Museum of May 25th
The May 25 Museum was designed by the architect Mika Janković and presented to the Yugoslav state and party leader by the city of Belgrade as part of the celebrations for Tito's official 70th birthday on May 25, 1962. The aim of the museum was to store, catalog and publicly present all domestic and foreign gifts that Tito received during his reign. Furthermore, the original baton of the annual Tito relay races (Titova Štafeta) were exhibited.
Today the building is used for the museum's special exhibitions. The special exhibitions are devoted to a wide range of topics, such as heroes we love (a critical examination of Yugoslavia-nostalgic tendencies), art against oblivion or design for a new world .
Old museum
The Altes Museum was designed by the architect Branko Bon and built in 1964/65. The usable area of the building is 870 m². It was originally built to display the numerous gifts that Tito received during his long term in office, either on his state visits or on his birthdays. The house still fulfills this function today.
The building was renovated in 2015, the new permanent exhibition of the museum - Journey around the world in 23 minutes ( Put oho sveta ) - shows selected exhibits from Tito's gift collection, including national costumes from Montenegro and Kosovo , a copy from Prizren dates from 1870, Musical instruments, handcrafted weapons, and a range of ethnographic exhibits. Tito's Tanto sword from the 14th century is the most valuable piece in the collection. Also worth mentioning is the stone gusle , a one-sided violin made from a single stone. Tito received the instrument in 1961, and the events of the Battle of the Sutjeska are depicted on it .
House of Flowers
The House of Flowers ( Bosnian and Croatian Kuća cvijeća , Serbian Kuća cveća Кућа цвећа , Slovenian Hiša cvetja , Macedonian Куќа на цвеќето ) was built in 1975 by the architect Stjepan Kralj as a winter garden for Tito. It has a usable area of 902 m² and was originally intended as a new Belgrade residence for Tito, alongside his favorite villas in Bled (Slovenia) and Brijuni (Croatia) and other villas in the former Yugoslavia.
Main entrance
Grave of Josip Broz Tito
Jovanka Broz's grave
Permanent exhibition (2010)
Today it represents the mausoleum of Josip Broz Tito , who died on May 4, 1980 in Ljubljana and was brought to rest there on May 8 in the presence of numerous heads of state from all over the world. It is striking that there are no political symbols depicted on Tito's grave. The tombstone is kept simple, in white marble, based on the grave of Franklin Roosevelt . During his visit to the USA in 1978, Tito was impressed by the grave of this US President. Especially immediately after Tito's death, the number of visitors was massive. In the first six months after Tito's death, an average of 13,500 people visited Tito's mausoleum every day. During the Kosovo war in 1999, the building was slightly damaged by a NATO bomb, and after the fall of Slobodan Milošević , it was extensively renovated. Every year the mausoleum is visited by around 20,000 people, mainly from the successor states of Yugoslavia .
Today there are three permanent exhibitions in the House of Flowers :
- One shows a selection of the more than 22,000 relays that were presented to Tito and his successors between 1957 and 1987.
- The show Up Close and Personal with Tito gives a glimpse into Tito's private life, but also into his political activities. It is divided into five areas: man with style, encounters, travel, hedonism and in the Comrade Tito section , we swear to you .
- The third show is entitled Figures of Memory and spans a historical arc from 1945 to 2014. It relates objects, rituals and people to one another. The central exhibit is the condolence visit on the occasion of Tito's funeral.
The exhibitions were curated by Momo Cvijović, Radovan Cukić, Maria Đorgović, Vesna Mikelić and Veselinka Kastratović Ristić.
After long years of poverty and oblivion, the fourth wife and widow of Titos, Jovanka Broz Budisavljević (1924-2013), was buried in the House of Flowers after her death , but in an adjoining room, as the removal of the massive tomb slab Titos a crane and would have required the temporary removal of the glass roof. The couple had lived separately for at least the last three years of Tito's life. Her burial near her husband was Jovanka Broz's last wish.
park
The park plays an important role in the museum complex, on the one hand because of its botanical diversity and careful maintenance, and on the other hand because of the sculptures by numerous well-known artists from former Yugoslavia , including Antun Augustinčić , Frano Kršinić , Stevan Bodnarov , Mira Jurišić , Vladeta Petrić , Sava Sandić and Sreten Stojanović .
Park view
Ranjeni kurir
by Frano Kršinić
Fontana
by Sreten Stojanović
Tito's statue
Admission is free on May 4th, the anniversary of Tito's death, and on May 25th, Tito's (official) birthday. On these days, numerous supporters of the former partisan leader and later President of Yugoslavia still come to visit.
See also
literature
- Alina Zubkovych: Transformation of the Public Space Perception: A Case Study of the Museum of Yugoslav History. In: Lena Danilova, Matej Makarovic, Alina Zubkovych (eds.): Multi-faced Transformations: Challenges and Studies , Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2015, ISBN 978-1-4438-8266-8 , pp. 157-178.
- Ljiljana Reinkowski: Long live Tito, Tito died. The image of Tito in communist Yugoslavia and in the Yugoslav successor states . In: Thomas Großbölting, Thomas; Rüdiger Schmidt (Ed.): The death of the dictator - event and memory in the 20th century . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. ISBN 978-3-525-30009-1 , pp. 199-221
Web links
- Museum of the History of Yugoslavia , official website (Serbian / English)
- Department of Eastern Europe at the University of Basel , description of the museum
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Elmir Camic: Tito as a political hero . In: Peter Tepe, Thorsten Bachmann et al. (Ed.): Myth No. 2. Political Myths , Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, pp. 194–213. Quotations on p. 204 and 205.
- ↑ White Giant . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1984 ( online ).
- ↑ a b c Luzia Böni (LB): Museum of the History of Yugoslavia , in: Looking for YU , project of the Eastern Europe Institute of the University of Basel (as of December 15, 2014)
- ↑ Der Standard (Vienna): Belgrade wants to fulfill Tito's widow Jovanka Broz's last wish - derstandard.at/1381369299588/Belgrad-will-letzt-Wunsch-von-Tito-Witwe-Jovanka-Broz-erfuellen , October 21, 2013, accessed on June 12, 2016.
Coordinates: 44 ° 47 ′ 12 ″ N , 20 ° 27 ′ 6 ″ E