“Comrade, join us!”, Yugo drivers warmly greet tourists getting into a car that is no longer produced for a return, but brings back memories of a country that has ceased to exist.
Yugo, the symbol of former Yugoslavia, is once again driving through the streets of Belgrade.
Like in other places once trapped behind the hated Iron Curtain, Serbia’s capital has found an original way to respond to curiosity and nostalgia for life in communism.
During a three-hour tour, visitors, mostly foreigners, explore some of the important sites in Yugoslav history, and while riding in the once ubiquitous Yugo, the tour concludes near Tito’s grave in the House of Flowers.
“People come to experience a ride in an iconic car, which is not offered anywhere else in the world,” said Jovana Stojiljković, head of the Yugotour travel agency, to AFP.
The last ‘jugići’ were produced ten years ago, but Stojiljković says they are still popular among foreign tourists on a tour called “The Rise and Fall of a Nation.”
“It’s something like a tour of Berlin in a Trabant,” explains Stojiljković.
Along with Yugo, the cars Fićo and Zastava 101, produced in Kragujevac, were the pride of communist Yugoslavia and extremely popular at the time due to their low price. However, Yugo was often the subject of ridicule due to its design and unreliability.
Yugo also appeared as an object of mockery in the Hollywood blockbuster Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995, starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.
Today, tourists from all over the world can take a ride in a Yugo, which at the height of its popularity was exported from Yugoslavia to 74 countries, including Egypt, India, and the United States. Although the communist authorities boasted of a “deal of the century” with Americans, Yugo had little success there.
Dennis Bertelsen, a 38-year-old Dane, decided to take a Yugonostalgic tour with his three friends “to gain insight into history and learn what influenced the development and fall of Yugoslavia.”
He is one of a million tourists who visit Belgrade each year. More than 800,000 come from abroad.
The tour includes passing by the popular Hotel Jugoslavija on the banks of the Danube, one of the most luxurious hotels during the communist era. American presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, as well as British Queen Elizabeth II, stayed there.
Although Hotel Jugoslavija has been out of operation since 1999, hit during NATO bombing aimed at forcing Slobodan Milošević to withdraw his troops from Kosovo, the building still holds a mythical status.
Polish student Dominik Wojciechowski is researching the Fićo car for his artistic project focused on Yugonostalgia, a feeling still present in all countries of the former Yugoslavia, but, as AFP notes, much less so in Croatia where a strong sense of patriotism dominates.
“I am interested in the process of commercialization of Yugonostalgia and how people are trying to preserve knowledge about Yugoslavia, while older generations are trying to turn back time,” said the 25-year-old student.
The most impressive part of the tourist tour for the student were the concrete towers of Genex, or the western gate of Belgrade, still one of the largest and probably the ugliest skyscrapers in the city.
Most tourists do not know much about Yugoslavia, except that it was a country with 22 million inhabitants led by Tito, who ruled it from the end of World War II until his death in 1980. The federation of six republics disintegrated a decade later in a series of wars that claimed more than 130,000 lives.
Jovana Stojiljković was born in 1992 and has never lived in SFRY, but knows a lot about it. “From the stories of my parents, their friends, and family, it was a good time,” she says.
