Top > World > 2005 > August > 2005-08-16

Balkan republics pine for Yugoslavia of old

Blasko Gabric is a Balkan dreamer who has set about building a new Yugoslavia - Yugoland - here on the northern edge of Serbia. While his mini-Adriatic Sea is still only a waterless hole, and his Mount Triglav is but a pile of dirt, he hopes his 3-1/2-hectare theme park will prove popular with an older generation nostalgic for the defunct nation.Vexed by a parliamentary vote in 2003 that scrapped the name Yugoslavia and replaced it with Serbia and Montenegro, Gabric hoisted the Yugoslav flag, marked trails on his property with signs like "Road of the Yugoslav Great Ones", and declared Yugoland.

Since the park opened two years ago, more than 3,000 people have paid $3 each to become "citizens" of Yugoland. Feelings of "Yugonostalgia" are on the rise, as three of the five countries that spun off the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia struggle with the aftermath of ethnic warfare, collapsed economies, and international isolation.

Comparisons between today and the era of Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito are made especially frequently in Bosnia, which suffered some 150,000 dead and saw half the country become refugees in its 1992-1995 war of independence from Yugoslavia. Retirees receiving monthly pensions of $94 today remember the kingly $1,200 pensions given out by Tito. Today`s average monthly wage is just a few hundred dollars, nearly half the country is out of work.