A Trip on the Tito Museum Trail

Out & About :

Everyone knows something about Tito, but as Belgrade Insight finds out, a network of surviving museums helps fill in many of the gaps about this fascinating man’s colourful life.

The life of Yugoslavia’s longtime leader, Josip Broz Tito, is still shrouded in part by mystery.

But some key points of his life are quite clear, at least to those born in Yugoslavia who learned them in school as incontrovertible facts.

One is that Tito was born in the small Croatian town of Kumrovec as the seventh child in a family of 15 children. Another is that after World War II, he became the ruler of Yugoslavia.

A bronze statue of him was erected in front of his family home, showing him dressed in overcoat, walking with his hands behind his back.

In 1953 the house was turned into the Memorial Museum of Marshal Tito. In what was then Yugoslavia, numerous road signs directed people to Kumrovec and the town was always crowded with school children or workers coming to see where their leader was born.

Birthplace, Kumrovec

Today Tito’s home is just one of 20 houses in an open-air museum, which show what life was like in a Croatian village in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

But Tito’s house has remained just as it was when he and his parents lived there. Everything in and around the house is designed to leave the impression that they just left. 

Bread lies on a wooden table in the living room and in rooms the beds are perfectly made. Only one room looks different: it serves as a museum to Tito’s later life. The walls are covered with photographs of the Marshal and the display cases hold a few of Tito’s personal belongings, as well as his trademark white uniform.

One rumour that has long followed Tito is that the person who ruled Yugoslavia for more than three decades was not the same man who was born in this house.

The rumour started after some Kumrovec locals said Tito had changed so much in his appearance that they didn’t recognise him after the war. They said they suspected the real Tito had died during the war and the Soviets had sent a double to rule the country as their obedient pupil.

However, as Tito showed great disobedience to the Soviet Union just a few years after the war, it seems that either the Soviets made a mistake when they chose Tito’s double or the rumour was just that – a rumour.

Wartime years in Bosnia

The locksmith from Kumrovec became leader of the then small Yugoslav Communist Party in 1938. Three years later, after Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia, Tito was declared Supreme Commander of the Partisan movement against the Germans. According to Yugoslav textbooks, Tito himself led his soldiers into battles.

Two of the most important battles were held in Bosnia in 1943. In March that year the Communist-led Partisan army fought both the Germans and the Serbian royalist resistance movement, known as the Chetniks, in the battle of the River Neretva.

In this key battle, near Jablanica, some 80 kilometres south of Sarajevo, the Communist-led forces removed the royalists from the stage as rival future rulers of Yugoslavia.

One of the most expensive movies in Yugoslav history was filmed about this event. The Battle of Neretva, starring Orson Welles, was an Oscar nominee for best foreign movie in 1969.

On the site of the battle today is a memorial museum. Wrecks of the bridge that the Communists destroyed to prevent the German army from reaching them are still intact and form part of the museum.

Just two months after defeating both his foreign and domestic foes at the Neretva, Tito was shot in a second major battle, at the River Sutjeska.

This, along with the battle at the Neretva, was one of the principal battles fought on Yugoslav soil during World War II. The Communists built a memorial here too.

The Valley of Heroes memorial complex opened in 1974 and before Yugoslavia dissolved about 30,000 people visited it annually.

At the complex the memorial museum contains the names of the 7,000 soldiers who died there, a monument and an ossuary where more than 3,000 soldiers are buried.

Hosting stars on the islands

But battlefields are not what most people think of when they think of Tito. Instead of a muddy soldier covered with blood, Tito is remembered as a man in a bright white uniform who led a life of luxury.

From 1947 onwards he spent most of his life at his Belgrade residence in Dedinje and his summer residence on the islands of Brioni in Croatia.

Brioni is a group of 14 islands in the northern Adriatic Sea. Although some hotels were built on the islands in the early 20th century, the islands became widely known as Tito’s personal domain.

He spent most of his time in a mansion on the island of Great Brioni and at his other residence on island of Varga, which is closed to the public.

Here Tito hosted stars, royal monarchs and political leaders, including movie stars Sofia Loren, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro of Cuba and many others. It was on these islands that Tito, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt signed the declaration that marked the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Tito himself arranged his residence and refurbished historical buildings on Brioni. Although a Communist and thus an atheist, in 1958 he also refurbished a 15th-century church. 

Today the islands are a national park with several hotels. Every day a boat operates from the small fishing village of Fazana and takes tourists on a tour through the islands.

Along with a museum dedicated to Tito, tourists can also take a walk through the safari park inhabited by the descendants of animals Tito obtained from all around the world.

The zoo is still home to a 40-year-old elephant, Lanka, which Indian leader Indira Gandhi gave to Tito. Tito’s favourite parrot, Koki, is also still alive.

Tourists can take a spin in Tito’s 1952 Cadillac. Some say that Tito enjoyed driving the car himself, with his driver in the passenger seat.

Last stop, Belgrade

The last stop on the Tito route is the House of Flowers in Belgrade, where the Yugoslav leader is buried.

The House of Flowers was built in the late 1970s as a winter garden for Tito. Between the end of World War II and his death, Tito lived at Užička 15. Next to his residence, in the late '70s, he built both the winter garden and a new residence, the Mansion of Peace, but he never moved in.

After his death in 1980, both residences, the House of Flowers and his old hunting lodge were turned into a museum complex exhibiting collections of all the gifts he had received from the various leaders he had hosted in Belgrade.

Along with the 25th May Museum, Tito’s old homes formed a huge complex dedicated to the Marshal.

In 1996 Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević built a wall dividing the 25th May Museum and the House of Flowers from the residential area before moving into Tito’s residence.

During the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, however, the residence was hit and is today a ruin. Milosevic then moved into the Mansion of Peace and lived there until 2001, when he was arrested on war crimes charges and sent to The Hague for trial.

The House of Flowers and 5th May Museum are still open for visitors who wish to see Tito’s grave and the batons that were carried across the whole of Yugoslavia and given to Tito on his birthday.

And finally…

Many now see Yugoslavia as part of a long gone era, but here so-called Yugo-nostalgics can feel at home.

They can also feel at home in one other place. On the day that the state of Yugoslavia finally disappeared as a legal entity in 2003, Blaško Gabrić of Subotica declared his estate in Vojvodina the “Fourth Yugoslavia”.

The first was royal Yugoslavia, the second was Tito’s state and the third was the brief “rump” Yugoslavia that existed from the dissolution of most of the country in the 1990s until 2003.

Every May Yugonostalgics from all over former Yugoslavia gather at Gabrić’s place to celebrate Labour Day, an event that was celebrated with great pomp across former Yugoslavia.

Everyone who wishes to can sign the “Book of Citizens”. As a result, the Fourth Yugoslavia now boasts about 10,000 “Yugoslavs”. Tito’s legacy lives on, after a fashion.