Tito returns to Skopje: The forgotten memories of Josip Broz

Ines Crvenkovska Risteska

doi:10.37620/eaz202093cr

Abstract

After the breakup of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, J.B. Tito’s self and legacy were by turns remembered and forgotten to a greater or lesser extent, depending on certain actions taken by the political elites. In this text I am trying to examine this issue by using examples of the actions taken by state authorities and the political centers of power, like in this case the relationship towards the artistic portrait of J.B. Tito by D. Kondovski, Tito’s message after the 1963 earthquake in Skopje, which was written on the wall of the then-railway station which is now the Skopje Museum, as well as other cultural monuments and institutions that are associated with the memory of J.B. Tito. In the periods after the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, when VMRO-DPMNE was in power, we can see a tendency for removing or concealing the artwork representing J.B. Tito in the museum depots in order to ‘expunge’ or cleanse the Macedonian collective memory of Tito’s legacy. On the other hand, the initiatives that appear on the internet and in the public media in the periods when VMRO-DPMNE is not in power, especially after 2017, strive to restore J.B. Tito's message on the Museum's wall. The architects of the initiatives believe that J.B. Tito's memory will help reestablish the idea of Skopje as a city of solidarity, because in their eyes, “simply put, any healthy society nourishes such concepts.”

Highlights

In this discussion of the memories and the attempts to forget J.B
When authors write about collective memory, they are much more interested in what is remembered and less in what is to be forgotten collectively, i.e., what the party in power wishes for the public to forget
From a position of political power, they impose their political opinion as the only one that has any bearing, and they assume the right to carve the dominant narrative about the way J.B. Tito and his socialism treated the Macedonians, Macedonia, etc., whilst being supported by a group of historians, archeologists and other professionals from the period. In line with their ideological policies, they construct the dominant narrative in post-socialist Macedonia, which the society uses as a foundation for constructing the collective relationship towards J.B

Summary

The culture of remembering and forgetting

A lot has been said in the ethnological and anthropological literature on the memories of J.B. Apart from paying great attention to titostalgia in the independent Balkan countries, he submits an interesting proposal, namely he suggests an analysis of the ‘antiTito’ discourse that was developing in tandem with the ‘pro’ discourse within and outside the territory of SFRJ and later, in the post-socialist states and the Republic of Macedonia Velikonja detects such ‘anti-Tito’ discourse in the measures following the transformation of the socialist regime and the breakup of SFRJ, in the measures carried out on the territory of former SFRJ when “a few thousand monuments and symbols of the national liberation movement, socialism, Yugoslavia, its hero leaders, and Broz were removed, destroyed, defaced, stolen or damaged” (Velikonja 2008: 75, footnote 153). He is being explicitly presented as a villain in Macedonian national history, and there are flagrant attempts to ‘breakaway’ from the cultural heritage related to ‘his self and his legacy’ created in the socialist period

How did Skopje become the city of solidarity?

Findings

Conclusion