Yugoslavia's Sunny Side

Karin Taylor is a historian of everyday life and popular culture in Southeast Europe and the Middle East, with recent research focusing on Southeast Europe in socialism.Hannes Grandits is a Professor at the Department of History at the Humboldt-University in Berlin and a former senior associate for Southeast European history at the University of Graz.

"The wars that ended Yugoslavia obscured the country's successes during its 1945-91 existence, and few now recall that from the 1960s through 1990, Yugoslavia was a major destination for tourists from Western Europe. The country also had a well-developed domestic tourist industry. Thirteen authors cover topics ranging from broad considerations of tourism and the making of socialist Yugoslavia through specific analyses of youth work brigades, the political tourist shrine created out of Tito's birthplace, cross-border shopping in Italy by Yugoslavia tourists, and an insightful analysis of the Sarajevo Olympics as both unifying spectacle for Yugoslavia's people and source of contention between the politicians of its constituent republics. The changes in Yugoslav tourism from free vacations at "workers' resorts" to market-driven transformation of small, privately owned "weekend houses" into rental cottages is also covered well. In the end, it seems that tourism contributed to the successes of Yugoslav socialism, but also to the increased perceptions of Yugoslavs in the 1980s that the country was failing to deliver on promises of the good life. A major contribution to studies of Yugoslavia, tourism, and cultural history. Summing Up: Highly recommended."

• Acknowledgments JOHN K. WALTON, Preface: Some Contexts for Yugoslav Tourism History KARIN TAYLOR & HANNES GRANDITS Tourism and the Making of Socialist Yugoslavia: An Introduction PART I: “HOLIDAYS ON COMMAND” IGOR DUDA Workers into Tourists: Entitlements, Desires, and Realities of Social Tourism in Yugoslav Socialism RORY YEOMANS From Comrades to Consumers: Holidays, Leisure Time, and Ideology in Communist Yugoslavia IGOR TCHOUKARINE The Yugoslav Road to International Tourism: Opening, Decentralization, and Propaganda in the Early 1950s PART II: TOURISM AND THE “YUGOSLAV DREAM” NEVENA .KRBIC ALEMPIJEVIC & PETRA KELEMEN Travelling to the Birthplace of “The Greatest Son of Yugoslav Nations”: The Construction of Kumrovec as a Political Tourism Destination KARIN TAYLOR My Own Vikendica: Holiday Cottages As Idyll and Investment MAJA MIKULA Highways of Desire: Cross-Border Shopping in Former Yugoslavia, 1960s–1980s PART III: TOURISM ECONOMIES IN TRANSFORMATION KARIN TAYLOR Fishing for Tourists: Tourism and Household Enterprise in Biograd na Moru DRAGAN POPOVIC Youth Labor Action (Omladinska radna akcija, ORA) As Ideological Holidaymaking IGOR DUDA What To Do at the Weekend? Leisure for Happy Consumers, Refreshed Workers, and Good Citizens KATE MEEHAN PEDROTTY Yugoslav Unity and Olympic Ideology at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games SYNOPSIS PATRICK HYDER PATTERSON Yugoslavia As It Once Was: What Tourism and Leisure Meant for the History of the Socialist Federation, List of Contributors, Index