What

Remembering Yugoslavia explores the memory of a country that no longer exists.

How do people of the former Yugoslav republics remember and imagine their former homeland? In what ways does Yugoslavia remain present or is evoked in the region? How does popular memory differ from official discourses? What is Yugonostalgia?

Topics

  • Josip Broz Tito
  • Physical environment, including architecture (buildings, parks), memorials and monuments (spomenici), plaques, gravestones, infrastructure (roads, train lines), place names
  • Museums, galleries, exhibitions
  • Books, including school textbooks, history books, memoirs, fiction
  • Traditional media, including newspaper, radio, television
  • Internet websites and social media
  • Art, including pop culture, comic strips, television series, films, music, posters
  • Objects, artifacts, and ephemera, including electronics, toys, cars, foods/drinks, appliances, furniture, clothes, postcards, stamps, coins/banknotes, photo albums
  • Yugonostalgia in all its manifestations
  • Individual / personal memories and recollections, oral histories

Media

  • The website RememberingYugoslavia.com is an online note- and scrap-book for the project, including research notes, links, contemplations, travelogues, and anything else that relates.
  • The podcast features a range of stories and interviews tackling a variety of topics two to three times a month.
  • The book (upcoming) Remembering Yugoslavia: A Journey Through the Memory of a Disappeared Country is an account of my travels along the routes of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics torch. Early draft fragments are on this website, on the podcast, and on Instagram.
  • The Instagram account features photos from my travels that relate to the former Yugoslavia.
  • The newsletter is a weekly missive from my personal desk, including musings, podcast notifications, photos, tweets, travel stories, quotes, project updates, news from the region, books and music and films, and much much more.
  • The bibliography gathers sources and resources for the project.

Who

Remembering Yugoslavia is a project of Peter Korchnak.

I was born in a country that no longer exists (Czechoslovakia) and explore the memory of another (Yugoslavia). Peter Korchnak

I’m a writer.

  • My nonfiction travel writing has appeared in Narratively, Cargo Literary, Tablet Magazine, Týždeň, and Oregon Quarterly (winner of 2014 NW Perspectives Essay Contest) as well as a number of travel blogs.
  • As a freelancer, I have also written for Oregon Jewish Life, Oregon Beer Growler, and The Portland Bee.
  • My books include The Collapse of Federations: Elite Political Mobilization in the Dissolutions of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and Guerrilla Yardwork: The First-Time Home Owner’s Handbook; he also created and co-edited the collaborative volume The Portland Bottom Line: Practices for Your Small Business from America’s Hotbed of Sustainability.
  • I headquarter in Astoria, Oregon and online at PeterKorchnak.com.

Related past publications include:

  • “Roses of Sarajevo,” Compass Cultura, Issue #5, 12/15/2014 [original website / pdf of original website / pdf of current website]
  • “Tváre Belehradu” (Slovak original) [ “The Faces of Belgrade” (English translation, with new title “Belgrade’s Great Erasure,”) ], Týždeň, 45/2013, 11/4/2013 [jpg]
  • “Len futbal tu spája” (Slovak original) [ “Only Football Connects People Here” (English translation, with new title “Sarajevo Roses and the Temples of Bosnian Soul,”) ], Týždeň, 39/2013, September 23, 2013 [jpg]
  • Review of Michael E. Brown (ed.), The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, in: Southeast European Politics, Vol. V, No. 1, June 2004, pp. 103-105 [pdf – p. 10]
  • “Images of Yugoslavia: Past and Present,”The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, Vol. 3, no. 3-4, March/June 2004, pp. 82-87 [pdf ]
  • Review of Jasna Dragović-Soso, “Saviours of the Nation”: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism, London: Hurst & Company, 2002, and Ivan Čolović, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays in Political Anthropology, translated from the Serbian by Celia Hawkesworth, London: Hurst & Company, London, 2002, in: The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, Vol. 3, no. 2, January 2004, pp. 95-97 [pdf – p. 7]