Time Travel: A Photographic Journey through the Yugoslav Capital Belgrade

If there is any month which reminds me on Yugoslavia it is definitely May. Starting with the International Workers Day, the country’s most significant holiday, followed by Tito’s death anniversary, his birthday and the Youth Day on the 25th of May. In honor of my Yugo-nostalgia moments, I will share three different photograph collections from this time, starting with the Brutalist architecture. Most pictures are taken during the 1960s and 1970s in Belgrade.

From the mid 1950s through roughly the 1980s, people of the Socialist Yugoslavia, especially those in Belgrade, lived in a curious, almost surreal “window” in space and time. This surreal window of space-time, offered unprecedented opportunities for personal development, exposure to the classic cultures and the newest events in the cultural scenes from all over the world, freedom of speech, gathering, activism and opportunities to travel and interact with a multitude of international people who came to Yugoslavia. European and American tourists flocked to the Adriatic coast. Yugoslavia was, by the way, the first Mediterranean country, which allowed nudist beaches. By the early 1960s, foreign observers noted that the country was “booming”, and that all while the Yugoslav citizens enjoyed far greater liberties than the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc states. Literacy was increased, the cinematic movement, known today as the Black Wave won international appreciation and medical care was free on all levels. Such special window in time and space sounds impossible to believe, all the more, in the light of the subsequent brutal and bloody civil wars of the 90s in which Yugoslavia perished.