59 Fun Facts About Yugoslavia

What does the name Yugoslavia literally mean?

Land of the South Slavs: jug is the local Slavic word for "south". One South Slav people never joined, though, because the Bulgarians kept a state of their own next door.

Under what name was Yugoslavia founded in 1918?

Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes: Prince Regent Alexander proclaimed it on 1 December 1918 for his ailing father, King Peter I, uniting Serbia with lands that had just broken away from Austria-Hungary.

Why did King Alexander rename his kingdom Yugoslavia?

Common identity: after scrapping the constitution and banning political parties in January 1929, he renamed the country that October to forge a single Yugoslav nation.

Which royal dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Yugoslavia?

Karađorđević: the dynasty took its name from its founder Karađorđe, "Black George", a livestock trader who led the Serbs' 1804 uprising against Ottoman rule.

King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was shot dead in 1934 at the start of a state visit to which country?

France: the king was shot as his car moved slowly through the streets soon after he landed, and French foreign minister Louis Barthou, riding with him, was fatally wounded too.

In 1928 a Serb deputy opened fire inside the National Assembly, fatally wounding which Croatian Peasant Party leader?

Stjepan Radić died of his wounds seven weeks after Puniša Račić opened fire on the opposition benches, and King Alexander answered the crisis by scrapping the constitution and ruling as a dictator.

King Alexander I redrew Yugoslavia into nine provinces called banovinas, almost all named after what?

Rivers: all but one took names such as Drava, Sava and Danube, the exception being the Littoral. The borders were drawn to cut across the historic lands and weaken regional loyalties.

Who headed Yugoslavia's regency for the boy-king Peter II after King Alexander's assassination?

Prince Paul ruled for the young king until army officers overthrew him in 1941. The British then interned him in Kenya, and a Serbian court cleared his name only in 2011.

What did Yugoslavia's regency sign in Vienna on 25 March 1941, provoking a military coup two days later?

The Tripartite Pact: General Dušan Simović's officers deposed the regency and declared 17-year-old King Peter of age, and a furious Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia that same evening.

Which fascist movement ran the Axis puppet state of Croatia from 1941?

The Ustaše: days after the Axis attack of 6 April 1941, Ante Pavelić's movement proclaimed an Independent State of Croatia, and its terror against Serbs, Jews and Roma killed hundreds of thousands.

Which officer led the royalist Chetnik resistance in occupied Yugoslavia?

Draža Mihailović began the war as the Allies' favoured resistance leader, but his Chetniks drifted into collaboration. Tito's forces captured him in 1946, tried him for treason and had him shot.

At which 1943 conference did the Allied leaders agree to arm and supply Tito's Partisans?

Tehran: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed there to supply the Partisans "to the greatest possible extent", and within months the Allies had dropped the rival Chetniks altogether.

At Jajce in 1943, the Partisan council planning a federal Yugoslavia gave Tito which military rank?

Marshal: the same session in the Bosnian town of Jajce set up a provisional government with Tito at its head and declared that the government in exile no longer spoke for Yugoslavia.

In which two 1943 battles did Tito's Partisans fight their way out of Axis encirclements?

Neretva and Sutjeska: the escape through the Sutjeska gorge helped persuade the Allies to back Tito instead of the royalists, and both battles were later retold in epic Yugoslav war films.

Which Yugoslav holiday on 25 May, Tito's official birthday, ended with runners handing him a relay baton?

Youth Day: Tito was really born on 7 May, yet 25 May was kept as his official birthday, and each year a baton carrying a birthday pledge from the country's young people was relayed from town to town to reach him that day.

What did Yugoslavia's new Communist-led assembly abolish on 29 November 1945?

The monarchy: King Peter II had fled the Axis invasion as a teenager in 1941 and was deposed while still in exile in London, so he never reigned again and spent the rest of his life abroad.

Yugoslavia's six republics used two alphabets, Latin and which other?

Cyrillic: Serbs wrote in a Cyrillic alphabet that a 19th-century reformer had matched letter for letter to the sounds of speech, while Croats kept the Latin alphabet.

Which two autonomous provinces lay within Serbia and gained near-republic status under the 1974 constitution?

Kosovo and Vojvodina were set apart to recognise their large Albanian and Hungarian populations, which left Serbia as the only republic with self-governing provinces inside its borders.

Which territories did Yugoslavia gain from Italy after the Second World War?

Istria, Rijeka and Zadar passed to Yugoslavia under the 1947 peace treaty. Tito's Partisans had also entered Trieste in May 1945 and claimed it, but the city was put under British and American control instead.

Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and was expelled from which communist organisation in 1948?

The Cominform had its headquarters in Yugoslavia's own capital, because Tito's party was its keenest founder member, yet within a year of its founding it expelled the Yugoslavs for defying Stalin.

After the split with Stalin, suspected pro-Soviet communists were sent to a prison camp on which uninhabited Adriatic island?

Goli Otok opened in 1949 as a secret camp where inmates quarried stone on a treeless rock and were made to beat and denounce one another. Women were held on neighbouring Sveti Grgur.

Yugoslav socialism became known for which distinctive economic principle?

Workers' self-management: after the break with Stalin, factories were handed to councils elected by their own workers, as Tito's party set out to show that Moscow's centralised model was not the only way.

The Non-Aligned Movement was formally established in 1961 at a summit in which city?

Belgrade: Tito hosted the founding summit with Nasser, Nehru, Nkrumah and Sukarno. Members had to stay out of both superpowers' military alliances, which let communist Yugoslavia lead countries tied to neither.

Tito, Nehru and Nasser signed a 1956 declaration, a step toward the Non-Aligned Movement, on which Adriatic islands?

The Brijuni islands were Tito's presidential residence, and he liked to do his diplomacy there: the talks with Nasser and Nehru were one of many summits he staged on the islands.

Which word did Yugoslavia drop from its official name in 1963, when "Socialist" was added?

People's: the Federal People's Republic became the Socialist Federal Republic in April 1963. Tito, president since 1953, was named president for life only later, under the 1974 constitution.

Tito was born in 1892 in the village of Kumrovec, in which region of northern Croatia?

Zagorje: Kumrovec lies in its hills beside the Slovenian border. The cottage where Tito was born to a Croat father and a Slovene mother was made a museum in 1953, while he was still in power.

Tito died on 4 May 1980 far from the federal capital, in a medical centre in which city?

Ljubljana: Tito died in its medical centre three days short of his 88th birthday. No successor took his place, and power passed to a collective presidency whose chair changed hands every year.

Tito is buried in a mausoleum in the capital known by what name?

The House of Flowers was built in 1975 as Tito's own winter garden, a place for him to work and rest. Five years later he was buried inside it, and the building was turned into a museum.

Tito toured the country in a luxury railway carriage known as what?

The Blue Train doubled as a rolling embassy: Tito entertained dozens of foreign leaders in its saloons and dining car, among them Queen Elizabeth II and Yasser Arafat.

As an Austro-Hungarian army sergeant in 1915, Tito was wounded and taken prisoner by which country's forces?

Russia: he was still a prisoner there when the 1917 revolutions broke out, joined a Red Guard unit in Siberia, and came home in 1920 a committed communist.

Which minister of the interior and secret-police chief was stripped of all his posts after a major falling-out with Tito?

Aleksandar Ranković had built Yugoslavia's secret police himself during the war, and in 1966 a party plenum removed him from every post and expelled him for abusing it.

The 1970-71 protests in Zagreb demanding greater civil liberties and republican autonomy are known as what?

The Croatian Spring was crushed in December 1971, when Tito forced the republic's party leaders to resign and had activists jailed, yet the 1974 constitution went on to grant many of its demands.

How did Tito respond on television to the 1968 student protests?

He said they were right: "students are right" were his words on air. That ended a week-long university strike, but in the years that followed the protest leaders were pushed out of their posts.

Yugoslavia's post-Tito presidency drew one member from each what?

Republic and province: the eight delegates took the chair in a fixed yearly order, a routine that jammed in May 1991, when the Croat whose turn it was got in only weeks later, under European pressure.

Slobodan Milošević's late-1980s rallies that brought Serbia's two provinces under his control are known by what name?

The anti-bureaucratic revolution filled the streets until the provinces' leaders resigned, and the fear that Serbia would now dominate Yugoslavia gave independence movements in other republics a boost.

Under what name did Tito's party rule Yugoslavia until it broke apart at a congress in January 1990?

The League of Communists: the Communist Party renamed itself in 1952, four years after the break with Stalin, and it came apart when two republics' delegations walked out of its last congress.

Which two republics were the first to declare independence from Yugoslavia, on 25 June 1991?

Slovenia and Croatia declared on the same day. The Yugoslav army pulled out of Slovenia after ten days of fighting, but the war that followed in Croatia cost tens of thousands of lives.

The EC-brokered deal of July 1991 required Yugoslavia's two breakaway republics to do what?

Suspend independence for three months: the pause let the federal army pull out of one republic for good after a ten-day war, but in the other the fighting grew into a full-scale war within months.

Which republic left Yugoslavia after a September 1991 referendum without any war against the federal army?

Macedonia: President Kiro Gligorov negotiated the Yugoslav army's peaceful departure by April 1992, but the new state then spent decades in a dispute with Greece, which objected to its very name.

Which Bosnian Serb leader's party obstructed Bosnia's 1992 independence referendum, in which 99.7% voted yes?

Radovan Karadžić: with almost no Bosnian Serbs taking part, just under two-thirds of the electorate voted, and within weeks his forces were at war with the newly independent state.

The rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed in 1992, consisted of Serbia and which other republic?

Montenegro: the two-republic federation dropped the name Yugoslavia in 2003, and it ended altogether in 2006, when Montenegro voted to go its own way and each became an independent country.

Which country's embassy did NATO bombs hit during the 1999 air war on Yugoslavia, killing three journalists?

China: the bombs were meant for a Yugoslav arms agency down the road, and an outdated map took the blame. Its government called that unconvincing, and crowds besieged Western embassies in Beijing for days.

Which 1995 agreement ended the Bosnian War?

The Dayton Agreement was hammered out at an American air force base in Ohio and signed in Paris weeks later. It gave a Croat-Bosniak federation 51 percent of Bosnia and a Serb republic the other 49.

What caused Slobodan Milošević's death in 2006 while he was on trial in The Hague?

A heart attack: he was found dead in his cell shortly after judges had balked at letting him travel to Moscow for treatment, so a trial that had run for four years ended without a verdict.

The 1984 Winter Olympics were held in which Yugoslav city?

Sarajevo: the Games ran smoothly, but eight years later the city was under siege, and the war left its Olympic venues badly damaged.

In which sport did Yugoslavia win its first Winter Olympic medal, at its own 1984 Games?

Alpine skiing: 21-year-old Jure Franko, fourth after the first run of the giant slalom, skied the fastest second run of all and took silver.

The Yugo hatchback was sold in America from 1985 to 1992 by which importer?

Malcolm Bricklin had already brought Subaru to America and built a gull-winged sports car under his own name before he persuaded Yugoslavia's state carmaker to adapt its little hatchback for export.

The Yugo was built by which Yugoslav car maker, whose production finally ended in 2008?

Zastava kept the Yugo in production for almost three decades. Air strikes hit its factory in 1999, yet the last car did not roll off the line until 2008.

What was the face value of the highest-denomination banknote printed during Yugoslavia's early-1990s hyperinflation?

500 billion dinars: prices were rising by more than 60 percent a day at the peak, and the spiral stopped only in 1994, when a new dinar was pegged one-to-one to the German mark.

Yugoslavia hosted football's 1976 European Championship in which two cities?

Belgrade and Zagreb: in their semi-final the hosts led West Germany 2-0 and lost 4-2 in extra time, and the final was settled by Antonín Panenka's chipped penalty, the kick that still carries his name.

Which director won his second Palme d'Or at Cannes for Underground, a 1995 epic about Yugoslavia's history?

Emir Kusturica: in Underground a wartime profiteer keeps a cellar full of partisans making weapons for 20 years by telling them the Second World War is still on, while he rises through Tito's regime above their heads.

What was the official slogan of Tito's Yugoslavia for relations between its peoples?

Brotherhood and Unity: the slogan grew out of the Partisans' war, cast as a liberation every Yugoslav people had fought for side by side, and it became a founding myth of Tito's state.

Which was the only language taught across the whole of former Yugoslavia?

Since the breakup it has diverged into four standardised varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian.

Which song served as Yugoslavia's 'temporary' national anthem for 43 years?

Hej, Sloveni: a Slovak wrote it in the 19th century to a tune almost identical to Poland's anthem. Yugoslavia kept looking for a permanent replacement and made the stand-in official only in 1988.

Which country's aircraft did Yugoslavia shoot down twice in August 1946, early in the Cold War?

The United States lost two C-47 transport planes over Yugoslavia ten days apart, the first Western aircraft shot down in the Cold War. Two years later Tito broke with Stalin and began accepting American aid.

Red Star Belgrade won the 1990-91 European Cup by beating which club in the final?

Marseille could not score in 120 minutes in Bari, and Red Star converted all five of their penalties to win 5-3. Months later they beat Chile's Colo-Colo 3-0 to become world club champions as Yugoslavia fell apart.

Which provocative Slovene industrial band was the musical wing of the 1980s art collective NSK?

Laibach took the German name for Slovenia's capital, which stirred controversy for evoking the wartime occupation. The band formed NSK with a painters' collective, a theatre group and a design studio.

King Alexander I's assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was a marksman from which organisation?

The IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, lent an experienced gunman to Croatian exiles plotting against the king. He was cut down by an officer's sabre, beaten by the crowd and dead by evening.

What did Yugoslavia do to mark the International Year of Tourism in 1967?

Suspended all visa requirements: on 1 January 1967 Yugoslavia opened its borders to foreign visitors, while hundreds of thousands of its own citizens were already free to come and go from jobs in western Europe.