Diaspora Voices 8: Pictures
Diaspora Voices is an occasional series of conversations with ex-Yugoslavs living abroad.
With Amina Horozić (Sarajevo / Detroit / Stockholm).
Listen: “Diaspora Voices 8: Pictures” (Episode #124)
Bonus Extras: “Diaspora Voices 8: Pictures” (Episode #124)
Ad-free version of “Diaspora Voices 8: Pictures” (Episode #124).
Transcript: “Diaspora Voices 8: Pictures” (Episode #124)
PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen episodes ad-free and also have access to extended and bonus episodes.
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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your host, Peter Korchnak.
Diaspora Voices is a segment on this show featuring conversations with ex- or post-Yugoslavs living abroad. It is in fact these conversations that spurred my dissertation topic at the University of Ljubljana: emancipatory nostalgia among second generation immigrants in North America.
To be sure, first generation immigrants from the former Yugoslavia experience nostalgia and nostalgia-adjacent emotions even more strongly.
Today’s yugodiasporan messaged me on Instagram to share a piece of her writing.
“Lately, I’ve found myself caught in a strange current of Yugoslavia, an undertow of memory I thought I’d long out-swum. I’ve had mixed feelings about it, as the notion of that country holds both my happiest and most painful memories.” began the piece, “On Finding Yugoslavia in a Swedish Bookshop: What old Swedish travel books taught me about home.”
What started with words on the screen ended with hugs across the virtual space. That too is what this podcast can do.
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PETER KORCHNAK: Amina Horozić was born in Sarajevo, in 1982—
AMINA HOROZIĆ: —back when, as you know, Yugoslavia still existed. And unfortunately, I do not remember the ‘84 Winter Olympics, but I do remember the war.
PETER KORCHNAK: Her family left the city early into the siege. They first lived in coastal Croatia and then moved to Detroit, Michigan.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: Essentially, by the time I turned 12, I had already lived in about three countries, which is maybe why I treat structure, order, and having a good exit strategy as a love language.
PETER KORCHNAK: Horozić describes her family background as “quite typical.”
AMINA HOROZIĆ: My dad is from the north of Bosnia, and my mom is from Herzegovina. So they met in Sarajevo University, and they stayed in Sarajevo. They loved Sarajevo. They were both economists. And they also very much loved Yugoslavia, and even after dissolution.
And my dad continued very much so to advocate for that way of living for the rest of his life. He loved Yugoslavia in a very grounded way. He was quite aware of all of its flaws very clearly, but he cherished this lived reality of what it meant to grow up in a genuinely diverse society. He believed in the idea that people from different backgrounds could build a shared life together, and he saw resilience, even after our war as something collective, something that you practice with your neighbors. None of this was revolutionary thinking to my dad, it was very normal.
PETER KORCHNAK: Horozić’s parents moved back to Sarajevo after they retired.
She writes, “ My parents still speak fondly of Tito’s days, after all, they were some of the best of their lives. After nearly 500 years, they were the first generation of free southern Slavs, finally unbound from royal or colonial landlords. Raised with agency and optimism, they believed in a better collective tomorrow under the banner of brotherhood and unity. As recently as this past July, I had long conversations with my parents, aunts, and friends about what Yugoslavia meant for them, searching for any trace of their lived experience that might have foreshadowed the gloom. I found none. As far as anyone within my circles was concerned, Yugoslavia was flawless, and what became of it and us in the 1990s was an abomination.”
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PETER KORCHNAK: Horozić is a multidisciplinary designer.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: My work has always been about making complex things feel human and coherent. I basically pay attention to how people live, and I try to make that experience better, clearer, more intentional.
My creative practice is essentially an adult version of what I’ve always done, which is to build sense out of chaos. When you’re displaced as a child, you basically learn how to create stability from whatever you have, whether it be a familiar food or a small routine, a way of arranging whatever small space you might have. And so design and writing became my way of doing that with intention, to make life more coherent when these external structures would start to disappear by using language and by making objects or trying to simplify complex systems, I try to build forms of clarity that help both myself and others feel anchored.
That’s the kind of immigrant logic in my work. I try to build stability and sense, because I know what the opposite feels like.
And alongside design, recently I started to write a Substack where I’m trying to explore how the things that we create shape how we live and what we remember.
PETER KORCHNAK: Horozić’s Substack is still fairly new, with only a couple of posts to its name as of December 2025. But you can already tell what permeates it: both a sense of loss and that of new opportunity.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: To me it feels like carrying a story whose ending everyone thinks they already know.
You know, most people frame Yugoslavia into its collapse, but if you’re from there, you, of course, carry the full arc. You have the everyday life, the culture, the contradictions, the humor, the ambition, all of the messiness and the hope that sits behind it.
And you know, a lot of us also forget that former Yugoslavia had about, I think, 20 million people, which means 20 million completely different ways of experiencing that experiment.
So I think what it did for me is it made me aware of how easily the fullness of a place gets flattened into one moment of history. So I try to pay attention to the nuance in almost everything, like the way people navigate differences, the way people solve problems, and those parts rarely make it into this global narrative.
PETER KORCHNAK: In 2018, Horozić moved from the US to Sweden. Her homeland remains close to her heart. She writes, “I’ve oscillated between identities—wondering how to even declare myself, what to embody, and whether I am, in any real sense, a Yugoslav. After all, I only was one for the first decade of my life, after which I became Bosnian, then American, and soon enough will officially be Swedish, if on paper only.”
AMINA HOROZIĆ: Even though Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore, I am so grateful that Bosnia and Herzegovina survived, even in its super complicated form.
I’m so proud of the diversity of that place. Growing up there in the 80s and especially that was the time before the internet and any sort of things that could make us connect to each other faster. It meant being exposed to different cultures, different religions, different ways of living from the very start, and that early mix made the world I would step into later feel very familiar to me and not so foreign.
I would love for people to know that Bosnia is not just this frozen war museum, it’s a very much living place with quite smart, funny but exhausted, creative people who are just dealing with very complicated structures and still making beautiful work, and like everyone else, trying to have a decent life.
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PETER KORCHNAK: Last summer, Horozić walked into an antique bookshop and stumbled upon the book, Jugoslavien, by Bent Barlach published in Malmö in 1955.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: I wasn’t expecting to find Yugoslavia in a Swedish bookshop at all. I walked into this used bookshop in Stockholm looking for vintage cookbooks, actually, because I love writing about and reading about food and doing food based events and things like that. And so I was doing some research, hoping to find some old, crusty cookbooks.
And instead, there was a Swedish travel book about Yugoslavia and it had these beautiful pictures. And so, of course, as a designer, I had to have it.
The images in this one were so striking, and I’ve never seen some of it before ever, like I’ve never seen a foreign eye in such a volume before. And so I just wanted to see the country through an eye of someone who hasn’t lived there, and to see it from an era I know so little about, from the era where my parents were young and kids, and I was kind of like hoping maybe, like, oh, maybe I’ll find grandma somewhere in the background of one of these images. And I was hoping to find maybe more images of Sarajevo during that era as well.
PETER KORCHNAK: Naturally, she looked for more of these books.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: And I ended up, ordering about five or six more, published between 1950 to 1965 and, you know, as a designer, I naturally selected the ones that looked good, so a lot of picture books. And I was so excited when they arrived.
PETER KORCHNAK: The full list of books Horozić found is at the end of her article. It includes three books published in Sweden, one in Germany, and one, by Špiro Kulišić, in English, in Yugoslavia.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: I was expecting something totally different, and the tone of each one of them was very surprising. These authors weren’t writing— you know, you have to keep in mind, this is maybe like 10 to 15 years after World War Two, which was pretty brutal in the Balkans, and none of these authors, they didn’t write about the World War Two or its aftermath. They were writing about the warmth, the hospitality and the kind of everyday aliveness that they kind of envied.
These books captured Yugoslavia, seemingly at its most optimistic, it came across as a very curious country, very forward looking. And even though it was not as advanced as what a lot of these Swedish authors were used to, it was definitely self-assured in its diversity, and it showed a country that was experimenting, trying to define itself, building…
PETER KORCHNAK: Late 1950s and particularly the 1960s was a time of rapid growth in Yugoslavia, one the fastest in the world in fact. Things were getting better and better with unprecedented speed. No wonder it was a time of optimism…
AMINA HOROZIĆ: And it reminded me of this Yugoslavia that my parents would often describe, energetic, imperfect and ambitions [sic]. So I felt that seeing, that version documented, documented by these outsiders and in such a positive light was so unexpectedly moving for me. It kind of cut through the heaviness of the usual narrative of Yugoslavia collapsing. And it reminded me that a place can have these multiple truths, and that the international memory of a country doesn’t have to be limited to its worst moment. I mean, I think your podcast is a perfect example of this.
PETER KORCHNAK: Travel writing is as much about the place being described as about the author and where they come from.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: I also found fascinating how these authors revealed as much about Sweden at the time as about Yugoslavia. For them, Yugoslavia was singing on trains and warmth in strangers, generosity without ceremony, the kind of emotional ease that Northern Europe maybe didn’t have at the time.
And the way they describe the spontaneity and the emotional openness of Yugoslavs told me a lot about what was missing in their own society at the time. It almost felt like their fascination was partially a projection. It was like Yugoslavia became a mirror for their own longing for connection and warmth.
PETER KORCHNAK: At the end of her essay Horozić includes a quote by Gustav Sandgren from his book Sköna Landet Annorlunda (The Beautiful, Unusual Land) published in 1961, that pretty much summarizes how I feel about the place, even though it doesn’t exist. Quote, “The remarkable thing about Yugoslavia is that as soon as one has left its borders behind, one begins to long for it again… as if the country possessed a secret charm that enchants without one being able to explain why.”
Indeed, good travel writing also gets the reader to reflect on their own experience.
“He was right,” Horozić reflects on Sandgren’s quote. “The longing remains, even for a reluctant me, but not for a flag, or an ideology, or a name. It’s for the sound of a coppersmith hammering away in the old town and drawing you in just to tell you an anecdote from his youth. For the smell of wild thyme riding the winds on the mountain peaks. For the sense of home before it needed translation.”
AMINA HOROZIĆ: And on a personal level, it made me aware of how very narrow my own understanding of Yugoslavia had become with time. You know, after the war, Yugoslavia, to me personally, was basically Sarajevo and Bosnia, this very small radius of experience.
And these books totally widened the frame. They reminded me that there was this entire world within that old country that I never had a chance to know, and that there’s still so much left of it for me to explore and dig into. It’s such a beautifully complex part of the world.
PETER KORCHNAK: “Maybe that’s what these books remind me of,” writes Horozić, “that every country is temporary.”
AMINA HOROZIĆ: Whenever I run into our people anywhere in the world, it has always felt like bumping into extended family.
I can’t tell you how many times, Peter, I’ve had unexpected moments of connections with people like taxi drivers, customs officers, shopkeepers around the globe simply because my name is Amina and I’m from Bosnia. It’s been one of the quiet privileges of coming from a place with so many cultural threads strung together.
And I also took away from it this fact that contextualizing our past matters. When you widen this frame beyond the collapse, at least for me, I could finally see the full humanity of what was there. It truly helped me understand my own background without the static of politics or this trauma, and it made me realize that longing for Yugoslavia maybe isn’t always longing for a state, but a longing for a way of being human.
PETER KORCHNAK: I’m not crying. You’re crying.
AMINA HOROZIĆ: This is where we hug.
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AMINA HOROZIĆ: I would like to take a moment and dedicate this episode to my dad, who passed away recently.
He was an absolute, as I mentioned earlier, fan of Yugoslavia, and again, he really believed in this idea that people from different backgrounds could build a shared life together. And I feel like what I carry from him is also this belief that unity is built through everyday acts of kindness, humor and hard work, and that communities survive because people choose each other again and again, especially when it’s difficult.
And if there’s anything I hope that the listeners can take from this or from the article, it’s that remembering isn’t only about preserving monuments, it’s about keeping alive a way of being human that’s open, that’s communal, and quietly resilient. This kind of coexistence that makes this human experience remarkable in the first place. And my Dad understood that deeply.
And I think that’s the spirit that is worth carrying forward,
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PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this Diaspora Voice episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.
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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOx5DkDkceU. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!