[Redux] The Origin Story of Remembering Yugoslavia

Remembering Yugoslavia the podcast is FIVE years old! A gift to you in celebration of our 5th birthday: a reverse episode with me as the guest expanding on the podcast’s origin story. Plus travel, socialism, and Yugonostalgia.

With Peter Korchnak.

Listen: “[Redux] The Origin Story of Remembering Yugoslavia” (Episode #115)

Bonus Extras: “[Redux] The Origin Story of Remembering Yugoslavia” (Episode #115)

Extended, ad-free version of “[Redux] The Origin Story of Remembering Yugoslavia” (Episode #115).

Transcript: “[Redux] The Origin Story of Remembering Yugoslavia” (Episode #115)

[JINGLE]

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.

The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast has turned five! Over the course of running the show, I’ve been asked many questions, but there’s one that towers over the rest. Everyone wants to know why. Why did I start the podcast, why does someone who isn’t from Yugoslavia make a podcast about it, why why why. It is the best question, really. 

For the podcast’s fifth birthday, I’m putting out some special treats. There’s the redux of our very first episode, and what you’re about to hear is another one. 

The why question swirled almost as soon as I started the podcast back in 2020. Episode 3, “The Origin Story of Remembering Yugoslavia,” released along with two others on the launch date, was an attempt to answer it in brief.

But about six months into it, I thought I’d offer a longer, more exhaustive version. My wife, Lindsay, had the idea to do a reverse episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, where I’d be the guest on my own show, and she the interviewer. We recorded the interview. I didn’t know the questions in advance, so I ended up rambling a lot, which made the editing a particular challenge. 

But I soon changed my mind; after all, the podcast was about Yugoslavia, not me. 

Reflecting on the five-year journey, I thought this would be a great time to finally make that reverse episode, with some overdubs, and with it both answer the big question and give you something special as well. It actually holds up pretty well, if I may say so myself.

And yes, there is an extended version too, available to Yugoblok members, that is everyone in a member-supported global community and information hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Become a member at Yugoblok.com to access it, as well as all other extended and bonus episodes, and with your membership contribution will help the podcast keep going and make it (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to everyone. It really is the best podcast birthday present you can give me and yourself. Thank you and…enjoy!

[SOUNDBITE]

LINDSAY SAUVE: Tell us about your life and how you came to create this podcast.

PETER KORCHNAK: I was born in 1976 in what was then Czechoslovakia, which is obviously also a country that doesn’t exist anymore. 

Czechoslovakia, in the part that’s now Slovakia, I should add.

And when I was a child, Yugoslavia was always a distant dream or a paradise that I could never go to. My family would vacation  around Slovakia in we went to the Soviet Union once to, you to the Ukraine, to Odessa. That was a car to car road trip. We went on a train trip to Bulgaria, to the Bulgarian coast, but never Yugoslavia. 

Some of my friends did, and I always was kind of, if not jealous of them, then maybe a little mad that we as a family couldn’t go or never went. And I was always led to think that it was a financial matter, only later to find out that it was more of a political or administrative matter of my parents not being able to obtain a permit to go to Yugoslavia. You had to apply for permits to go abroad, and they couldn’t get one to Yugoslavia. 

Something I didn’t know then, that I know now, Yugoslavia was a popular route for people to emigrate. So to leave to the west, out of Czechoslovakia. And because my on both my parents side, some of the some distant relatives, had emigrated to the USmy parents were, I guess, in a little more of a risk category so they could never obtain a permit. 

I don’t know the details of the story, but back then, I was mad at my parents. I thought they were punishing me for something which I couldn’t understand, what? Because I was a good student. 

LINDSAY SAUVE: Other than this general longing for this place that you couldn’t go to, what was Yugoslavia to you as a child?

PETER KORCHNAK: We didn’t really have a whole lot of products. I don’t think, well, a whole lot of cultural production, like we may have from Hungary, from Poland, from Soviet Union. You know, we didn’t have Yugoslav cartoons. We didn’t have, I don’t know Yugoslav music. What I did know was there were, there was there were these tunes, what’s called zabavna musica, or novokomponovana muzika, so new, newly composed folk music, so pop music and newly composed folk music that were kind of very, what we used to call typical of Yugoslavia. And it was, again, something that, oh, this is, this is the land that produces this music. And it was always kind of very sunny. The music was always very positive and upbeat, and again, almost forbidden, distant, unattainable, but very kind of representative of that country of Yugoslavia. 

[SOUNDBITE]

The other thing was ice cream. Obviously we had ice cream in Czechoslovakia, and we had different kinds. But all the kids, all my friends or acquaintances or whatever, who went to Yugoslavia, they could not stop talking about how great the ice cream is and how you know how superior it is to what we have to in in Czechoslovakia, even the famous ice cream place, Aida in downtown Košice, where I’m from, the town I’m from, could not compare. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Finally—

…there were these movies about Winnetou, the Native American, or Indian, as we call them, chief, who befriended a German immigrant, Old Shatterhand, based on books by Karl May who was German and turns out, which I don’t know if I knew at the time, he never actually went to the Wild West but basically, they were all wild west stories. And there were these series of movies, a German production, and they were super popular in the 80s. You know, we kids read books, but the movies were just super popular. 

Well, they were predominantly filmed in then Yugoslavia. These Westerns were actually filmed in Yugoslavia. I want to go because I love these movies. So we could see in our own living rooms what that land looks like, even if we can’t go, I can’t go.

LINDSAY SAUVE: I’m tickled by part of that story that it’s so reflective of what I know about you and your personality, this idea of you as a child being told that you can’t go somewhere or do something, and then throughout your life, making it not just a place you do end up going, but your your passion project, I mean, all the way to making a podcast about it, which is— that just tickles me that somebody told Peter Korchňak that he couldn’t go somewhere, and then he made a life out of going there and studying it and talking about it. So I think that’s really special.

PETER KORCHNAK: I’m tickled that you’re tickled first of all. That’s an interesting observation I never thought of it this way. Am I petulant?

Inat is an untranslatable Serbo-Croatian word that means roughly spite but with an element of hard-headedness, defiance, even prickliness. Reflecting on Lindsay’s tickled comment a few years later, it hits me. Remembering Yugoslavia is an inat project. 

Moving on…

I was 13 when the Velvet Revolution happened in Czechoslovakia (the overthrow of the Communist Party-led regime). And of course, 1991 rolls around,  I start going to high school, and Yugoslavia starts falling apart. And so, of course, every day, or, you know, often, we see in the media back then, the horrific things that are happening in that country. And you go from being a child, thinking Yugoslavia as a paradise to being a teenager seeing it’s all coming to a very violent, ugly end. It was a very strange time. 

And of course, in the 90s, Czechoslovakia itself was headed towards dissolution, and so there was a bit of a fear. I mean, of course, everybody thought we’re peaceful people, we’ve never fought each other or anything like that, but you just never know. People didn’t think that all these horrific things could be happening in 20th century Europe. Czechoslovakia then disintegrated peacefully, which to this day is actually a point of envy for ex-Yugoslavs. 

When I went to university in Bratislava, in the capital of Slovakia, Yugoslavia, kind of caught up with me when I saw the film Underground, Emir Kusturica’s probably one of his most famous movies. And of course, now I know there are some challenges to say the least with the film. It really kind of, if not brought back then inspired some sort of a drive to know more, to be more connected to the place. 

PETER KORCHNAK: This would’ve been in 1996 or 7.

And you know, me being a then still, a repressed, repressed teenager. There was a, there was something, there was something very appealing about that emotional piece.

There was obviously no way to go to Yugoslavia anymore, because it didn’t exist. And I was quite upset when Czechoslovakia fell apart. 

Czechoslovakia, my country where I was born and raised doesn’t exist anymore. The country that I could never go to, doesn’t exist and it doesn’t exist anymore. So it was, it was just a weird, weird feeling.

Towards the end of my studies in Bratislava, I got involved with a pan-European organization of economics or business studies students. And one of the events that happened within that organization were these conferences you could go to as a member of the organization. So I went to one in Timisoara, Romania. 

And I met a group of Serbs, Serbian students of journalism. And you know, we hit it off, and we became fast friends, and we’re still friends. And you know, that kind of drip fed the Yugoslavia pipeline, so to speak. And they visited me in Bratislava when my chapter of the organization held a conference—  We had a lot of fun.

And then, I went to study in Budapest at the Central European University. Then came to the time to do my master’s thesis, and it had to be comparative, and so it was on a natural at that by that point, to compare the dissolutions of my country, Czechoslovakia, with that of Yugoslavia. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In graduate school, I met Lindsay, fell in love, and ended up moving to the United States. Not part of the plan, to say the least.

Then I set Yugoslavia aside a little bit, as I like to say, life intervened…

I was preoccupied with making a new life in the United States, and as part of that—and I think every immigrant goes through that, or most of us, anyway—nostalgia came up, came up as a as a feeling, as a state of mind. And I’ve actually heard it said or written that it is that nostalgia is a permanent state of mind of an immigrant. 

I felt nostalgic for the place I’m from, for the country that no longer exists, for home, or as I was making home here, obviously, for home, or for youth. You know, I was turning 30, or in my 30s, and that’s, of course, an important time in a human life. 

I started, exploring that on just through my writing, which is always a good therapy for me. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In 2011, I started and ran for four years, the blog American Robotnik, where I aimed to document the immigrant experience. 

Amidst those explorations I stumbled upon the then-lively Balkan music and dance scene in Portland, Oregon, where I lived at the time. On Friday the 13th, 2012, I saw at a small local venue the local brass band Krebsic Orkestar absolutely slay with their mix of traditional Balkan brass music, tracks from Underground, and some modern tunes adapted for brass music.

So I found that community, and I became intrigued. What makes, what makes these people, Americans, later, I found out that none of them had any personal, familial connection with the Balkans, not just people who were playing the music in the band, but also people who were dancing, you know, there were a lot of kolo, you know, circle dancing going on. So I was intrigued with what drives this phenomenon, what drives these people to to be so involved and so engaged, and so attracted by Balkan music, and I kind of one thing led to another, and here we are, Yugoslavia [LAUGHTER]

PETER KORCHNAK: There is in Portland a Balkan music and dance festival called Balkanalia. 

That same year I went for a day to check it out, and at some point I found myself at the venue’s loading dock sitting around a table drinking rakija with a bunch of Balkanophiles and people from the Balkans. Then someone, I think it was big Bulgarian man named Vesko, started belting out the song that ended up being the end-credits tune of this podcast, Yugoslavijooo, Yugoslavijooo—and I was hooked again.

In 2013, I visited Serbia for the first time in a decade, with a detour to Sarajevo, as part of a bigger, round-the-world trip. It was then that I realized how much I missed the place. 

Then I turned 40 and—

PETER KORCHNAK: I realized that there’s a lot that I kind of left on the table or left unexplored in terms of Yugoslavia, in terms of exploring that whole area, that whole topic. 

And I realized, okay, there’s a whole another world, you know, 15, almost 20 years, I guess later that I want to explore, relating, or kind of overlaying the exploration of nostalgia and exploration of memory, how people remember what doesn’t exist anymore, the country that doesn’t exist anymore. And so I just kind of decided, okay, this is something that, one, I want to pick back up because I miss it; two, there’s a lot more to explore; and three, this could be something that could do, I want a passion project…

And there’s also something very therapeutic about all this. You’ll recall that at some point I started writing a memoir of growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, and when I realized that maybe there wasn’t enough of a story for a memoir, you suggested, oh, why don’t you make it a novel? And that way you can, you know, make certain things up, which I did, and it worked, that worked, for a while, worked out for a while, but then at some point, I couldn’t do it anymore because it just became too personal, even though I was able to remove myself and it was, this was about a character with a lot of the made up stuff that I put into the story, it was just way too personal, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it so pivoting or shifting to Yugoslavia, so from exploring my own self in a country that no longer exists to a different country that no longer exists, there’s something therapeutic about it, where I can explore my own issues, if you will, or my own emotions about my own life and my own problems  through exploring those of another place. And so I don’t know if there’s a psychological term for this, or if it’s just denial of, not wanting to deal with my own thing, but it was the next best thing, so to speak. 

I come from a place, from a country, from family, you know, where we didn’t really, or don’t really, go deep into things, into emotions. And so this allows me to go there without going there necessarily, or go at it from a different angle or from a different perspective. 

LINDSAY SAUVE: You’re able to connect on an emotional level and still feel okay and still feel safe. So that makes perfect sense.

PETER KORCHNAK: And what’s funny is that, a lot of people, when asked what they miss about Yugoslavia, they do say they miss the safety, the sense of security that they had in those times in that life. So it all kind of connects back to itself.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: It was my immigrant nostalgia that rebooted my fascination with the former Yugoslavia. And Yugonostalgia is a major topic on the podcast. In the extended episode, Lindsay and I converse at length about Yugonostalgia, and why I feel at home in the Balkans. Join Yugoblok as a member to listen.

I launched Remembering Yugoslavia in 2017, and conceived of the travel book Remembering Yugoslavia: Journeys in Search of a Lost Country, which alas is still in the works, and the podcast in 2019. At the end of that year, and the beginning of 2020, I took an 8-week road trip around the former Yugoslavia to gather material and interview people for the podcast. Nearly 6,000 kilometers, in a Volkswagen Polo and Škoda Fabia took me around Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Slovenia (I covered Montenegro, Kosovo, and North Macedonia on subsequent post-pandemic trips). 

LINDSAY SAUVE: So one of the things you’ve said, especially coming back from your visit to the Balkans last year, for two months, just before the world locked down, you came back and you shared with me that this is a place that you feel connected to, that the people of of the Balkans are your people. You feel like one of them. Why is this? What? What about this part of the world, or this culture feels like home to you?

PETER KORCHNAK: I’m not from there. I was not born, I was not raised, I was not educated, I did not work. So anytime I go anywhere in former Yugoslavia, anywhere in the Balkans, I’m a visitor, I’m a traveler, I’m an observer, reporter, scholar, whatever you want to call it. And so there’s a certain kind of freedom that that brings. I’m not encumbered by the realities of everyday life. 

So it really comes down to freedom of movement, of being, of just doing my thing.

Whatever answer I give, it comes very closely, or dangerously close to Orientalizing or balkanizing, the place, right?

Oh, I come from a place that’s that’s very rational, you know, very structured or repressed even. And here’s a place that’s free and emotional, and, you know, unencumbered by those things. And so, you know, you take a repressed little boy and you put him in a place where he can just run wild… 

[SOUNDBITE]

LINDSAY SAUVE: As an American who was a teenager in the 90s, a young teenager in the 90s, I associated this part of the world with civil war and genocide. I know that this podcast isn’t necessarily about those events in the 90s, but do you see this podcast as contributing [in] any way to the country, like the healing of that experience that country had, or maybe even like, how have you seen the people that you’ve interviewed like connect back to that time?

PETER KORCHNAK: When I was deciding on my topic for my master’s thesis at Central European University,, this was 2000 right? The war, or the wars, all of that was fairly recent, and a lot had been written on these wars. So basically, everybody focused on the wars, right? The whole world, knew the area as the place where these civil wars,  ethnic conflict happened, genocide, etc, very serious matters, very tragic, obviously. But I felt that it was something that was overstudied or overwritten about, over analyzed and the issue of the dissolution of the country, which actually happened, technically speaking, happened before the wars broke out, and the whole process had started, you know, many years, if not decades before. And of course, some would argue that the whole country was built on shaky foundations and was destined to disintegrate anyway, which I don’t believe. So I was trying to look at what came before, and those issues of politics and economics and so on.

Memory studies tend to focus on the memory or recollection of negative or of tragic events, right? How do people remember tragic events? Again, very important, very crucial, to our understanding of ourselves as humans, to understanding of our societies, to healing, as you said, to justice, to reconciliation, to all those things. But I wanted to look at something that fewer people seem to be looking at, and that is recollections of positive, what came before, in the case of Yugoslavia, what came before the tragic events, right? 

So talking about what was good, what a lot of people want to talk about, a lot of people appreciate. It’s sometimes kind of odd, you know, like getting the words of appreciation from people, or words of thanks. You know, thank you for working on this, thank you for talking to me or us about this, thank you for talking about Yugoslavia, the good that we had before all these terrible wars, before all the death and killing and suffering. So in that sense, you know, it contributes to highlighting what was good, highlighting the values that I mentioned, highlighting the positives of that country, of that system, maybe even,  of that regime, which is not not my intention, necessarily, but it just comes out of those conversations. 

At some point, I did compare the whole matter to a marriage, you know, it was a good marriage. It was a long marriage, and it ended terribly. And that’s what people tend to focus on. Okay, Yugoslavia may have been great, but it fell apart violently, and so it was bad. That’s not necessarily what I’m after. I want to remember the good. 

I tend to ask people about the good. I tend to speak with people about their recollections and what’s good. At the same time, the whole project is evolving, or has evolved.

LINDSAY SAUVE: That’s kind of what I was getting at. That just like human beings aren’t defined by the traumas that happen to them, or the traumas that they experience, that countries are not necessarily defined by their traumas. I am just considering what’s going on in the United States right now. I’d love the opportunity to share with the rest of the world that America is not just about anti-immigration and, you know, insurrection at the Capitol, and like these stories that the rest of the world is hearing about America doesn’t define us. And so, I see your podcast as contributing to sharing a different narrative about a place that people may have one experience with.

So what themes are emerging from this podcast that might be relatable to people. 

PETER KORCHNAK: I can’t believe that I’m actually saying this, but I’m saying it. And I say that I can’t believe that I’m saying it because I come from a socialist system that was completely different than Yugoslavia’s socialist system. Czechoslovak socialism was completely different from Yugoslav socialism. So one thing, one takeaway would be, there are different types of socialism, and they’re not all bad. And I hear you laughing, because you know that this is not a sentence that you ever expected me to say. (And she’s nodding for the record.)

So one thing that I’ve heard people appreciate about Yugoslavia was that despite all the faults, despite all the negatives, despite all the errors made, etc. it was a system, or it was a reality in which powers that be were attempting to make progress, were attempting to build something better, were attempting to not just do something different but something better. So constant attempts, failed as many of them may have been, to improve things, improve the system, improve the workings of the system. What people miss is that this is not the case anymore today. 

It’s the theme of, historically there was a way to work together to make something better, to make a better world. And you know, it sounds very lofty and very blah, but I would say that an underlying maybe current of conversations I’ve been having with people, has been that. It is presenting an alternative that is a historically based alternative, but that has and carries lessons for us today. You know, obviously no one’s trying to restore Yugoslavia, no one is trying to rebuild it or bring it back together. And that’s not the point. The point is that there is an alternative, historically lived alternative that has a lot of lessons for us today.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: I launched Remembering Yugoslavia in 2017, and conceived of the travel book Remembering Yugoslavia: Journeys in Search of a Lost Country, which alas is still in the works, and the podcast in 2019. At the end of that year, and the beginning of 2020, I took an 8-week road trip around the former Yugoslavia to gather material and interview people for the podcast. Nearly 6,000 kilometers, in a Volkswagen Polo and Škoda Fabia took me around Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Slovenia (I covered Montenegro, Kosovo, and North Macedonia on subsequent post-pandemic trips). 

LINDSAY SAUVE: Is there a story from that trip that represents the aha moment of like, Yes, this is why I’m doing this, and this is why I’m making this my passion project.

PETER KORCHNAK: So as I drove around, obviously spent a lot of time by myself in the car, I listened to the radio a lot, but I also did not a lot. I did think about, Okay, I am spending so much time, out of my work, out of my life, away from you, away from home, and so much money to do this. What am I doing, driving around these, some of these remote areas, or walking around the cities, or whatever. Definitely there were moments where I was like, What the hell am I doing?

So the reason that I went when I went, was that I wanted to go to the celebration of Yugoslavia’s birthday in the town of Jajce in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Yugoslavia was founded in 1943. And I was leaving the town, going to the next town. I had to go over this hill, and it was a kind of a windy road, windy, super tiny, you know, narrow road. It was like, up and up and up and up, winding, winding, winding. And the sun was behind  the cloud. And then it was actually at that exact same time that I was got to the point, okay, I’m, what am I doing? What am I driving around for? And then the sun came out from behind the cloud, and this whole land just kind of became this sun drenched, winter land, and I crested the hill and on the other side, there was another valley and another much, much taller mountain range that was snow capped. And I thought, that’s what it is, it’s just coming out into the sun, or, you know, seeing what’s on the other side. That felt like, Okay, this is why.” 

That, I guess, is also part of the answer to, you know, what feels like home. It is that I can feel those things about that place that I can’t, or I think that I can’t, or feel that I can’t, or I’m unable to, rather, I’m inadequate to about my own and so going up that hill was like that, like, Okay, I’m here because here I can feel things.

PETER KORCHNAK: Later on that first road trip, another experience helped me answer the why question from a different angle. You’ve heard this story in that first origin story episode, here it is in full. 

[BACKGROUND MUSIC]

To get from Podgorica, Montenegro, to Višegrad, Bosnia, I decided to take a road less traveled, crossing the border at Bobotovo Groblje, so I could stop at Tjentište to visit the Sutjeska memorial. I didn’t gas up in Montenegro thinking I’d do so on the Bosnian side, in the first town called Gacko. It turned out the crossing was only open to locals and I had to double back an hour on a narrow, shoulderless, windy road. Surely I’d run out of gas.

In the Krstac hamlet, which comprised a handful of residences and appeared completely empty, I rang a bell and honked my horn at the biggest house I could find hoping to buy some gasoline. A cheerful, jolly man emerged from the house, one of those characters that seems to always be in a good mood. I told him the story, and he said yes, I always keep gasoline around the house for the generator for the winter. “We have to have everything out here in the middle of nowhere.” He grabbed an empty 2-liter Coca Cola bottle, filled it up with petrol from a canister, and poured it into my car. He’d worked at the thermoelectric power plan across the border for 37 years, he told me, and in the times of Yugoslavia there was no border. I tried to give him a few euros but he refused and said this is a goodwill gift from Montenegro, and may we, like Slovakia, be in the European Union soon so that again there are no borders.

Driving away, I flicked through the radio stations, and before a news segment on Radio Sveta Gora, a religious station, a man with a soothing preacher’s voice told a story that turned out to be essentially a parable for my own journey. 

At a big gathering of all animals, ant announced he’s going to go to Jerusalem. This caused a stir. One by one, animal after animal spoke up saying it was a bad idea. The road was long and risky, filled with obstacles, challenges, and perils, and even the biggest ones of them, the elephant and the lion, wouldn’t think of going to Jerusalem, so why would he, the littlest guy, want to go? Finally, it was the ant’s turn again. And he said, I know the road to Jerusalem is long and risky and full of obstacles and perils, but, he said, I want to die on the way to Jerusalem.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this birthday episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening and sticking with me all these years. I couldn’t do this without you. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. 

And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and become part of a growing community of post-Yugoslavs, yugodiasporans, and yugophiles. Yugoblok.com/Join/ is the place to be.

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić; interludes by Sticky Keys. Special thanks to Lindsay Sauvé and Heather Van Valkenburg.

I am Peter Korchňak.

Ćao!