Yugophiles of All Lands

All around the world, there are people with no familial or formal links to Yugoslavia who carry the country in their hearts and souls with love.

“Yugophiles of All Lands” is a new series on Remembering Yugoslavia featuring yugophiles around the world. Today, we take a look at the place from the Netherlands by way of Ireland with Stephen Eustace and from Spain with Sebas Velasco.

Listen: “Yugophiles of All Lands” (Episode #94)

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Transcript: “Yugophiles of All Lands” (Episode #94)

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PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok. Yugoblok is a membership-based global community and social network for all who celebrate Yugoslavia’s legacy, cultivate its memory, and imagine its future possibilities. It’s all Yugoslavia, all the time. Join at Yugoblok.com.

[JINGLE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your yugophile Peter Korchnak.

I have no traceable connection to Yugoslavia. No family, no ancestors, I never even went there when the country still existed. But here I am, with a podcast about it and now a business that is Yugoblok.

I am not alone in my interest and fascination and passion. All around the world, there are people with zero formal Yugoslavia links and heaps of passionate Yugoslavia love. And so, inspired by one such yugophile, I set out to talk to them. 

In a new series here at Remembering Yugoslavia, I’ll be talking to my fellow yugophiles around the world. Today, we venture to the Netherlands by way of Ireland and to Spain. 

But first, let me give a shout out to the first members of the Yugoblok community. 

Dozens of people all over the world have already joined at Yugoblok.com, but I want to especially highlight and welcome all the Yugoblok HEROes. Welcome Alex, Ana, Benjamin, Carol, Dijana, Elizabeth, Haris, James, Lisa, Margherita, Sam, Sanja, Siniša, Toby, and Valery. Yugoblok is better with you! 

[SOUNDBITE – “Yugoslav Space Program” by Sticky Keys]

Irish Blood, Balkan Heart: Stephen Eustace, a Yugophile from Ireland

STEPHEN EUSTACE: My name is Steven Eustace, born and bred in Dublin, Ireland, and 55 years old, living in the Netherlands for 23 years. And I have no connections to Yugoslavia.

PETER KORCHNAK: It was in fact Eustace who inspired this Yugophiles series. He is a longtime supporter of Remembering Yugoslavia, and one of the most active early members of the Yugoblok Community. 

So how does an Irishman fall in love with Yugoslavia?

STEPHEN EUSTACE: My mother before she got married, and she went on holidays with my aunt, her sister in law to be, to Yugoslavia. And she always talked about Yugoslavia. And she said it was her best holiday ever. And whenever we saw a bat she’d call it a šiš miš. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Literally fluttering mouse, šiš miš is the Serbocroatian word for bat.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: So everything would always be referenced to Yugoslavia for some reason. 

Now, remember, the 80s—I can’t remember how old you are—but my teenage years were in the 80s. And they brought out this song, “The Birdie Dance.” Do you know the Birdie Dance? [SINGS]

[SOUNDBITE]

But whenever that came on Top of the Pops, my mother said without fail, “They nicked that from the Yugoslavia.” Now I don’t know how true that is. But whenever I hear that, I think about my mother and I wonder, is it something which is stolen from the Balkans? I don’t know. It does have that kind of a vibe.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: It’s not. The “Chicken Dance” or “The Chicken Song” or “The Birdie Song” or “The Bird Dance” was originally called “The Duck Dance”  and the Swiss accordionist Werner Thomas composed it in the 1950s. 

[SOUNDBITE]

Eustace’s mother certainly could have heard it in Yugoslavia before the version by The Tweets took the world by the storm in 1981, but alas, it was not a Yugoslav or Balkan creation.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Towards the late 80s and even into the beginning of the 90s, Yugoslavia was becoming very popular as a holiday destination, competing with Spain. One of our neighbors they went to probably present day Croatia but then they said Yugoslavia and brought us back all of these presents. One was a slatke tanje just a bag of sweets. And then there was like this little troll doll with spiky blond hair on a big placard on it and it said “bolje biti pijan nego star” then I didn’t know what it meant. So we had that on the mantelpiece. 

PETER KORCHNAK: It means “better to be drunk than old.” Among other things it’s the title of an 1985 song by Plavi Orkestar. 

STEPHEN EUSTACE: And at the time we had like the newscasts coming out, and we needed to give this doll a name, so I decided we call the doll on the mantelpiece Slobodan Milošević, which I don’t know if that’s in good taste or not but we called this doll, Slobodan Milošević. So you can put that on my gravestone, Bolje biti pijan nego star.

And in between all of this, I moved to Italy for my studies. And we were next door to all this stuff it was going on. So I was becoming quite acutely aware of, hey, we border on Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia. 

My mother was great at say cleaning things up a mother she passed away in ‘96, shortly after the wars ended. And Slobodan Milošević, he went from the mantelpiece and straight into the bin.

PETER KORCHNAK: Then in the Netherlands, where he moved in 2003, the same year I left the Netherlands for the United States, Eustace hung out with people from Ireland, many of whom were working at the ICTY, where Milošević was on trial from 2002 to 2006. It then all came together in a strange way only real life can.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: And of course there’s a quite a significant Yugoslav, ex-Yugoslav population here so I came into contact with them again. And that kind of started getting my Yugoslavia back on my radar. 

And if we wind the clocks forward to 2015 I befriended somebody from Tuzla.

I start getting invited around to have pita krompiruša, potato pita, and it just kind of start from there. And just like in your podcast, first things first, there was always the rachio Always start with rakia, and bless yourself, and then you’d start to start your foods.

I would regularly go to the house and have the soup. There must be like, some special talent that I think that the soups that the Yugoslav mothers make is extra special. I don’t know what they put in. Maybe Vegeta, maybe that’s what it is, I don’t know.

PETER KORCHNAK: Eustace took his first trip to the former Yugoslavia in 2015.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: And I remember there was heavy guards in Tuzla airport. There used to be a direct flight from Eindhoven to Tuzla and to me, it was like this huge culture shock. Remember, it would have been just 19 years since the war. The damage was still very much visible in Lukovac and Tuzla, bullet holes everywhere. And I had a big Nikon camera. And nobody was happy. Who is this guy suddenly arriving with a Nikon camera, is he some kind of a spy? What’s he doing? So as the years progressed going back and forth between here and Tuzla, Lukovac, people started asking for the guy with the camera, Irac. 

They opened up a bar, and it was called Irish Pub in Lukovac. So I remember the first time I went in there, and there were like, you know, pravi Irac, a real Irishman. And we’re playing all this Bosnian music inside. And the guy went onto YouTube and he started putting on like, all of the old Irish music music that I know and I appreciate he seemed to know. And all of his Bosnian customers, they put down the glasses and they left and it was just me and the owner. They didn’t appreciate our music.

PETER KORCHNAK: Eustace travels to the region once or twice a year now. 

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Practically all over the Balkan region, start learning the language, kept learning the language, using DVDs, using music. And in the past couple of years, thanks to yourself, my music collection has exploded.

I think it’s the most— one of the most underrated cultures of the world. And still in Western Europe people associate that part of the world with the war, and it’s all dangerous and mines and wars and…

So people were quite surprised to hear me come back with all of these positive stories of Sarajevo, Belgrade, Tuzla, Split. 

But now people are coming around. The last time I went to Sarajevo, it was jammed. It was like Paris. The first time I went it was empty. I had the city to myself. Well, me and all the other Sarajevans. But now it’s full of tourists. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Eustace says he has Irish blood and a Balkan heart. And that Irish part cannot be denied.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: I always make it make it a point to go into an Irish bar and see who’s there. So I remember meeting some people in Doboj and they were very happy to see an Irish man. And I couldn’t buy— I wasn’t allowed to buy any drinks for myself. They kept buying me like these liters. And I was getting progressively more drunk, so while there’s a time and a place for that, I felt I had to escape. So I escaped I escaped through the back door in Doboj. So sometimes being accepted as an Irac, it does have its downfalls.

Again, the doors were opened in Irish Pub Lukovac. My friend’s family and Luke about so we’re so happy they decided that I should drink beer at 10:30 in the morning. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Of course, it’s called breakfast beer. What are you doing? 

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Breakfast beer.

But there’s only one thing which is more difficult than being gay in the Balkans and it’s been vegetarian. And I remember being force fed meat and being told that I had to have it because this was a pršut and it was very nice. 

That’s when I learned some swear words. And I told them under no circumstances where they’re ever going to try that again. So you can imagine the words I was using, so then they understood that, like, it’s not probably a good idea to give me meat.

PETER KORCHNAK: Lamb is not meat, it’s a way of life, as one waiter in Sarajevo once told me as he concluded bragging about having turned a vegetarian foreigner into a meat eater.

Now, when I talk to foreign yugophiles, the distinction between Yugoslavia and the Balkans gets a little blurry. After all, while one no longer exists, the other persists. Traveling to the region, you may rarely have a Yugoslav experience, but quote unquote Balkan experiences will abound, albeit less and less as the region develops. 

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Before I went to the Balkans, my other kind of obsession would have been Italy. And in 2019, I traveled from— overland through Italy to Yugoslavia, or former Yugoslavia. And it was very nice just to stand on the border in Nova Gorica – Gorizia, on the border between two places that I love.

If you have like an obsession with a land, you’ll get me you’ll get— or even obsession with two countries. It was a truly wonderful experience.

PETER KORCHNAK: Or take Eustace’s trip to Jajce that one time.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: We traveled by bus and the bus broke down in the middle of the mountains. So we were all out in the road, and the driver was asking if he could borrow like women’s tights or stuff like that. In the end— I don’t know how we fixed it, but they somehow improvised Balkan style. They got something from one of the passengers put it into the engine, and off we went again. So it was like, okay, Balkan experience. 

PETER KORCHNAK: My sister lives in Rotterdam so I asked Eustace for some tips.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Yeah, I just kind of get very immersive so I’ll cycle out to the shop. They’ll have usually in the Balkan shop, Rotterdam Zuid, they’ll have music playing. And then I’ll just have a little chit chat, they’ve gotten to know me now, and I’ll have a little chit chat with them. Also, there is Vinodol in the east of Rotterdam. And then there’s a restaurant as well, Balkan Deli, run by Serbs, Milan. And they have vegetarian proper vegetarian foods. So I was happy. So I go there from time to time. 

So for me, it’s just like being a immersing bring back my stash of Balkan foods. And I look for a good Balkan film. I’m a little bit obsessive like that, I’ll have to have the food and the drink and the movie. And then I’ll just immerse myself for like, whatever it is, an hour and a half, two hours watching a movie and getting right in there.

PETER KORCHNAK: It came as no surprise to me that Eustace’s favorite movie is Underground. Which, as you may recall, was my cultural gateway to the Balkans slash former Yugoslavia.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: The Balkan movies, they’re very bittersweet. You’ll have like, a lot of Balkan humor, but there’s like some very dark stuff in there as well. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Eustace now watches movies from the former Yugoslavia without subtitles and, as he writes on his Instagram, he has started to read books in BCSM. 

He suggests cookbooks are an easy way to break into a language and recommends Momo Kapor’s Vodič kroz srpski mentalitet, whose English version, A Guide to the Serbian Mentality, I’ve read and can heartily recommend.

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Once you get into a conversation, you’re five minutes in, and they suddenly put down the drink, and they’re always very surprised and they want to know, why the hell and how did I learn this language? So that’s always the question I get.

PETER KORCHNAK: So what do you what do you tell them?

STEPHEN EUSTACE: Well, I tell them about my friend from Tuzla. And I tell them that the Balkans is wonderful place and I love it there. Some of them don’t get that. 

Because I see those parallels between how Ireland used to be in the 80s and how the Balkans is now: there’s a lot of self doubt, self depreciation, and what are we good for? And wverything second rate, and I’m like, no, no, no, look, look at your wonderful food look at your wonderful landscape, you know, underrated foods, underrated wines.

Bosnia I would say for its landscape, Croatia for its spectacular beaches with the backdrop of mountains. Serbia, I’m going to go out on a limb here and I got to call it the Dublin of the Balkans, because if you want to have a good night, you will have a good night in Belgrade. 

[SOUNDBITE/BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Balkan Blues” by Sticky Keys]

Listeners of Remembering Yugoslavia, which recently turned four, include ex- and post-Yugoslavs,both in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, yugodiasporans, yugophiles like Eustace and my next guest, and all the yugocurious across the globe. What unites us is Yugoslavia, but there hasn’t been a place where we could all gather and socialize, exchange stories and ideas, organize or support each other. So I created it, and it’s called Yugoblok. 

This “global community for all who celebrate Yugoslavia’s legacy, cultivate its memory, and imagine its future possibilities” is a membership-based social network for all who have some sort of affinity toward the Southeast European country that no longer exists. At Yugoblok, you and other members with an individualized profile can share thoughts, opinions, links, photos, what have you; you can connect, socialize, and chat with each other; you can create groups around shared interests. It’s like that one big blue social network but with a singular focus and without the trolls.

Yugoblok is also the new home for both the podcast and my writing, it’s a destination guide, an event venue, a publishing platform, and a shop with original yugo-inspired designs.

It’s all Yugoslavia, all the time.

Most of Yugoblok is free, and a paid membership opens access to even more, including extended and bonus podcasts, additional features, archives, discounts, and more. Dozens of people have already signed on to be members of this burgeoning community, including Alex, Ana, Benjamin, Carol, Dijana, Elizabeth, Haris, James, Lisa, Margherita, Sam, Sanja, Siniša, Toby, and Valery.

Join them and make Yugoblok your own at Yugoblok.com.

[SOUNDBITE – “Yugoslav Space Program” by Sticky Keys]

Yugoslavia, Super Good Idea: Sebas Velasco, a Yugophile from Spain

SEBAS VELASCO: My name is Sebas Velasco, I am a painter from Spain. Yugoslavia is for me the most inspiring place in the world I’ve known so far. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Velasco is from Burgos and lives in San Sebastian, which is in Basque country and whence his mother hails. Velasco’s father is Spanish or Castilian.

SEBASTIAN VELASCO: That’s when I feel so many things about mixed marriages. And I know it’s kind of unfair to compare the situations but somehow I feel related a little bit because, as you probably know, there is also some national issues in Spain. In that sense, I don’t know what I am. 

PETER KORCHNAK: I spoke with Velasco just a few days after Spain won the European football championship. And it is in fact with football where what he calls his obsession with the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans started—he grew up watching Yugoslav-born players in the Spanish league.

SEBAS VELASCO: In the league, there was a lot of players. Mijatović, Prosinečki, and I think just the I don’t know if I could call it the beauty but the, the way this this name sounded, I think already that far was something attractive for me. 

And   actually, a couple of years later, I remember myself like going to one of these arcade rooms and in one of those there was a football video game called Virtual Striker. And for some reason, I was always choosing Yugoslavia as a team. 

PETER KORCHNAK: As with Eustace, and perhaps all of us foreigners of a certain age, the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution feature prominently in Velasco’s memory as sort of a prime mover.

SEBAS VELASCO: I was born in 1988. And I don’t have a clear memory of watching, of hearing about the war in in the news, but I do feel like it was the like, the first time as a little kid but you start feeling that the world is also a place where bad things happens. And I sometimes wondering somehow that mark my childhood somehow…

PETER KORCHNAK: First the travel…

SEBAS VELASCO: When I was like, maybe around 18, 20 years old, with my friends, we were like, looking for summer destinations for some kind of holiday, which were like, cheaper than Spain. And I remember once we went to Poland, we went also to that maybe the first time I went to former Yugoslavia, I think it was maybe to Croatia, like the typical holiday situation. 

On that time I was I was already I had started studying Fine Arts and I was also doing graffiti and murals and so on. And I remember that there that was like kind of attractive from from an artistic point of view already. Maybe the architecture, maybe the lights. The things that still are attractive to me started to be appealing and attractive as early as as those first trips. 

Also through graffiti in the first trips I made I had the chance to meet local people to make friends to engage with the local youth. After doing those trips, it was already too late to escape from the from the yugophilia or however you want to call it because I was already too obsessed about it.

PETER KORCHNAK: …then the people…

SEBAS VELASCO: I do remember that in one of these trips to one of these graffiti jams or festivals that took place in the coast of Croatia there were like Slovenians and people from Serbia, and for me to see, to see them like, gathering like that, speaking the same language and being so friendly with each other after all the all the things that you heard in the usual media right, like gave me a whole different perspective of the thing and maybe it made me a little bit more optimistic or inclined to think of Yugoslavia as a super good idea.

PETER KORCHNAK: The country brand slogan of my homeland is, “Good idea, Slovakia.” 

I have a lot to say about that but let’s not get into that whole thing right now. Let’s stick with Yugoslavia as a super good idea.

Over the years, Velasco has traveled to the former Yugoslavia frequently, to make murals, to take photographs he uses for his paintings, increasingly to visit with friends. And one place in particular stands out for him, as it does for many of us.

SEBAS VELASCO: I have gone to Sarajevo many, many times, maybe it’s the city where I’ve been the most amongst the whole former Yugoslavia. 

At the same time, I think it’s also the most inspiring for me because, even though I’m very attractive [sic] to let’s call it socialist architecture and one could say that Belgrade since it was the capital of Yugoslavia and the one who received the most migration from the village to the city and therefore it has the biggest neighborhoods for workers and the greatest examples of socialist modernism, right, like New Belgrade and so on, and I absolutely love it  and I go very often.

But somehow in Sarajevo, I feel something in the air, which makes it even more inspiring even though the socialist neighborhoods are smaller or the the buildings are not so massive as as they are in Belgrade. It’s where the where they give me the most to transform them into paintings for some reason.

PETER KORCHNAK: It’s possibly the same reason why so many featured images at Yugoblok, including the very home page, are from Sarajevo neighborhoods.

Velasco’s wife is from Poland (they met in Spain) and he travels to Poland often. He’s also taking weekly lessons to learn the language (and also BCSM). But, he says, his biggest obsession is the former Yugoslavia.

SEBAS VELASCO: It’s like somehow I have to feed my soul with former Yugoslavian stuff so I don’t know. I became addicted to ex-YU rock, I love reading both literature or or history or stuff about the Balkans. 

It’s not only some some artistic inspiration, but some obsession, some curiosity. I think also the more you you read, the more you hear, the more you learn, if you like the more you need, like, I don’t know, I guess it’s everything is so so wide and so complex, that it makes it just very, very attractive. 

That’s why I say that it’s good to hear in your program that the— or the fact that you have this program just proves that that there is something there, right, because you we are few.

PETER KORCHNAK: Other than photos he uses for his art, Velasco doesn’t necessarily collect anything programmatically, he picks up a record here and there, a football jersey, whatever catches his fancy. Still enough to raise some concern in his family…

SEBAS VELASCO: I have an older brother and in his case his obsession was or is music and death metal. 

And once my mom said something funny  like I don’t know what I did wrong with raising my kids that now I have a death metal kid and a Serbo-Bosnian kid.

PETER KORCHNAK: As to what is so inspiring about the place…

SEBAS VELASCO: When I tried to think like why this place is so inspiring for me like first I give to myself some more obvious responses, like the colors I see there. For instance, when you walk in the night through the neighborhoods, like the amount of colors you see behind the windows, it’s crazy. You don’t see that in Madrid or in Lisbon. And that amount of colors shining in the windows is also contrast in a lot with the with the grayness maybe of the concrete. And all those kind of contrasts are always very appealing for a painter in terms of colors, in terms of materials.

Leaving aside this more like aesthetic reasons, there is some other reasons which are for me more more difficult to define, but that maybe connects you more like, I don’t know, with this sense of childhood nostalgia or this kind of these kind of feelings, and I don’t know. Sometimes I think that it seems I grew up in this city called Burgos, which is like maybe a little bit old fashion and it had like this little bit a little bit eternal 80s look or 90s looking. And now when I go back there, I see some similarities between between the city I was born in and those I saw in former Yugoslavia like. Even though my city— if Belgrade is Madrid, my city would be more like to Čačak in Serbia or something.

I remember also that being a kid I there was a neighborhood also made for workers in the 70s or something and it had like some tunnels amongst the buildings. I was a little bit brutalist, or a local brutalism, let’s say, and I remember that that been been very small I was already like super attracted to these places. So maybe somehow I found in former Yugoslavia some something I saw in my childhood or…

PETER KORCHNAK: In Sarajevo in particular—

SEBAS VELASCO: —just by watching the landscape I was feeling like some some strong like, like sadness and happiness at the same time. And that cannot be only because of the colors or the materials or the shapes. I guess there must be something—it sounds very cheesy and romantic—but the more the times go by the more I think that it has to have some connection with childhood or memories or something deep in our brains, hearts, whatever. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Like me, Velasco drew cars when he was a kid. But I steered toward words and he became a painter. 

Cars, often derelict, are some of the most frequent objects you’ll find on his canvasses, and among those still it’s the Yugo.

SEBAS VELASCO: As a painter you are walking or watching with your eyes open to see what is attractive. In my case the things that are— very that have very simple forms and rectangles are that are more or less like Legos are something that you feel attracted to visually or painterly, if you like. That can make it for both for brutalist buildings and 80s cars. 

And again the colors like the way they color shine on cars make a contrast with the tires, with the wheels, with the plates. It’s like a menu of different materials to to represent the way the light reflects on the glass, I don’t know.

And yeah, again I also think that things that are from from another time or from the 80s or the 90s somehow they have some story. And these days it happens sometimes that obviously there is less and less Yugos around. Sometimes when I think like, ‘am I painting too many too many Yugos?’ And then I say no no not too many because maybe in five years you don’t see any Yugo at all in the street so maybe don’t worry about that.

I think I like when the objects and the things in life have some story around. So if everything is a little bit more rusty and has some stains. The footprints of time in the objects, it makes them more more appealing to me as an artist. 

It happens the same with the buildings. As an artist, I don’t feel particularly interested on, I don’t know, destroyed buildings but more on like subtle changes in the skin of the of the buildings through the time, like how someone repaired the windows or some of these, these more subtle changes, or I don’t know, Also in some neighborhoods, some how some people paint some little parts of the balcony in a slightly different green than the original one or small parts of daily human history in the daily objects. It’s something that that that I like to observe and to represent. 

PETER KORCHNAK: You can find and buy Velasco’s work at his website and on Instagram. If you travel in the former Yugoslavia, you can also find his murals, some made as part of street art festivals, in Sarajevo, Zenica, Rijeka, Ferizaj or Uroševac, Belgrade, Čačak… And finally an occasional exhibition, including one that’s in the works for Sarajevo next year. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: There’s a fine line between an affinity towards Yugoslavia and [towards] the Balkans; the two both overlap and can be hard to distinguish. I myself went from Yugoslavia to the Balkans and back to Yugoslavia over the course of four decades. Other regional designations are a whole another thing: I’m from the Southeast Europe generation and will rather not speak of the quote unquote Western Balkans here. But just as love has many facets and the objects of our love contain multitudes and be called a range of names, the darling that is Yugoslavia or the schmoopie that is the Balkans come in different guises. Either way, our love is pure and we’re in it till death do us part.

The other thing is the dark side, if I can call it that, of yugo or balkanophilia. As you’ve heard so many times on this show, people in the former Yugoslavia, or the Balkans more broadly, are sensitive to being objectified, otherized, exoticized. And rightly so. Balkanism is a thing. 

But there seems to be a threshold. First you’re a spy, then you objectify, and then, when somehow prove your seriousness and honesty of intent, you’re accepted, until you’re “one of us,” “Bosanac” [Bosnian man], “Balkanac” [Balkan man], “honorary Serbian,” or “more Yugoslav than anyone I know,” all of which I’ve heard said about myself.

So, if you have a yugostory to tell, get in touch. Just drop me a message at Yugoblok.com/Contact and we’ll take it from there. 

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

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this 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, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com. And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and take part in a growing community of yugophiles and others.  

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. 

The tracks “Yugoslav Space Program” and “Balkan Blues” courtesy of StickyKeys AKA Iva Janković. Check them out and inquire about gigs and commissions on Soundcloud. 

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!