Zagreb Trade Fair
In the inaugural episode of Visiting Yugoslavia, we tour a gem of modernist industrial architecture.
With Sonja Leboš and Donald Niebyl.
Listen: “Zagreb Trade Fair” (E1)
Zagreb Trade Fair
Nov 18, 2024 • 17:30
A gem of modernist industrial architecture.
Transcript: “Zagreb Trade Fair” (E1)
PETER KORCHNAK: The Visiting Yugoslavia podcast is brought to you by Yugoblok.
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Now let’s get on the road.
[JINGLE]
PETER KORCHNAK: Welcome to Visiting Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show taking you on a trip around a country that no longer exists. I’m your guide Peter Korchnak.
This is the first episode of the Visiting Yugoslavia podcast. It’s a spin-off of sorts from Remembering Yugoslavia, where I recently released a 100th episode. As you can hear on that show, read in my writing, and see from my photos on Instagram, I love traveling around the former country.
As I produced the mother show, I heard you, Yugoblokniks, and other listeners frequently ask for location-specific stories, reporting on various locations around the former country as well as travel recommendations and advice.
And as I continue to write about the region from the distance, I research places, their peoples and histories quite a bit.
So Visiting Yugoslavia is where it all comes together. Call it armchair travel, call it audio guides, in each episode we’ll do a deep dive into a single place and explore and uncover as much as we can in the way that only I can—nerdy AF. Put another way, it’s like Remembering Yugoslavia but for travel.
The place we visit aren’t always going to be the obvious spots you might expect to hear about, as you’ll find out in today’s episode. Often a visit there will last less than its episode run. You also won’t necessarily hear stuff that you can find by googling. But they’re all fascinating places, recommended to visit, and definitely worthy of a listen here on Visiting Yugoslavia.
So, let’s put on our walking shoes and get going.
[SOUNDBITE]
Our first excursion is to Zagrebački Velesajam (Zagreb Trade Fair). It is a gem of modernist industrial architecture that’s protected in whole as a cultural heritage entity, and several individual pavilions and other structures there enjoy additional protection as monuments. It was a symbol of Yugoslav ambition that’s now in today’s independent Croatia a neglected open-air museum.
Here to keep me company on the tour is Zagreb native, Sonja Leboš.
SONJA LEBOŠ: As a kid in the 70s, I used to go to skate there. My parents used to bring me there because there is a skate link in one of the pavions, Ivan Vitić Pavilion.
PETER KORCHNAK: Leboš is a cultural and urban anthropologist in Zagreb, and the founder and director of the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research, which has been working to revitalize the Fair for the future.
SONJA LEBOŠ: Then I started to dig into the history, and I realized how fantastic the place is. Its history is really something.
PETER KORCHNAK: Some of Yugoslavia’s most notable architects were involved in the design of the complex and individual pavilions.
DONALD: Most pavilions at the Zagreb Trade Fair were built in the 1950s and early 1960s, as collaborations between exhibitors, be it countries or enterprises, architects, and construction companies.
PETER KORCHNAK: Also with me at the Zagreb Trade Fair is Donald Niebyl, the creator of Spomenik Database.
Don and I explored the Zagreb Trade Fair complex together on a scorching May day last year. He later published a lengthy article about the place at his website, with detailed information about each pavilion.
DONALD NIEBYL: Many were built fast but often ended up quite significant architecturally as the Velesajam was a platform to reflect the state of the contemporary architectural scene and a laboratory for new architectural forms and viewpoints. Pavilions built in the 1970s tended to be less significant, and construction was completed in the late 1980s.
PETER KORCHNAK: Most importantly—
SONJA LEBOŠ: The Zagreb Fair was actually used as geopolitical laboratory.
PETER KORCHNAK: Yugoslavia pursued its own path to socialism, straddling the line between Eastern and Western Blocs. It was a founding member of the Non-aligned Movement during the Cold War’s height.
PETER KORCHNAK: The Zagreb Trade Fair doubled as an arena where the two opposing blocs competed with displays of architecture, technology, consumer products, and industry.
DONALD NIEBYL: With the Zagreb Trade Fair, Yugoslavia wanted to demonstrate the strength of its fast-growing economy and international orientation, on its own path to socialism between East and West and able to do business with both.
PETER KORCHNAK: For some time the Velesajam was a rare place where the US and USSR were present at the same event.
PETER KORCHNAK: Don and I were both so fascinated with the place, we joined forces and, using the VoiceMap platform, created a self-guided audio walking tour, “Monuments to Modernism: Exploring the Rise and Decline of the Zagreb Trade Fair.” Some of the stories you’ll hear today are excerpted from the tour, which is available at Yugoblok.com/Travel.
DONALD NIEBYL: Through the 1950s and 60s, the fairgrounds became a testing ground and showcase of mid-century modernist architecture, a symbol of Yugoslavia’s progress and prosperity, as well as a tool to educate Yugoslavia’s citizens about modern living and future lifestyles.
PETER KORCHNAK: The complex was built on a decades-long tradition of trade fairs in Zagreb and was the largest fairground facility in socialist Yugoslavia, with nearly half a million square meters of exhibition space.
DONALD NIEBYL: The construction of the Zagreb Trade Fair complex began in the mid-1950s, at the initiative of Mayor Vječeslav Holjevac as part of the city’s expansion across the Sava River into New Zagreb, Novi Zagreb.
SONJA LEBOŠ: Zagreb is one of those cities who has had a really long history of fairs back to the medieval times
There were ideas to urbanize this area that they were just meadows there and some villages. And Zagreb Fair was, let’s say, one of the proto constructive generators of this New Zagreb, the new socialist city.
PETER KORCHNAK: Zagrebački Velesajam opened on September 7th, 1956 with Yugoslav President Tito cutting the ribbon (part of the Fair was held at the old site on Savska cesta). TV coverage of the event was the first live television broadcast in Yugoslavia.
[SOUNDBITE]
SONJA LEBOŠ: In the 50s, Zagreb fair catalyzed something that we nowadays call cultural tourism. So people, visitors of the Zagreb Fair were invited also to, for example, visit Zagreb museums, Zagreb art in public space. And of course, theaters, there were cultural events organized by the Zagreb fair and so on.
Zagreb Fair was also a producer of industrial films, really fantastic films. I found eight so far. In the Chinese Pavillion, there was also cinema, 24/7 working cinema during those big fairs in spring and autumn [at] the end of the 50s and beginning of the 60s.
So it really, I think for many people who saw it, it just gave a totally different kind of horizon of imagination, how it was, and of course, that automatically brings us, but how it could be.
[SOUNDBITE]
DONALD NIEBYL: At its peak, in the mid-1960s, the Zagreb Trade Fair saw annually nearly 2 million visitors, with over 6,000 exhibitors from over 50 countries participating, making it amongst the largest such fairs in the world.
SONJA LEBOŠ: All purpose fairs, fairs where you could see everything, like they say, from needle to the locomotive, for example the U.S. in 1959 exhibited even fighter planes; there is a beautiful picture of one red Spitfire on the terrace of the US pavilion.
PETER KORCHNAK: Both the US and USSR ended up building two pavilions at the Fair grounds. The first USA Pavilion—
DONALD NIEBYL: —Number 34. It was built in 1957 by Walter Dorwin Teague, a master of the mid-century modern industrial architecture, jointly with the Yugoslavs, with most construction materials also made in Yugoslavia.
A number of visual elements, now all gone, provided flair to Number 34, which was then America’s largest national fair pavilion abroad.
The most popular original exhibit, opened by President Tito himself, was “Supermarket USA,” a 10,000 square foot replica stocked with groceries flown in from the States.
Along with other exhibits such as an appliance shop, laundromat, and a furnished apartment, it aimed to dazzle the Yugoslav people with demonstrations of the American way of life and pull Yugoslavia closer to the West.
Supermarket USA was so popular the Yugoslav company Vračar bought it and installed it in Belgrade as the first American-style supermarket in the country.
Meanwhile the Soviets, who showcased their advancements in industrial machinery and agricultural equipment, criticized Tito for spending much more time in the US Pavilion than in those of socialist nations.
In later years, exhibits here included a hypersonic rocket-powered airplane and fast cars like the Chevy Impala and Ford Mustang Cobra.
By the 1980s the original USA Pavilion declined in use. Today it’s used mostly as a warehouse.
PETER KORCHNAK: As for the Non-Aligned Movement—
SONJA LEBOŠ: There was a round table of the non-aligned countries that was held every year in the 60s and in the 70s.
Zagreb Fair was very important for the development of this economic and political and cultural relations of Yugoslavia with the countries of Africa and Asia.
Yugoslavia was very important link this non-aligned movement, and the role of Zagreb is much bigger than it has been known so far.
[SOUNDBITE]
DONALD NIEBYL: In the 1970s and 80s, fairs here shrank and became specialized by industry. Today only a few pavilions are used for various industry-specific trade fairs.
Two dozen industry fairs are at the Zagreb Trade Fair every year, including the Interliber book fair, the Zagreb Auto Show, and the CroAgro agriculture fair. Some 100-120,000 people visit the fairgrounds for these events every year.
About half of the functioning capacity of the fairgrounds is occupied by sports-related businesses…
PETER KORCHNAK: …the other half stands derelict and abandoned. The Velesajam is both a magnificent ruin and an open-air museum.
PETER KORCHNAK: On the self-guided audio walking tour through the Zagreb Trade Fair, Don and I take you from pavilion to pavilion, be they in operation or abandoned, used or falling apart, as well as to other notable places. We even enter some of them, including the Chinese Pavilion, the only preserved building in Europe in the traditional style built by the Chinese.
We tackle not only the architectural piece but also share background information and various tidbits, showing for example where Louis Armstrong played a concert, Orson Welles shot a movie, or Croatia’s first president practiced tennis. There’s good history, there are dark chapters, there’s survival and neglect, function and destruction.
The Fair is also where Zagreb residents go during disasters.
SONJA LEBOŠ: Zagreb Fair is one of those places where, actually, in the case of some catastrophe like [an] earthquake, people from downtown would go there and found they would find refuge there because it’s the big space that can hold lots of people.
DONALD NIEBYL: The complex finds temporary uses like hosting of city assembly sessions after the 2020 earthquake.
PETER KORCHNAK: During the Covid-19 pandemic, Pavilion 6 was used for mass vaccinations.
DONALD NIEBYL: Pavilion Number 6 was built by the Croatian architect Marijan Haberle. He was one of Zagreb’s most significant architects of the 1950s and created such iconic works in the city as Hotel International and the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall.
Similar to Number 5, Number 6 is also of an elongated pavilion style, with high ceilings, long strips of windows, and slits of perforated roof sections that let in great amounts of light and air. It is a protected cultural monument.
PETER KORCHNAK: The Velesajam was also a gallery, arboretum, and entertainment and sports center.
Our self-guided audio walking tour of the Zagreb Fair has all those stories. You actually don’t even have to go to the place, as the tour is available for armchair travel in virtual mode; it’s about 45 minutes long. Get your copy of “Monuments to Modernism: Exploring the Rise and Decline of the Zagreb Trade Fair” at Yugoblok.com/Travel.
The state the Zagreb Trade Fair complex is in today is not just a question of money, it is a reflection of politics and of economic policies in Croatia.
SONJA LEBOŠ: Zagreb Fair is mirroring how strong the industry was in the city, because many people are intentionally forgetting that nowadays, but Zagreb was the biggest, the largest industrial center of then Yugoslavia.
And a big, of course, question mark for me is how they successfully dismantled all that industry, and where did the money go? Because in the last 30 years, Zagreb has been successful in quotation mark[s] de-industrialized and suffers with the rest of the country with this political notion that Croats should live off tourism, which, of course, is not just unhealthy, but it’s quite destructive for the country itself.
PETER KORCHNAK: A few years ago, Leboš staged a pop-up exhibition at the New Zagreb Cultural Center showing archival photos and videos of the Fair complex. The idea was to involve the local community and raise interest in the revitalization of the Fair. The next phase of the project was going to be the staging of an opera in one of the pavilions and a series of art and architecture workshops. It is yet to be seen if that project comes back to life, in time for the 70th anniversary of the Zagreb Trade Fair in 2026.
SONJA LEBOŠ: It is not just that this physical aspects are under threat, but also the memory of the place. It’s like almost world heritage.
The politicians of Croatia who are in power don’t want actually to inherit that legacy, which is, of course, very, very stupid of them, because it’s a big, big part of world history. I think of Croatia last 30 years, mostly as some kind of neo-colony of European capital, and I don’t put much value in their politics, especially when you compare it with what Yugoslavia did.
[SOUNDBITE]
DONALD NIEBYL: The future of the complex remains somewhat uncertain and, like so much in Croatia, depends on politics. The company that owns the fair is in debt and seems to lack funds to both run the complex and renovate it, especially given some of the units are protected cultural heritage.
PETER KORCHNAK: A few years ago, a previous, right-wing mayor wanted to demolish the whole complex and build what was dubbed Zagreb’s Manhattan, a city within the city, similar to Dubai or Belgrade Waterfront. Critics quickly panned it as a potential tumor within the city. Ironically the project was proposed at the time that Yugoslav architectural heritage was showcased in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The mayor died and his plans did not come to pass.
DONALD NIEBYL: The latest talk is of a new event hall, congress center, and hotel to be built here.
SONJA LEBOŠ: In my vision, Zagreb Fair can become a hub for creative industries of Zagreb.
PETER KORCHNAK: For now, I hope you enjoyed this little tour of the Zagreb Trade Fair .
There’s a lot more in the audio walking tour at Yugoblok.com/TRAVEL. As a Yugoblok member, you can automatically get the tour for two dollars or 22 percent off (or use code VISITINGYUGOSLAVIA). If you do take the tour, let me know your impressions.
Fare well, travel safe, and see you in Yugoslavia!
[OUTRO MUSIC]
PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Visiting Yugoslavia, thank you for traveling along.
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/Podcasts.
Archival footage and music courtesy of various Yugoslav-era organizations, including the Yugoslav National Tourism Office, utilized under the Fair Use doctrine.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Bok!