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Will Tito's body be moved from Belgrade?

2024-09-24 19:33:09Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA NEMANJA RUJEVIC
Will Tito's body be moved from Belgrade?
Josip Broz Tito

Josip Broz Tito will continue to rest in the House of Flowers, right? Debate in Belgrade about Tito's departure from Serbia.

Exhuming Tito's body and leaving Belgrade? This idea is not supported by almost anyone in the Museum of Yugoslavia, but a big debate has opened in Belgrade, after the request of the mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Shapic, that Tito's mortal remains leave Serbia.

The museum, which includes the House of Flowers with the tomb of the Yugoslav Marshal and the eternal president of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito, does not want to officially answer the journalists' questions on this topic. But the vendor offering partisan hats, flags and other Yugoslav symbols in front of the museum in Dedinje thinks the idea is silly. The guard in this museum thinks the same. But also all visitors.

Will Tito's body be moved from Belgrade?
Tito's tomb in Belgrade

The foreigners that the Deutsche Welles reporter met in this museum during their visit there – from Germany, the Philippines, Japan and Croatia – had not even heard of all these discussions. While the locals have heard about this idea and they don't like it. Miodrag Elezović (70), a painter who visited the museum with his daughter and two granddaughters, made a cross in front of Tito's grave. He defended Broz's right to continue to rest where he is.

"Removing the grave would be desecration. In Orthodoxy, the grave is sacred and should not be touched. (Mayor of Belgrade) Shapic's requests are political, but this nation must respect the grave and tradition," Elezovic told DW.

“We're not going to move all the graves now, are we? Anyone who wants to visit Brozi's grave should come. If you don't want to, it's not necessary," he says, adding that Tito and Jovanka Broz wrote the history of Yugoslavia and that their bodies should remain in Dedinje.

Vucic's attitudes

Exhuming Tito would not bring anything good to Serbia. A few days ago, President Aleksandar Vucic told Politiko that he was "never a fan of communists and the communist regime", but that "Tito is part of history". "He lived here, he was buried here and will remain a part of Yugoslav and Serbian history," said Vucic, rejecting Shapic's idea.

The mayor of Belgrade, Shapic, shares his disgust with the "communist regime" with President Vucic. But he, with his initiative, will arouse the attention of all Serbian, regional and European media - because all of them consider Tito as one of the most important figures of his time.

Shapic says that the exhumation and relocation would be paid for by Belgrade. At the same time, he demands that a monument be erected to the former leader of the Chetniks, Dragoljub (Drazha) Mihailovic, in the park near Terazije, in the center of Belgrade. And this topic has also caused political divisions in Serbia. The head of the Socialist Party, Ivica Dacic, said that he is probably against it, while Serbia has more challenges and other things than opening the old topics.

Will Tito's body be moved from Belgrade?
Museum in Belgrade

Political games

Shapici himself has been criticized a lot recently for the bad management of Belgrade - due to privatizations and illegal constructions, as well as chaos in the city's traffic. "When the ratings of parties and persons fall, they open some such topic to show themselves patriotic, but these topics polarize and divide the opinion and the electorate even more", says Stefan Radojkovic in an interview for DW.

He recalls that the authorities of Vucic's SNS party are trying to benefit in the elections with such topics. "Moving and erecting monuments doesn't cost much, while the message is sent to the people - look, we're taking care of our history," says Radojkovic.

But this topic with Tito and Drazha Mihailovic is for many people in Belgrade a topic of interest, because Drazha's fans think that he should occupy a more important place in Belgrade and not just have a memorial room in a small space that it is not in the city center.

The opening of this "museum" in the theater last year attracted about two thousand people who had come to honor the leader of the Chetniks. But when the DW journalist visited this place these days, there was no one there. "I don't believe that any public monument to Drazha Mihailovic will be erected soon", says Radojkovic. He thinks that President Vucic - without whose approval there are no such ideological adventures - simply has no interest in dealing with Tito and Mihailovic now.

The Museum of Yugoslavia and the House of Flowers are among the most frequent destinations of tourists coming to Belgrade. Last year, a record was broken with more than 120 thousand visitors./ DW

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