Kumrovec 🚶 Youth Day 2023

Kumrovec, "the most well known village in the world" as they like to say it, is a birthplace of the late Josip Broz Tito, a benevolent autocratic president of the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

Every year on the Saturday closest to May 25th, a traditional Youth day in SFRY, this quiet village with a superb ethnographic museum (see my other video) transforms into a lively gathering place of young and old arriving from Croatia and a number of countries nearby. So the Youth Day event (Dan mladosti/Дан младости) lives on, albeit in a very transformed way.

Motivation and unifying values of the people visiting Kumrovec on this day are probably some of the following: Yugo-nostalgia about a country that once was, that united many ethnicities, people who used several languages and two scripts, worshiped different gods, but coexisted peacefully, having a good basis to live decently, with free health care and education, both of a surprisingly high quality. They traveled abroad as they pleased, because the SFRY passport enjoyed worldwide reputation. While SFRY was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, Tito's popularity there has not died with him.

The legend lives.

☮ Make love, not war. Peace! ☮