8 Nora (1996, p. 1).
144 Nevena Škrbić Alempijević and Petra Kelemen
core ideological concepts and nation-building efforts. Thus, political tourism included travel to memorial sites connected with the partisan struggle or victims of the Second World War, experiencing the settings of historical meetings that laid the foundations of the Yugoslav state, or visits to the places where figures who played a vital role in this process were born or died. Kumrovec was, and still is, one of such sig- nificant “realms of memory,” as Pierre Nora would put it, constructed by the political elite of the time “because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of every- day experience.”8However, we do not claim that each visit to such a memorial site was driven by ideology. The reasons for coming to Kumrovec and the practices performed there were a matter of individ- ual interpretation and can be hardly reduced to a single common denominator: some visitors simply described the trip as a nice way to spend a weekend away from the city, in the green landscape of Zagorje.
9Source: documentation from the “Old Village” Museum, Kumrovec.
10Marijana Gušić,Project for the Renovation of the Ancient Kumrovec Locality.
Personal records of Marijana Gušić 2428, signature 21/1986, Box 4, Croat- ian State Archives in Zagreb, 1956. See also Šprem Lovrić (2005, p. 33).
Figure 1.Youth (omladinci)from Trepče reach Kumrovec, 19839 which the cherished idea of “brotherhood and unity,” of reinforcing strength by bringing together different traditions, was expressed.
The brochure also included visitor statistics, information on accom - modation, restaurant and conference facilities, descriptions of the main sights, and the promotion of the destination through the media—
all these factors defined Kumrovec as a kind of tourist brand in the frame of socialist Yugoslavia. Along with the stress on its symbolic role in nation-building, cultural experts and local authorities were aware of the tourism dimension of the site from the very beginning of its restructuring in the 1950s. As Marijana Gušić pointed out in 1956,
“[t]he locality is entrusted with more and more new tasks, primarily to preserve the social and historical environment and to become an interesting and vivid tourist attraction through this archaic image.”10 Interest was indeed triggered among visitors, who mostly arrived on day trips, most frequently on prominent national holidays, like Labor Day (1 May), the Day of Youth (the celebration of Tito’s pro- Travelling to the Birthplace of “the Greatest Son of Yugoslav Nations” 145
11 This Zagreb–Kumrovec railway line was abolished in the 1990s; nowa- days travelers have to change to buses in Savski Marof.
12This motif was taken up by the motion picture Tito and I, produced by Goran Marković in 1992. The comedy presents a ten-year-old living in Belgrade in the 1950s who wins a competition for the most affectionate writing dedicated to Tito. However, his award—participation in a march from Zagreb to Tito’s birthplace—turns out not to be as ideal as the boy had imagined.
13Majnarić Radošević (2005, p. 41).
14The interview was conducted by Nevena Škrbić Alempijević, Kirsti Mathiesen Hjemdahl, and Marija Kulišić.
15 Šarić (2005, p. 184).
146 Nevena Škrbić Alempijević and Petra Kelemen
claimed birthday on 25 May), the Day of the Republic (29 November) and the Day of the Yugoslav People’s Army (22 December). They reached the place by regular daily buses, by direct train to Kumrovec11 or, as was the case with political delegations in particular, by car. Not all means of getting to Kumrovec were as comfortable as these:
schools, youth organizations, and local municipalities frequently organized hikes through Tito’s home region, particularly as an extra- curricular activity for young people.12
The organization of trips was often taken care of by institutions and influential associations. According to a management decision taken in 1954, the Arts and Crafts Museum in Zagreb, whose experts were in charge of transforming Tito’s house of birth back into its original shape, “will provide guides and organize transport from Zagreb to Kumrovec.”13Later on, trade unions and schools played an important role in bringing Kumrovec closer to the inhabitants of other Yugoslav republics. “Kumrovec and political tourism were almost synonyms at that time,” Branka Šprem Lovrić, the current head of the open-air museum in Kumrovec, concluded in an interview in 2005.14
As in any other desirable, though not necessarily political, tourism location, Kumrovec’s popularity with—primarily Yugoslav—visitors had a huge impact on the local community. In the 1950s, “the resi- dents of Kumrovec recognized the beginnings of tourism in their vil- lage and began to sell homemade food and drinks, handcrafted arti- facts in the form of souvenirs, and to rent out their modest homes for overnight stays.”15
Why is it then that we, as cultural anthropologists, are uncomfort- able with using the term “tourism” in connection with Kumrovec?
16 The interview was conducted by Kirsti Mathiesen Hjemdahl and Tihana Rubić.
17The Day of Youth, 25 May, was the Yugoslav state holiday on which Tito’s alleged birthday was celebrated. His actual date of birth was 7 May, and there are several interpretations as to why the celebration was moved to the 25th. According to one version, Tito used false documents in the course of his revolutionary activity, which stated the 25th as his birthday. According to another version, Hitler decided to “congratulate”
Tito by organizing an offensive against Drvar on 25 May 1944. Tito was nearly killed during that operation, so in a way he was “reborn” on this date. See Krklec (1980, p. 13). The Day of Youth was celebrated by peo- ple conveying gifts and good wishes to their leader, by the bearing of a baton (štafeta) containing birthday messages through all the Yugoslav republics, and finally by grand stadium events where the štafeta was delivered to the president. The Day of Youth is no longer on the list of public holidays in Croatia today. However, it is still marked informally in Kumrovec. These celebrations are organized by “Josip Broz Tito” associ- ations and associations of “antifascist fighters.”
Travelling to the Birthplace of “the Greatest Son of Yugoslav Nations” 147 According to the emicinterpretation, i.e., one that focuses on the visi- tor’s perception of the place, the material we gathered in Kumrovec suggests that people rarely defined the trip to the village as something for tourists. People commonly view tourism as an inconsequential and superficial activity. Thus, the assumption that people coming to Kum- rovec were on a tourist visit would seem, from their own point of view, to undermine their real motivation for the trip. Of course, there are as many practices and narratives behind individual experiences of Kum- rovec as there are people visiting it. Still, it was possible to spot a com- mon denominator. Along with the desire to have a break, to spend time in pristine nature, to enjoy time with one’s peers, colleagues from work, family, or sweetheart, there was a thread connecting all these trips:
people were travelling to the birthplace of their political leader. This is how a former curator of the Kumrovec Memorial Park summed up the construction of Kumrovec as a site of political reverence in 2005:16
“Everything that was accomplished in Kumrovec served the political doctrine, so that children would know that Tito was the greatest, that Tito was their leader, that the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia is what we have to keep together. Everything had that political role here.”
While conducting field research in Kumrovec on the Day of Youth17 celebration in 2004, we talked with participants of the celebration
18On Kumrovec as a focus of ritualized behavior exhibiting traces of con- secration despite its embedding in Marxist doctrine (marking it as com- pletely non-religious), see Belaj (2006).
19 Šprem Lovrić (2005, p. 30).
20 Dedijer (1981, p. 209).
about their memories and the feelings they had experienced during their visits to Kumrovec in the past, but also about their attitude to recent trips. The majority preferred to wave away easy-going, relaxed interpretations of their visit. They were there for a serious matter, not a mere tourist trip. Some of them were surprised that ethnological research, not related to the traditional heritage of Zagorje, could be carried out in Kumrovec. People had come to Kumrovec neither as tourists nor as researchers deconstructing cultural practices and the building of political myths: they had arrived as believers.18
In this article, we apply terms acquired from the anthropology of tourism and discuss strategies of creating a tourism destination using the example of Kumrovec. However, we bear in mind that categories defined from the outside by “experts” do not necessarily correspond to the worldview of the “users,” i.e., people travelling to Kumrovec.
It is their way of organizing and expressing their experiences of being there that makes up the more significant part of our study.