Josip Broz Tito is buried in the House of Flowers in Belgrade, but the eyes directed at his grave often find themselves diverted to the collection of batons that hang on the wall nearby. These bars are all from the annual Relay of Youth, one of the great staples of socialist Yugoslavia.
It is no secret that socialist regimes love themselves some pomp and circumstance, and the razzmatazz surrounding the Relay of Youth (Štafeta mladosti, in Serbian) ticked all of the necessary boxes. The relay achieved two major aims of socialism — namely uniting the whole country in one challenge, and engaging the youth in an active manner.
Yugoslavia came out of World War II as a united nation in international conversation only. The state had been decimated by a brutal three-way civil war during the first half of the 1940s, and Josip Broz Tito was the man tasked with bringing everyone together. His mantra of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ constantly rang around the country, but Yugoslavia still needed something to unite the younger generations.
The idea came from a student organisation in the central Serbian city of Kragujevac, home to Serbia’s automobile industry. The premise was simple — a baton was to be carried from town to town, traversing the whole of the country before being handed to Tito on his official birthday, May 25.
