Iskopavanje Tita? About that idea, which is fueled again by the mayor of Belgrade Aleksandar Šapić, surely no one in the Museum of Yugoslavia thinks anything good.
Admittedly, the Museum, which includes the House of Flowers with the grave of the Yugoslav Marshal and lifelong President Josip Broz Tito, does not want to officially respond to journalists' inquiries on the subject.
But the seller who offers partisan caps, pentagram badges and Yugoslav flags in front of the museum in Dedinje thinks that the idea is crazy. The guard thinks the same. And all visitors.
The strangers who DW reporter found in the museum - from Germany, the Philippines, Japan and Croatia - they didn't even hear about all those discussions.
They are local and they don't like it. Miodrag Elezović (70), a painter who visited the museum with his daughter and two granddaughters, crossed himself in front of Tito's grave. He defended the right of Broz to continue to rest where he is by arguing to the deceased so far away.
"Removing the grave would be desecration." In Orthodoxy, the grave is sacred and must not be touched. Šapić's stories are political, but this nation would have to respect the grave and tradition," Elezović told DW.
"We're not going to move all the graves now, are we?" Anyone who wants to visit Broza's grave should come. If you don't want to, you don't have to," he says simply, adding that Tito and Jovanka Broz wrote the history of Yugoslavia and that they should stay in Dedinja.
Vučić had his say
Nothing will come of Tito's exhumation. If it wasn't clear before, it was a few days ago when President Aleksandar Vučić 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 Vučić, rejecting Šapić's idea.
The mayor of Belgrade, Šapić, shares a dislike for the "communist regime" with the president, so for the second time in a short period he took care to pitch to all Serbian, regional and some European media with the initiative that Tito should be moved dead.
That, says Šapić, would be financed by the city, just like the relocation of the Tomb of the National Heroes from Kalemegdan. The icing on the cake among the mayor's ideas would be the erection of a monument to Dragoljub Draža Mihailović in the park at the foot of Terazije.
The topic once again divided the Serbian political scene. The leader of the Socialist Party, Ivica Dacic, said that he is of course against it, and that Serbia has more challenges than opening old topics.
Political games
If Serbia has more issues, maybe Šapić doesn't have them at the moment, whose management of the city is criticized a lot - from land privatization and wild construction to traffic chaos.
"Who knows what time it is that Tito is being sent to Kumrovec or something like that," says historian Stefan Radojković.
"When the rating drops, then it is good to take out topics in which you are a patriot, and which polarize, so you inflame the electorate." Even if the opposition gets caught up in that nonsense, it's all over the place," said Radojković in an interview with DW.
He reminds that the authorities of the Serbian Progressive Party have achieved something in the field of monument patriotism - a monument to Tsar Nikolay, Borislav Pekić on Cvetni trg and, as a crown, a giant statue of Stefan Nemanja in front of the former building of the Railway Station.
"It requires small amounts of money, and the political profit is big. The goal is for the people to say 'see how they care about our history,'" believes Radojković.
Private Uncle Draž
In one respect, Šapić is undoubtedly right - in Serbia, the Partisan and Ravnogorje resistance movements are officially equal. It happened exactly twenty years ago, that is, during the time of the "former authorities", when only socialists voted against in the Assembly.
From time to time dust is raised on this topic, for example when the courts rehabilitated Dragoljub Mihailović and Nikola Kalabić or dealt with Milan Nedić.
Regardless of the fact that he is both rehabilitated and equal, Mihailović, whom fans call Uncle Draža, only has a memorial room in Belgrade in a private space in Bregalnička street in Vračar, where his house used to be.
The opening of that "museum" last October attracted a few thousand people, all with Chetnik iconography. When the DW reporter visited Bregalnička these days, there was no one there except for Draža in the window.
"I don't believe that any public monument to Draža Mihailović will be erected soon," says Radojković. "And these private initiatives are - private, whether or not they had the support of the government."
He thinks that President Vučić - without whose approval he cannot embark on such ideological adventures - simply has no interest in really dealing with Broz and Mihailović now.
The Museum of Yugoslavia and the House of Flowers are among the most frequent destinations of tourists who come to Belgrade. Last year, a record was broken with more than 120.000 visitors.
Source: DW
