Laying the Foundations of Physical Culture: The Stadium Revolution in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

After liberation, the incipient socialist Yugoslavia engaged its citizens in an indefatigable process of reconstruction. An enormous wave of volunteers threw themselves into regenerating stricken cities and shattered infrastructure. A bastion of the revolution, physical culture was no exception: interwar venues were repaired and hundreds of new ones were built. These included flagship stadiums, as well as more modest undertakings: athletics grounds on Croatian islands, mountaineering hunts in Kosovo, and Bosnian bowling alleys among them. Major projects received public funding, but others relied on self-initiative, causing friction between the authorities and zealous locals. As the 'stadium revolution' evolved, professional companies worked on vast football grounds. At its zenith, expensive undertakings like Split's Poljud [built for the 1979 Mediterranean Games] were highly prestigious for the communist authorities. These venues constitute a mixed socialist legacy, but many continue to serve the needs of successor states. Using archival documents and photographs, this essay explores a stadium revolution that unfolded in parallel with the revolution at large. It examines the dynamics that shaped Yugoslav sport and society. Yugoslavia's experience, while unique, did not occur in a vacuum; the case provides a new perspective on the development of sporting infrastructure in revolutionary environments in general.In the spring of 1978, President Josip Broz Tito visited the construction site of the Poljud sports complex in Split. Rising beside the shores of the Dalmatian coast, it was a vast project with a state-of-the-art stadium and swimming arena at its heart. As the aging revolutionary sat in the middle of the site, surveying a scale model that depicted a bright future, hundreds of builders crowded round to gauge his reaction. The sweeping steel roof structure was only just taking shape, but Tito was reassured that the project, which would be 'one of the most beautiful and cheapest of its kind in Europe', would be completed in time to host the Eighth Mediterranean Games. 1 Eighteen months later, the leader of socialist Yugoslavia proudly opened the Games before a packed crowd.Yet, within a year, Tito would be dead and the state that he had done so much to establish would begin to unravel. The Mediterranean Games were the biggest sporting event that Yugoslavia had hosted until that point. Its facilities were the pinnacle of a long and fruitful relationship between the communist authorities and sporting infrastructure projects [ Figure 1]. Figure 1 here

State of the Field: Physical Culture

“…This also explains why studies on Yugoslavia, and doctoral work on Poland, has tended to emphasise the role physical culture was presumed to play in the Soviet political system. 56 Soviet physical culture was never all-consuming and, indeed, Susan Grant's work has plenty of examples in which citizens disregarded, or cynically used, physical culture as espoused by the state and state bodies. 57 The tension between aspirations and reality or government control and individual experience has likewise been found in studies examining the fascist physical culture regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy.…”