Dan mladosti, Youth Day, in honour of a 60th birthday

Dan mladosti, the Day of Youth. An unforgettable birthday that took us all for a walk through YUGOSLAVIA
Those of us who were never part of that youth could only watch as people went back to an emotional period in which they had grown up, full of feeling and of all sorts of stories. It is all here: young Pioneers, a dance in honour of the birthday boy, the relay baton, the scarves and the caps!

25 May / Dan mladosti

It was a public holiday in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), marked on 25 May and celebrated from 1945 to 1988. The holiday was tied to the birthday of the SFRY’s president for life, Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), and in the first years it was marked only as his birthday, while in 1957, on his own initiative, it became the Day of Youth.

The main symbol of the holiday was the Štafeta mladosti, the Relay of Youth. It was carried for about a month and a half across the whole territory of Yugoslavia. On 25 May it was handed to Tito at a magnificent rally staged at the JNA stadium.

History

The Relay of Youth was introduced in 1945, at the suggestion of the young people of Kragujevac, as “Tito’s relay”. 12500 young people took part in the first Tito relay. Having run a route 9000 kilometres long, they handed Tito the first nine relay batons and the Blue Book bearing 15000 signatures of the youth of Šumadija. Those first batons were presented to him in Zagreb, while in the years that followed, right up to 1956, Tito personally received the last bearers of the baton in front of the Beli dvor in Belgrade, which was preceded by a ceremonial welcome on Trg Republike.

In 1957, on Tito’s initiative, the event was proclaimed the “Day of Youth”. Until Tito’s death in 1980 the baton was handed to him personally at the “JNA” stadium in Belgrade. The Relay of Youth of 1980, which was making its way through Croatia towards Tito’s eighty-eighth birthday when he died on 4 May, broke off its journey and was laid on the president’s bier in the Assembly of the SFRY.

The Relay of Youth lived on after the death of Josip Broz and became a symbol of love and devotion to his work. With the oath of the Yugoslavs that they would remain firm and unwavering on Tito’s path, it was handed over beneath a portrait of Josip Broz to the president of the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia.

In 1987 a scandal broke out in Yugoslavia when the design by the Ljubljana design studio “Novi kolektivizam” was published in Slovenia; it was in fact a reworked German Nazi poster, a copy of “The Third Reich” by Richard Klein. Even the design that was finally adopted differed from earlier batons. It was made of Plexiglas, with eight drops of blood which, seen from today’s perspective, may have foreshadowed the beginning of the bloodshed in this part of the world.

That same year, 1987, the pageant marking the Day of Youth was held at the Belgrade stadium for the last time. On 26 January 1988 the SSOJ abolished the mass rally, which had been extremely popular.

Our thanks

Thank you to our guests and to the birthday boy for such a lovely and unforgettable experience!
And of course thank you to the team at Lopin Dekor, who took care of even the smallest details, which were captured by the sharper eye of amg_photograpy. YOU ARE BRILLIANT! 💙💬❤