When it comes to travel writing and the Balkans, the vast majority of literature is by Western authors; travel writing about the Balkans. What’s much less known is a significant body of travel writing literature authored by people from the Balkans, including the former Yugoslavia. In fact, Balkan (and ex-YU) writers have been traveling and living to tell the tales for some 150 years now. What’s all this travel writing from the Balkans about? Who are these Balkan travel writers, where do they travel, and what do they have to say about it? And how do they fit into the whole travel writing genre? 

With Wendy Bracewell.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Balkan-Travel-Writers/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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The Yugo car headlined the inaugural episode of Remembering Yugoslavia. A part of the little Yugoslav car's story remained unexplored, the part that made the Yugo one of the best known automobiles in history—and turned it into a legend.

Out of the 794,428 Yugos made between 1980 and 2008 in Kragujevac, 141,651 were sold in the U.S. In America, the Yugo went from fad to farce in just a few years.

How did Zastava manage to sell the Yugo in the U.S.? Why was the Yugo both "the worst car in history" and a legend? And what of the Yugo in America today?

With Jason Vuic, Al Staggs, Jim Ruiz, and Valerie Hansen. Featuring songs by Leftwing Fascists and The Legendary Jim Ruiz Group.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Yugo-Car/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein gives a short lecture on Yugoslavia's history in an attempt to answer the question, "Was Yugoslavia good or bad for its peoples?"

The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Bonus-Ivo-Goldstein/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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There was Yugoslav cuisine the same way there is European cuisine. At best, Yugoslav cuisine was an amalgam of cuisines of Yugoslavia’s constituent peoples, all of which can, in turn, be easily subsumed under a grander umbrella of Balkan cuisine. 

There is nary a more representative, metaphorical, and even iconic Balkan dish than sarma, or stuffed cabbage. Irina Janakievska, a Macedonia-born, London-based chef walks me through the process of making a sarma recipe from her grandmother's cookbook and through her journey to Balkan Kitchen. The Australian scholar, Wendy Bracewell tells all about Yugoslav cookbooks. And Natasha Tripney, an English Serb-Yugoslav, discusses Yugonostalgic cuisine. 

Delicious! 


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Yugoslav-Cuisine/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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Yugoslavia continues to disintegrate. There’s Kosovo, there’s lingering territorial and financial disputes among successor countries...and there’s Republika Srpska. Last month, Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency and Republika Srpska’s strongman leader, announced the entity would annul a number of state laws and withdraw from the country’s institutions in order to establish the entity's full autonomy under the original Dayton Peace Agreement. While these steps would fall short of outright secession, the announcement sent chills across Bosnia and the region; the internationals and many Bosnians are worried at the prospect of partition and conflict. The situation remains tense.

How did we get here? How did Dayton's gendered nature impact Bosnia and Herzegovina in its 26 years? What are the broader international and geopolitical implications of the current crisis? And how can the Dayton problem be solved? 

With Aida Hozić, Valery Perry, and Tanja Topić.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Specter-of-Dayton/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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In 2016, a cantonal government decided that, in one of the secondary schools in Jajce, which was following a Croatian curriculum for all the students, a separate school would be established on the premises for Bosniak students with a parallel Bosniak curriculum. The students in the integrated school rebelled and mounted a campaign to prevent their school from being segregated. After two years, the students prevailed and pressured the government into halting their school’s division into two.

Fifty-six schools in 28 Bosnian towns and cities operate under a two schools under one roof system. Why do segregated schools exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina? How did the students in Jajce win the fight against school segregation? And how can the problem be resolved, if it can be resolved at all? 

With Samir Beharić, Téa Hadžiristić, and Valery Perry.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Two-Schools-Under-One-Roof/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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A sea of ink has been spilled documenting the life and times of Josip Broz Tito. But Tito's biographies place his life against that of Yugoslavia, so that reading a biography of Tito means reading the history of the country. If you want to know about Tito the man, you’ll get a broad strokes picture, an outline, a composite, if not a caricature, that everyone fills with the story they want. For details that reveal his human side, you have to sift through texts like a gold prospector.

There's another way to get to know the peasant who became president: a documentary featuring anecdotes by those who worked for him; a peculiar interpretation of his life style; and a tour of milestones along his revolutionary path. 

With Ania England, Janja Glogovac, and Danijela Matijević.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Secondhand-Tito/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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Yugoslavia lives. It lives, among other things, in the architecture and infrastructure built during its existence. Buildings, roads, and monuments from the Yugoslav era keep that country and the memory of it not just alive but an integral, if sometimes invisible, part of everyday experience in Yugoslavia’s successor countries. The same goes for Czechoslovakia and its progeny. 

But the two countries also live on in a more poetic way, an ocean away, on an island at the edge of the North American continent. After they served their representative duties as Yugoslavia’s and Czechoslovakia’s pavilions at the Expo 67 world fair, both buildings were repurposed as cultural institutions in small communities on the island of Newfoundland.

This is their story.

With Jasmina Cibic, Robert Lodge, Kevin McAleese, Donald Niebyl, and Terezie Nekvindová.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Expo67-Pavilions-Yugoslavia-Czechoslovakia/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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Eighty years since its publication, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia remains the most authoritative (and longest) book of travel writing on that former country. The book, which documents West’s travels through Yugoslavia in the second half of the 1930s, has been described as “astonishing,” “brilliant,” “remarkable,” “a supreme literary monument,” and “one of the most important books written about Europe in the last century.” It’s also been derided as biased, fictional, and factually flawed.

What’s the big deal about this big book? Who was Rebecca West? And what makes the book relevant a lifetime later?

With Helen Atkinson (Rebecca West's great-niece), Angela Carlton, and James Thomas Snyder. Featuring music by Gogofski, Paniks, and Undescore Orkestra.


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Black-Lamb-and-Grey-Falcon/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
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Few travel books have had as big a real-world impact as Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert Kaplan. Published in 1993, this account of Kaplan’s travels through Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia in the late 1980s and 1990 purportedly influenced President Clinton’s policy in the region during the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Kaplan’s portrayal of the relations among the peoples of former Yugoslavia created “the sense that nothing could be done by outsiders in a region so steeped in ancient hatreds” (Richard Holbrooke). 

The ancient hatreds thesis, which holds that Yugoslavia disintegrated in war because its constituent peoples have always hated and killed each other, has become a trope of explaining the place. It has also been dismantled over and over by generations of scholars and policy wonks. Balkan Ghosts is one of those books you read so much about you might get a feeling you no longer need to read it because you already know it through and through from all the reviews and critiques. 

What does Robert Kaplan think about the criticisms leveled at his famous book over the past nearly 30 years? About how his book has been utilized? Has he ever defended his work and what does he have to say? Does he care about the book’s impact? How have his views evolved?

With Robert D. Kaplan. 


The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.

• Shownotes/transcript: RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast-Balkan-Ghosts/
• Instagram: @RememberingYugoslavia
• SUPPORT THE SHOW: Patreon :: PayPal :: Subscription

Support the show