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This book examines the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. It tells the story of the extensive infrastructural transformation of the city and its changing global image in relation to hosting of the Games. Reviewing different cultural representations of Sarajevo in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the book explores how the promotion of the city as a future global tourist centre resulted in an increased awareness among its populace of the city's cultural particularities. The analysis reveals how the process of modernisation relating to hosting of the Olympics provided an opportunity to re-imagine the city as a particularly environmentally progressive city. Placed within the field of studies of late socialism, the book offers important insights into Yugoslav society during the period, including those relating to the country's unique geopolitical position and its nationalities policies.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Sarajevo's Olympic Spirit.- Chapter 2: Putting Sarajevo on the World Tourist Map.- Chapter 3: Fixing Sarajevo for the Olympics.- Chapter 4. Catching Up With the West with the Sarajevo Olympics.- Chapter 5: Inventing Sarajevo as an Ultimate Olympic City.- Chapter 6: Framing Olympic Sarajevo as a truly Yugoslav city.- Chapter 7: Sarajevo's Olympic Benchmark.
About the author
Zlatko Jovanovic is an affiliated researcher at the research centre The Many Roads in Modernity, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Report
"This compelling study of Sarajevo's place in Yugoslavia during the 1980s sets the prevailing view of its history, characterized by the rise of ethnonationalism across the country, against an opposing trend that emerged in major Yugoslav cities and amongst the youth. The effect of Jovanovic's book, therefore, is to overturn all the easily-drawn links between the two (or three) events that made Sarajevo globally famous (or notorious), to expose them as tenuous, or even tendentious." (Bojan Aleksov, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 101 (1), January, 2023)
