Historic Maps
1978 Yugoslav WWII Monuments Sticker Map
The above navigable image is a 1978 Yugoslav WWII monument map from the kids' sticker booked named 'SPOMENICI REVOLUCIJE' or 'Revolution Monuments'. This map scan was provided to me courtesy of artist/musician Anthony Bautovich. This was an educational book intended to teach young people (particularly "Tito's Pioneers", a political youth group) about the memorial sites across Yugoslavia that commemorated the victories and tragedies of the People's Liberation Struggle (WWII). Sticker albums with collectible stickers were particularly popular during the 1970s, most notably after the Italian publisher "Panini" created a global craze with a sticker album for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. In Yugoslavia, the potential for such a concept as a tool for youth political/history education was immediately seen. In the 'SPOMENICI REVOLUCIJE' sticker album, collectible picture stickers of NOB monuments (exactly 252) were meant to be placed next to descriptions of the monuments, with the stickers purchased in small packs at shops, newsstands and kiosks around towns and cities. There were 36 monument stickers for each of the six republics, plus 18 stickers for the two provinces. The challenge was to collect all of the stickers and fill up the entire book. There were numerous competitions around the release of this book, where school groups who filled up completely a certain number of these sticker albums could win special trips or prizes. As such, this book took on special significance to many young people. Even in the introduction to this book, it states: "This album is a type of monument. We prepared it in the year in which Comrade Tito turned 85 years old and 40 years of leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia." The above map was located on the back cover of the book as a means for kids to orient themselves to the location of all of the monument stickers they collected. Sadly, very few fully completed sticker books can be found in the present day. A full PDF version of a completed 'SPOMENICI REVOLUCIJE' sticker book can be seen in the below window, courtesy of Archive.org:
Interactive Map - use +/- or mouse wheel to zoom
Interactive Map - Use fingers to zoom
On the cover of the sticker album above the title of the book were also printed three individual years "1892, 1937, 1977". These three years signify the above-quoted section from the album's intro about what this book was created in memory to: Tito's birth in 1892, Tito's placement as lead of the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1937, and 1977, the year the book was assembled. This sticker album, although being intended for children, is a huge repository of historical information (related to WWII, the monuments, their creators, and much more). Even the introduction to this book speaks of the huge amount of research and investigation that was undertaken to assemble this publication in the first place. However, it must also be noted that the album does contain a small amount of significant errors. For instance, in the entry for the monument in the Croatian town of Slavonski Brod, the associated sticker instead shows an image of the monument across the river in the town of Bosanski Brod. Meanwhile, several names of monument authors are written incorrectly, such as in the entry for the kosturnica at Priština, its author "Svetislav Ličina" is written "Bogdan Ličina" and for the entry in Sisak, Croatia of the Monument to Victims of Fascist Terror, the caption credits an author named "K. Halačev", when all sources I have seen credit it resoundingly to famous sculptor Antun Augustinčić, among other small oversights.
The publisher of the 'SPOMENICI REVOLUCIJE' sticker book is the Organization "Sava Munćan" from Bela Crkva, Serbia, while it was printed by the "Jugoreklam" group in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The director of this publication was Aleksandar Mihajlović and its chief editor was Ljubiša Petković, while the concept of the book was developed by Dragan Petković and Tomislav Rakočević. The sponsoring of this project was undertaken by SUBNOR and the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. Exactly 50,000 copies of the sticker album were made. A second and third volume to this first sticker album were intended by the publisher as follow-ups to this first publication, but these subsequent volumes failed to ever materialize.