By using a line of a song by one of the most popular Yugoslav rock bands in the 1980s as a title for this paper, I offer a reading of different representations of the city of Sarajevo in the period surrounding the 1984 Winter Olympics. I emphasize the change in the representation of the city in relation to it hosting the Olympics—the Olympics that were by the large majority of observers seen as a sheer success. Although this success resulted in a worldwide positive image of Socialist Yugoslavia and the host city Sarajevo, in particular, the line “Sarajevo, my dearest city, we fixed you for the Olympics” should not be read as a celebration of this success. Rather, in this line, the band Zabranjeno pušenje (No Smoking) put forward an ironic statement that can be read as an attack on the dominant modernization narrative in Socialist Yugoslavia. According to this narrative, Sarajevo’s cultural production was perceived as backward in comparison to that in other major cultural centers of Yugoslavia.

From this point of departure, I present several examples of how Sarajevo was represented in local and other Yugoslav newspapers and magazines, in official documents (among others those of the Communist Party and of the Yugoslav Olympic Committee) and in popular culture in the period between 1979 and 1987. I discuss how these representations are related to the ideas of the necessity to “catch up” to the West and to get rid of the country’s Ottoman heritage. I argue that, in order to depict the former, we need to understand how the uneven inflow of western material and cultural products in the country shaped this idea of backwardness. Western products, especially the cultural ones, would always enter the western and northern parts of the country, before spreading towards the southeast, translating the idea of “catching up” to the West into an internal hierarchy according to which southern and southeastern parts of the country were trying, more or less successively, to “catch up” to the northern and northwestern ones. This hierarchy was closely related to the notion of Ottoman yoke. According to this notion, the regions of the country that had been longer under the Ottomans were reciprocally least capable of becoming western.

Zlatko Jovanovic is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, where he also has completed his PhD and his MA in history. He has taught East and Southeast European history at the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, as well as several general courses in history at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. His research has mainly focused on popular culture, (anti)nationalism and identity-formation in Socialist Yugoslavia, and he has written a PhD dissertation on Yugoslav rock music in the 1980s. His current research deals with competing definitions of modernity and identity-formation in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during the same decade. As a co-leader of Ex-Yu Network, which assembles a number of researchers from the Nordic countries, he has organized multiple seminars on Southeastern Europe at the University of Copenhagen.