world came to his funeral. They’re interest- ed in what he was like a boy, surprised that he was a poor pupil – even repeating rst grade. And that was all because he grew up with his grandfather in Slovenia, so it was dicult for him to switch to the Ka- jkavian dialect. This is said to be one of the reasons why he was dicult to understand throughout his life, a fact that contribut- ed to those conspiracy theories suggesting that he wasn’t even from Croatia. And Tito was also a bad pupil because he had to take a cow to graze and make sure it didn’t wander o...“As soon as you move your eyes away from her, she heads straight for someone else’s eld... And now you read the story to the end! You have a school task, The Zagorje speciality of štrukli, a kind of cheese pie that is eaten as both a sweet and savoury, was always Tito’s favorite dish Zagorski specijalitet štrukli, neka vrsta pite sa sirom koja se jede i slatka i slana, uvek je bila omiljeno Titovo jelo and the cow knows its own. For her, the grass over there is always more succulent and sweeter,”said the great Josip talking about the troubles of little Joža. And those hills of Zagorje are really green and lush, because beneath their depths run thermal healing waters that are reason enough to come here even if you’re not interested in Josip Broz at all. Whether you choose the Krapi- na toplice, Terme Tuhelj or Terme Jezerči- ca, here you can enjoy it all in abundance. They will feed you every two hours and, af- ter copious amounts of food, oer you sin- fully moist štrukli that you can eat either as sweets or savouries, and which are served as dessert. As if that wasn’t enough, they will also serve you white, red and rosé wines from the endless slopes of their vineyards. From Krapina Neanderthals to the Toplice Heli Centre – the only helicopter pilot train- ing simulator of its kind in Europe... From the revolutionary Matija Gubec to legends of fairies and murdered maidens... There is so much that could be told, because the sto- ry of Tito, and that of Zagorje, hasn’t even scratched the surface here. But we’ll discuss that when we meet again.
which is perhaps the actual one that we read about in schoolbooks when we were kids, in stories that aptly spoke about the idea that no matter how poor you are, if you have brains, courage and imagination, you can one day become a lifelong president and the object of absolute worship. A good lesson for the future. And in this story, the parents of little Joža, of course, didn’t have the money to buy him a sledge, so he came up with the idea of descending the Zagorje hill in a trough that he lubricated with grease. It was interesting to stand in that place that I pictured so vividly in my imagination as a child, and here I was, with my travels hav- ing led me here for the rst time almost 40 years after Tito’s death. Still, it seemed that our guide knew the same anecdotes that we knew ourselves, so he gave us a some- what uninventive account of the story about how the hungry Joža stole a pig’s head from the attic and fed his many brothers and sis- ters (15 were born, with seven surviving). Josip Broz also liked to recount this story himself, and it found its way into school- books, and here we nd the curators tell- ing it in this museum today. In reality, the noted trough certainly isn’t that same trough, because the only item in the entire house that actually belonged to the Broz family is a wooden cradle. The rest of the furniture is from the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, but was collected from other houses in the village. In the traditional Zagorje home, the original architecture has been preserved, and at every step it can be seen that the Broz family was poor and that every corner of this small space was utilised wisely. Part of the house also contains a per- manent exhibition of newspaper clippings, several relay batons, and two busts of Tito... And everything appears authentic and viv-
id, as if the little Joža will run out of the house at
any moment. But he won’t, because that boy was replaced by a grown man, a life- sized monument to the marshal sculpted in 1948 by famous artist Antun Augustinčić. The look of this Tito monument at the en- trance to his home was best described by Miroslav Krleža, who also explained why the leader looks so concerned and not tri- umphant, as would be expected... “... This Tito of Augustinčić isn’t shown in the pose of a commander at the head of his brigades; it is the appearance of a man whose head has grown weary from heavy worries, who I imagine pacing in circles in the narrow courtyard of the fortress in Jajce, just as he circled the yards of dungeons for years...”. Tourists aren’t bothered by the mar- shal’s worries; thousands of them take pic- tures beside this monument every year, and they come – according to Kumrovec folk – from all parts of the world, even the most distant. That’s because foreigners are curi- ous to hear stories about a man who was so loved and so inuential that the whole
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