Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics

Zlatko Jovanovic is an affiliated researcher at the research centre The Many Roads in Modernity, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

• 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.

“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)