Jugonostalgija – the nostalgia for the lost Yugoslavia is a strange social phenomenon. It can be the harmless obsession of younger people who have never experienced what they dream of, except through the stories of their parents or grandparents. It can be the quirky eccentrics of a collector or someone slightly mad who likes to run around swathed in old paraphernalia. It’s neither threatening nor very political and it has experienced a renaissance in Serbia and in Belgrade as well. Nowhere is Jugonostalgija more apparent than in the Yugoslavian Museum, the halfhearted new nickname of Tito’s final resting place.

You can find the museum on a leafy hill in a well-off residential district of the city. The museum itself, a pompous and not particularly trustworthy looking post-war construction, is closed for the foreseeable future. It’s official name used to be the “Museum of May 25th”. It was given to Tito so he could have space for all the lavish gifts that were thrown at him by his own people as well as foreign heads of state. Among those gifts we can, of course, also find the eponymous batons that were used in the festivities of May 25^th – but let’s talk about them later. The museum is being renovated and questions reveal that renovation is a highly flexible state. When will it be re-opened? Well, when we open it.

Notwithstanding that, there are tickets for the museum. You can buy them in a small, not very obvious hut and an improvised path leads you behind the museum into a garden inhabited by statues. At the top of a small set of stairs you are personally being welcomed by your host. A black bronze statue of Josip Broz wearing his favourite coat waits in an imperious posture for all visitors, well-wishers and distant relations.

Here you can find a few visitors, scattered in the abandoned-looking gardens. Nothing here is pompous. It feels relaxed and only slightly kitschy. There’s a strong smell of pine needles. Occasionally a group of tourist-pilgrims rushes past. They are young people who all have been given a felt hat with one red star. Neo-soviet sheep shepherded by a brisk guide. They laugh and seem joyful, perhaps a bit intoxicated and – as all themed tour groups do – slightly out of this world.

The groups are being led towards the House of Flowers. It is a pavilion from the 1970s. Inside, surrounded by marble and exotic plants and flowers, you line up for your selfie with the tomb of Tito. It used to be a winter garden, built right next to Tito’s residence. Following his own wish, he was entombed here, inside of thick white marble. A smaller tomb is next to his. This is where his wife Jovanka Broz lies. She was the victim of intrigues that first estranged her from her husband in 1975 and then caused her to lose all her possessions a few years later. Tito’s presumptive heirs wanted to remove her from the scene as quickly as possible. She spent the rest of her life in poverty and it took until 2013 for her to be reunited with her husband in death.

Next to the tombs is a smaller room. Tito used it to work and today it houses and exhibition of the Blue Train, that he used to travel around the country. Here you can find old maps, photographs and parts of the original chairs and tables used inside the train. I was there before half the world fell in love with a new kind of autocracy, but even then the fascination seemed very uneasy to me. At the same time I could not help but wonder how to make sense of this mass of events, political as well as personal – even at a remove of many decades it is difficult; to make sense of events as they unfold seems, at least from the perspective of a historian, impossible.

The opposite side of the room is dominated by many batons, celebrating the Titova stafeta – the “Relay Race of the Youth in Honour of Tito”, which happened every year on May 25^th. This was the Day of the Youth and Tito decided it was also his birthday (his real birthday was May 7^th but who is counting?). On this day Tito stood in the Belgrade stadium to receive the baton as well as a book of signatures from the hands of the last relay runners. Altogether those gifts had traveled a distance of more than 9,000 kilometres, traversing the entirety of Yugoslavia. The runners were young and athletic men who had – according to legend – spontaneously started those races in order to honour their wonderful and magnificent ruler. They continued until 1987 – 7 years after Tito’s death. The House of Flowers used to be filled to the brim with pilgrims then. But the collapse of Yugoslavia put an end to all that – the races, the pilgrims, everything disappeared and the House of Flowers closed its doors.

But the most recent of those batons are not from 1987 but from 2012 … no 2013. How come? In 2008 the relay races began anew, as a festival for those thousands of people that still celebrated Tito’s birthday. The initiators were political actors – the New Communist Party, led by one of Tito’s grandsons. For them these festivals are a means to an end, a way to tap into the nostalgia and use it for their own purposes and support.

The people, however, want their nostalgia to be just that and nothing more. Not a political but a personal event. A chance to get drunk and reminisce, taste some sweet sadness of bygone days or remember tiny personal glories. A memory of childhood or power (this nostalgia is most deeply rooted in those who only experienced the end and downfall of Yugoslavia or those that had careers in the military). Sometimes nostalgia means nothing more than a place where Tito impersonators, wearing sunglasses and the famous coat, can pose for pictures. Where you can open restaurants with Tito decor and dress the waiters as Young Pioneers. Nostalgia rarely wants reality. It wants mood and fashion.

The main part of the museum is in another house – Tito’s former residence. Here you can find piles upon piles of those gifts that Tito recieved from abroad. It’s called the Old Museum and it is quite disorderly. You walk around between guns and very similar looking uniforms of the Great Marshall and slowly but surely you feel lost. Lost in time as well as in the personality of Tito. Only occasionally the curators try to speak up, in the form of newspaper clippings, notebooks from schools or paintings. It is an intentional looseness, they say. They want to create an undogmatic space where you can encounter the complicated past eye to eye.

Sometimes you imagine to glimpse the lack of budget behind the idea of an open and undogmatic museum, but it certainly is not a waste of time. There are no self-important interpretations that give you meaning and so you are forced to create your own image of Tito and his time. Surprisingly enough this image, even amidst all the relics and pomp, might turn out less negative than one would initially suspect. Any form of hero worship quickly collapses under the sheer weight and repetition of lavish gifts that heads of states or sycophants sent him. But behind that you can find an educated man, self aware and interested in art, science and psychology. Sensitive, perhaps most sensitive to his image. The military appearance, that silly coat, was calculation, not an expression of his personality the way it was with Mussolini, who had to hide behind it. It was the role he thought was best suited to keep Yugoslavia together. Of course he was mad – only a madman even wants to be in such a position …