page_title: Josip Broz Tito
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Josip Broz Tito / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Slovenščina: Titov spomenik poleg njegove rojstne hiše v Kumrovcu. Posneto 26.5.2007
context_page_description: Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito, was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman, serving in various roles from 1943 until his death in 1980. During World War II, he was the leader of the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe. He also served as the President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 14 January 1953 to 4 May 1980.
  Broz was born to a Croat father and Slovene mother in the village of Kumrovec, Austria-Hungary. Drafted into military service, he distinguished himself, becoming the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian Army of that time. After being seriously wounded and captured by the Imperial Russians during World War I, he was sent to a work camp in the Ural Mountains. He participated in some events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent Civil War. Upon his return to the Balkans in 1918, Broz entered the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. He later was elected as General Secretary, later President, of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia.
context_section_description: During his life and especially in the first year after his death, several places were named after Tito. Several of these places have since returned to their original names.
  For example, Podgorica, formerly Titograd (though Podgorica's international airport is still identified by the code TGD), and Užice, formerly known as Titovo Užice, which reverted to its original name in 1992. Streets in Belgrade, the capital, have all reverted to their original pre–World War II and pre-communist names as well. In 2004, Antun Augustinčić's statue of Broz in his birthplace of Kumrovec was decapitated in an explosion. It was subsequently repaired. Twice in 2008, protests took place in what was then Zagreb's Marshal Tito Square (today the Republic of Croatia Square), organised by a group called Circle for the Square (Krug za Trg), with an aim to force the city government to rename it to its previous name, while a counter-protest by Citizens' Initiative Against Ustašism (Građanska inicijativa protiv ustaštva) accused the "Circle for the Square" of historical revisionism and neo-fascism. Croatian president Stjepan Mesić criticised the demonstration to change the name.
  In the Croatian coastal city of Opatija the main street (also its longest street) still bears the name of Marshal Tito. Rijeka, third largest city in Croatia, also refuses to change the name of one of the squares in the city centre named after Tito. Streets in numerous towns in Serbia, mostly in the country's north. One of the main streets in downtown Sarajevo is called Marshal Tito Street, and Tito's statue in a park in front of the university campus (ex. JNA barrack "Maršal Tito") in Marijin Dvor is a place where Bosnians and Sarajevans still today commemorate and pay tribute to Tito. The largest Tito monument in the world, about 10 m (33 ft) high, is located at Tito Square (Slovene: Titov trg), the central square in Velenje, Slovenia. One of the main bridges in Slovenia's second largest city of Maribor is Tito Bridge (Titov most). The central square in Koper, the largest Slovenian port city, is as well named Tito Square. The main-belt asteroid 1550 Tito, discovered by Serbian astronomer Milorad B. Protić at Belgrade Observatory in 1937, was named in his honour.
  The Croat historian Marijana Belaj wrote that for some people in Croatia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, Tito is remembered as a sort of secular saint, mentioning how some Croats keep portraits of Catholic saints together with a portrait of Tito on their walls as a way to bring hope. The practice of writing letters to Tito has continued after his death with several websites in former Yugoslavia devoted entirely as forums for people to send posthumous letters to him, where they often talk about various personal problems. Every year on 25 May, about 10,000 people from the former Yugoslavia gathered in Tito's hometown of Kumrovec to pay tribute to his memory in a quasi-religious ritual. Belaj wrote that much of the posthumous appeal of the Tito cult centers around Tito's everyman persona and how he was presented as a "friend" to ordinary people, in contrast to the way in which Stalin was depicted in his cult of personality as a cold, aloof god-like figure whose extraordinary qualities set him apart from ordinary people. The majority of those who come to Kumrovec on 25 May to kiss Tito's statue are women. Belaji wrote that the appeal of the Tito cult today centers less around communism, observing that most of people who come to Kumrovec do not believe in communism, but rather due to nostalgia for their youth in Tito's Yugoslavia, and affection for an "ordinary man" who became great. Tito was not a Croat nationalist, but the fact that Tito became the world's most famous Croat, serving as the leader of the non-aligned movement and been seen as an important world leader, inspires pride in certain quarters of Croatia.      
  Every year a "Brotherhood and Unity" relay race is organised in Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia that ends at the "House of Flowers" in Belgrade on 25 May – the final resting place of Tito. At
caption: Statue of Tito in his village of his birth, Kumrovec
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