Back Back to Positive Things 

„Did you cry when Tito died?”: A somewhat satirical look at Macedonia then — and North Macedonia now.

When we started school in Belgrade in 1987, one of the most popular jokes was to ask: „Did you cry when Tito died?” Everyone had seen the footage on TV: When Tito died, millions of people felt real grief or felt at least infected by some human emotion. But seven years had passed since then. Yugoslavia was just about to disintegrate, so this question had political significance for the adults. But for us, schoolchildren who were born in the year of Tito’s death, the very same question meant simply whether we were born before or after the date of his death — as babies, we would have totally cried.