| The three official heirs of the President of the SFRY - sons Zharko and Alexander Misha and widow Jovanka - had virtually nothing to share after his death. The heirs had no problems with royalties from the publication of the marshal’s books (about 3.5 thousand dollars), and everything else - villas, cars, ships and planes - belonged to the state. The marshal had practically no personal property: he believed that his Yugoslavia would be eternal and did not transfer party funds to foreign bank accounts.
The eldest grandson of Marshal Joshko Broz willingly shows journalists two relics left to him in memory of his great grandfather: a gold wristwatch and a hunting rifle. It seems that these are the few of the personal belongings of the Yugoslav leader that were preserved by the heirs of the Yugoslav leader - those of works of art and expensive gifts from heads of foreign states that Tito did not personally transfer to state repositories disappeared after the death of the marshal from his residences and from the gift museum, opened in 1970 year in the Belgrade district of Dedinje. This museum was also a gift to the leader - “from the Yugoslav people” for his 75th anniversary. In Belgrade they say that many valuables and museum exhibits ended up somewhere in the private collections of politicians who came to power after Tito's death.
In Dedinje, in a special pavilion called “House of Flowers”, a stone’s throw from the central residence “White Court”, Tito was buried. The new occupant of the palace, Slobodan Milosevic, ordered the park to be divided in half with a high wall, probably so that the spirit of the leader would not interfere with his work. The tomb remained on one side of the fence, and two presidential buildings (one of them was destroyed during NATO bombing) on the other.
The White Yard residence once belonged to the Karageorgievich dynasty. The “People's Revolution” confiscated royal property in favor of its leader - the Karageorgievics were left only with a small mansion in the town of Oplenac. Other mansions, palaces, chalets, and villas were used by the new owner of Yugoslavia without any restrictions. Some things were expropriated “for the people” from other rich Yugoslav families. There are at least a dozen former residences of Tito in all the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Here are just a few: the palaces of Smederevo in Serbia and Karađorđevo in Vojvodina, a villa on Pantovčak hill in Zagreb, a villa in Milocer on the Montenegrin Riviera. In some residences, such as on the Adriatic archipelago of Brijuni, Tito lived for months, in others - say, at the hunting lodge Brdo pod Kranem in Slovenia, where a stuffed bear shot by the marshal still stands - he appeared infrequently. But everywhere he was surrounded by an atmosphere of modest luxury: the leader did not forget about his proletarian origin (his first specialty was a mechanic) and invariably emphasized that all this property belonged to the people. Half an hour by boat from the Brijuni Islands, in the Uljanik shipyard in Pula, a well-equipped metalworking workshop was always waiting for Tito - the president sometimes liked to stand at the machine. And on the island of Greater Brijun itself, from where all the inhabitants were evicted in the early 50s, there is a huge zoo-reserve, which Tito called a safari. It still houses strange animals, including a pair of elephants that were once a gift from Indira Gandhi. The luxury limousine that was used to serve famous visitors to the pier is now taking tourists for $40 an hour...
But for some reason the president did not like to travel to his homeland - the village of Kumrovec not far from the Slovenian-Croatian border. In the 70s, the village was turned into an ethnographic reserve, and in the house where the Yugoslav leader was born (the building was once family property), a museum was organized, the exhibition of which mainly consists of old photographs. Near the house there is a monument: a marshal in the image of a heroic partisan. Five hundred meters away is a large modern building of the former higher party school. Five hundred meters in the other direction is the “Source of Joy” fountain, laid out by Yugoslav pioneers with colorful mosaics to the delight of their common grandfather. Now Kumrovets is half alive and half dead: grass grows between the tiles of the fountain bowl, and mostly veterans of the unsuccessful struggle for socialism come to the monument and museum on the birthday and anniversary of the leader’s death. Tatiana SHARAYA
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