Museum of the Second Session of AVNOJ
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
On 29 and 30 November 1943, the Second Session of AVNOJ met in Jajce while Yugoslavia was occupied and the partisan war was still underway.
AVNOJ stands for the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia.
The session adopted principles for organising a new Yugoslavia on a federal basis and established political institutions connected to the partisan movement under Josip Broz Tito.
The museum presents this as a foundational moment for the post-war Yugoslav federation.
It is important to keep wartime context. The delegates were not drafting a constitution in peaceful normality. Fighting, occupation, collaboration regimes, ethnic violence and genocide had torn the country apart.
Federalism offered one answer to the national question by recognising constituent peoples within republics.
The post-war socialist state later developed far beyond the decisions taken here, and its political system was not a liberal multiparty democracy.
So the accurate statement is neither 'democracy was born here' nor 'nothing important happened'. The session genuinely established principles and institutions that shaped the Yugoslav state created after victory.
TANJUG, the new Yugoslav news agency, had also been founded in Jajce that month to communicate the partisan movement's claims internationally.
The building became a pilgrimage site in socialist Yugoslavia.
After Yugoslavia's violent breakup in the 1990s, the meaning of AVNOJ became politically contested across successor states.
The museum therefore preserves not only a 1943 event but a later argument about how Yugoslavia should be remembered.
Our final stop is the waterfall. That might sound like escaping politics into nature. In Jajce, even the waterfall has been engineered, measured and incorporated into urban identity.