Olympic Museum

Transcript

Sarajevo hosted the XIV Winter Olympic Games in February 1984. The Olympic Museum opened on the first day of the Games, 8 February, in Villa Mandić.

The Olympics projected a confident image of socialist Yugoslavia: internationally open, non-aligned and capable of organising a major global event. For many Sarajevans, the Games remain a cherished memory precisely because later history did not erase the excitement of 1984.

The museum building was badly damaged during the 1990s war and the collection had to be protected and later re-established.

Avoid the cheap narrative in which Olympic venues are shown only as “before and after” symbols of Yugoslavia’s collapse. The Games were real civic experience, not merely tragic foreshadowing.

A city is allowed to have happy history even when documentaries prefer the ruins.

Synthetic narration. Sources are linked below.

Sources

• Museum of Sarajevo — Austro-Hungarian administration in Sarajevo
• Museum of Sarajevo — Sarajevo assassination: 112 years later
• Museum of Sarajevo — 20th-century collection
• Olympic Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina — Olympic Museum
• Museum of Sarajevo — Memory of the Markale massacre