Of ovens and model villages - it's Tito (baton) time!

As May 25th approaches and every harbourer of Yugoslav nostalgia dusts off their memorabilia in time for his birthday, this post is dedicated to my love of the batons of Tito's youth parades. Held every year during his rule as part of his official birthday celebrations, people from different areas across Yugoslavia made these batons to be carried to Belgrade via a mass countrywide relay (I think there was also one official baton each year). They liked to get them to him via impressive feats, including helicopters and absailing! I recently went to an exhibition at the Tito museum in Belgrade which had a load of these homemade batons on display. Being a fan of homemade presents of the slightly ridiculous variety I feel like my skills might have actually been appreciated at this time! I particularly like the random use of a plastic toy oven...




I was also quite impressed in the exhibition by some of the random presents made for Tito by various societies. Below are the society of dentists' creepy diorama, the pharmacist society's gift, which Damian Hirst obviously stole from, the orthopaedic society's somewhat creepy gift, and my personal favourite (purely for incongruity rather than the physical object), the completely random gift from the society of nuclear research - anyone who can find the link between said profession and a taxidermy spider and snake wins a prize (if you're lucky one of my classy homemade presents)!