Home of Old Magazine Stories Keeps Yugoslavia’s Memory Bright

"This intelligent polemicist and forecaster is already a little tired of politics, he says. He would like to do it on a voluntary basis. But he cannot escape, he knows, right now from that hot cauldron."

So wrote journalist Manojlo Vukotic back in 1989 about a then fresh face on the scene of Montenegro politics.

That man was Milo Djukanovic, who has more or less run the country ever since as president or prime minister, and whose party only just lost power for the first time in recent elections.

That newspaper article - and many others from the distant past - has resurfaced thanks to Yugopapir, a website that specialises in re-publishing newspaper and magazine articles from the long-lost era of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, or SFRY.

The website explains its purposes as dusting down news pages of the past that would otherwise be "doomed to extinction".

"Dusty pages are cleaned and reviewed, the most interesting articles are extracted and completely digitized - and not only scanned, but their content is 'extracted', converted into text format, and only then published," the website says.

"In this way, numerous texts doomed to extinction gain new life: they premiere on the Internet, and for search engines such as Google it is made easier to search and provide information about popular and important personalities, events, phenomena from the SFRY era," it adds.

BIRN contacted the administrators of the website to explain more about their motives but they did not want to talk.

Articles published on this website, which has been up and running since 2013, recall what political, economic, cultural and sporting life in Yugoslavia was really like.

First colour films and departments...