On 20 March 2026, a guest lecture by Dr. John Paul Newman was held at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The event was organized by Mina Hristova, PhD and other members of the “Balkan Ethnology” Department and was entitled “Biographies of War and Welfare in Tito’s Yugoslavia: The Disability Commission of SUBNOR in the Socialist Republic of Croatia, 1961–1986.”
The lecture examined materials from the “requests and complaints” archive of the Croatian branch of the anti-fascist war veterans’ association SUBNOR in Tito’s Yugoslavia. This archive consists of letters written by disabled anti-fascist veterans and their families to the republican branch of SUBNOR in Croatia, in which they sought financial and welfare support they believed they were entitled to due to their participation in the anti-fascist struggle of 1941–1945. The letters typically outlined the authors’ wartime experiences, their disabilities, and the challenges they faced in the post-war period. Spanning from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, the archive forms a kind of generational biography of men and women who fought in the Second World War and later lived in socialist Yugoslavia. It provides insight into their expectations, hopes, frustrations, and disappointments with the socialist state for which they had fought and sacrificed.
The event was followed by over an hour of discussion, during which researchers and students shared reflections and personal and family experiences related to the topic, alongside academic perspectives.
