About Yugotour
YUGOTOUR is a guided ride in a vintage Zastava (Yugo) car through the history and architecture of Yugoslavia. We drive past the remnants of this now-extinct nation, making stops at the most significant socialist-era buildings and sights in Belgrade, Sarajevo and beyond. Our tours keep everything as authentic as possible, helping you experience a day in the life of a typical Yugoslav citizen: their ideals, their stories, and their surroundings.
It’s more than a tour—it’s a ride back in time.
YUGOTOUR is helmed by a pair of Dutchmen based in the Balkans: Ralph van der Zijden in Belgrade and Harm Rudolf Kern in Sarajevo. As true Yugonostalgics, they share a deep love for Zastava cars, traditional kafanas, and anything reminiscent of the federation that not long ago united their current homelands with the wider Yugosphere—from the Triglav mountains looming over Italy, to the deep Balkan reaches of North Macedonia’s Vardar River.
Yugotour Belgrade
was officially launched by Ralph on May 25th 2015, not coincidentally President Tito’s birthday. Ralph became interested in Eastern Europe back in the nineties, and decided to use his studies in Sociology and International Relations at the University of Amsterdam to learn as much as possible about what happened behind the Iron Curtain. 2004 brought him to the Balkans for the first time, where he worked for an NGO and later the Dutch government, before he had the bright idea of creating YUGOTOUR in 2010. A year later he’d moved from the Netherlands to the former Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.
There, Ralph loved searching for remnants of Yugoslavia—old billboards, street names, monuments, and the like—while also noticing that some traces such as traditional kafanas and Zastavas were slowly disappearing. With an eye to keeping this Yugoslav heritage alive, Ralph soon bought his first Zastava 101 and developed the best routes in Belgrade. His carefully-curated Belgrade tours focus separately on Yugoslavia’s rise and fall, its brutalist architecture, President Tito, sights beyond the city center, and Yugoslavia’s twentieth-century war history.
Yugotour Sarajevo
The Bosnian concern was born one year later, in 2016, when Harm proposed to show the history of Yugoslavia in his adopted city of Sarajevo. Harm had fallen in love with Bosnia as a first-year student of history back in 2008, and his passion for the region gave a strong direction to his further studies and life. During his MA in Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, Harm finally moved to Sarajevo on a student exchange in 2013 and soon thereafter started working as a Bosnia-based tour guide.
Harm recognized the value of YUGOTOUR in sharing those parts of Sarajevo that are extremely rich in stories and architecture, but ignored by the other walks and tours offered in the city. Besides his Sarajevo-based tours focusing on everyday life in Yugoslav Sarajevo, the 1984 Olympics, and the 1992-95 siege, three additional tours take the Yugo out of town. There, visitors can take in brutalist Zenica and the memorial complexes of the Neretva and Sutjeska WW2 battlefields. In all his Sarajevo tours, the central role of Sarajevo as the beating heart of the YU-rock scene is well-represented in the soundtrack and song stories along the road.
Elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia
If you can’t get enough of riding around in a Yugo, visit Dževad and his Yugotour Mostar or our friends at Yugocar Adventure in Zagreb! The goal of Yugotour is to preserve the story of Socialist Yugoslavia and to show it to visitors in one of the country’s most symbolic icons: the Yugo!
