In the Former Yugoslavia, Monuments to Rocky, Tarzan and…Samantha Fox?

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  11.14.07 | 5:18 PM ET

imageA bronze-and-concrete statue of Rocky Balboa exalting in victory anchors the village square of Zitiste, a farming hamlet in Serbia. And, strange as it seems, Rocky isn’t the lone pop icon in the region: A statue of Bruce Lee has been erected in Bosnia, and statues of Tarzan and the former Playboy model and sort-of singer Samantha Fox are also set to go up in the Balkans, which is still recovering from the bloody wars of the 1990s. In a strange and hilarious story in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune writer Dan Bilefsky reports that these monuments to Hollywood and pop culture are “either delighting or alarming cultural critics.” Milica Tomic, the Serbian visual artist, told Bilefsky that the statues are “a dangerous joke in which history is being erased and replaced by Mickey Mouse.”

In Mostar, Bosnia, where Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims are divided by an Ottoman bridge, a bronze and gold-plated statue of Bruce Lee is now in storage after it was vandalized. It turned out that both ethnic groups complained because Lee’s likeness “pointed at them in an aggressive martial pose.”

In Medja, a village near the Romanian border, city officials are fundraising for a statue of Tarzan in order to pay homage to Johnny Weissmuller, the Tarzan actor, Olympic swimmer and Meja native. (Townspeople have his birth certificate.)

Meanwhile, in Cacak, south of Belgrade, townspeople are planning to build a likeness of the British sex kitten Samantha Fox. Aside from baring her breasts, Fox is also known for the hit song “Touch Me (I Want Your Body).”

Bilefsky is one of my favorite newspaper writers, primarily because he has a remarkable ability to find offbeat stories that unlock a locale’s inner weirdness. Of course, there’s usually a somber subtext. In the case of the Balkans, glorifying pop culture icons is “an outgrowth of an identity crisis after the wars of the 1990s, when the lines between oppressors and victims were blurred,” Bilefsky writes, citing sociologists.

I understand that much. But, still, Samantha Fox? If I saw such a statue on my travels to Cacak, I’d think I’d walked onto the latest Borat set.

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A with Rick Steves: Reflections on Three Decades of World Travel
* From Tonga to Texas, Doing the Haka

Photo by Jesse Gardner via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Tags: Pop Culture Travel, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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