With Marshal Tito

The story

"Uz maršala Tita" (With Marshal Tito), first called "Pjesma o pesti" (Song about the Fist), is a Yugoslav Partisan anthem in praise of Josip Broz Tito, leader of the country's liberation movement in the Second World War. Vladimir Nazor wrote the Serbo-Croatian words and Oskar Danon the music, in 1943, when relations between Tito and the Soviet leadership were close.

Its original opening named Tito together with Stalin. According to Danon, at its first hearing, at the second session of AVNOJ in Jajce in 1943, where Tito was named Marshal of Yugoslavia, the audience spontaneously sang the line with Tito alone. After the Tito–Stalin split of 1948 the original version was no longer performed or printed in songbooks.

A middle verse answers the ideology of the Ustaše, whose wartime Independent State of Croatia played down the Slavic origin of the Croats and claimed they descended from the Goths; the song rejects that theory and affirms the Slavic origin of all South Slavs. It was translated into all the national languages of Socialist Yugoslavia and into minority languages such as Slovak. In the late 1970s, shortly before his death, Tito visited North Korea, where a ceremonial choir sang it in Serbo-Croatian to honour him.

What it says

A Partisan song in praise of Tito and of the unity of the South Slavs; martial and celebratory.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words.