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Yugoslav Television in Communist Romania the meeting place of Yugonostalgics and turbo folk lovers—the same Yugonostalgics who were supposed to fill in the Timisoara stadium in 2012 at the long-awaited Lepa Brena concert (Fig. 7), 28 years after the first one in 1984, which was called off in the end. Yugonostalgia—broadly defined as “nostalgia for the fantasies associated with a country, the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic or Yugoslavia), which existed from 1945 to 1991”, where “no necessary relationship exists between the temporally and spatially fragmented memories of a Yugoslav past and the present desires, expressed by and through Yugonostalgic representations of this past” (Lindstrom 2006: 233)—is known to be strongest among ex-Yugoslav emigrants and diaspora communities, many of whom left the ex-Yugoslav region after the breakup of the federation at the beginning of the 1990s (see Markovi¢ 2009: 205). These individuals “produce nostalgic discourses as a justification of their Yugoslav pasts, experiences and memories, but simultaneously, these nostalgic discourses are to be seen as an answer to the nationalistic discourses many former Yugoslavs could not identify with” (Petrovié 2007: 264). Paradoxically, many Banat Romanians are also—and still—Yugonostalgic, without having ever lived in Yugoslavia. Yugonostalgia, this recently highly debated and intensely criticized concept (see Petrovi¢ 2012: 122-154), as it is expressed in Timisoara, is to be understood not so much as identification with a political system or regime. People here are emotionally attached mainly to the consumerist facets of Yugoslavia, their nostalgia being directed towards different aspects of popular culture. Instead of Conclusions By now, it is widely accepted that the reception of foreign televisions in the border zones of the countries of the Eastern Bloc played an important role in getting people accustomed to the values of capitalism and a Western way of life. The same happened in Romania, and the influence of the Yugoslav TV in the 1980s in the Banat was a cultural phenomenon that deserves the entire attention of anthropologists, linguists, historians, and sociologists. The Yugoslavs became the significant, relevant Others, whom the Romanians admired and tried to imitate. Today, these Others are still alive in the discourse and consciousness of my interlocutors and, after twenty years, this image has become nuanced; but the admiration still persists. The mediated image of the Others, of the Yugoslavs, that Romanians received and perceived in the 1980s was by any measure a distorted one, which partly changed after the fall of communism. The propaganda that was also present on the Yugoslav TV seems to not have been perceived, or at least not to its full extent, by the Romanians, as it was far more diluted than the propaganda being broadcast on Romanian state television. Further research should focus on the way the Others, people on the other side of the borders, of the iron curtain, are represented in the accounts of the residents of the former Eastern Bloc. The widespread idea of two separate communication blocs, with almost no points of contact, will surely be contested 189
