Nikola Gogić, the director of the museum in the Serbian city of Užice, told BIRN on Monday that museum staff are optimistic that a five-meter tall statue of former president Josip Broz Tito will return to the city's main square, where it once stood.
"This will be a way for Uzice and this whole area to pay homage to Tito and all that communist period when a lot was really done for Uzice, which turned from a small village into a small town with factories ,” said Gogić.
Tito's statue was removed in 1991 as Yugoslavia began to descend into civil war and many Serbs turned away from Tito's legacy.
There have been previous attempts to have the statue placed back in the square. SUBNOR, the organization representing former World War II Partisan fighters, petitioned Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic to reinstate the statue in the square, but the effort failed.
The latest initiative comes as the Užice museum prepares to open a Museum of the "Republic of Užice", a short-lived territory liberated from partisans established during the German occupation in World War II.
"If we fail to place the statue in 'Partizani' Square (the main square), it will be placed in a very visible place in the new museum," Gogiq said.
"We are asking the local authorities to reconsider the 1991 decision to remove the statue. We have the support of a large number of citizens and we hope that they will soon respond to our demands," Gogiq said.
During the communist period, the city was known as "Tito's Užice" for its role in the Yugoslav partisans' war against the occupying Axis forces.
Užice was said to be the late leader's favorite city in Yugoslavia, and almost every street was named after a Partisan fighter.
Tito ruled Yugoslavia from its reformation in 1945 until his death in 1980, after leading the Partisans during World War II.
Because of his diplomatic stance of non-alignment, he was admired by many in the West as a mild dictator and praised for maintaining peaceful coexistence among the peoples of Yugoslavia.
As a successful statesman whose death shocked the entire former Yugoslavia, he was the subject of dozens of monuments across the Balkans.
One of the largest and best-kept memorials dedicated to Tito is located in Belgrade, where his tomb is also located. A statue of Tito also stands in his home village of Kumrovec in Croatia. It was attacked in 2004, but was restored not long after.
Several Tito monuments still stand in Bosnia and Herzegovina, three of them in Sarajevo, while in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, a small statue stands outside a school that still bears the former Yugoslav leader's name.
Although he was accused of imprisoning and killing political opponents and implementing weak economic policies that left the country in an economic crisis, many people remember his 35-year rule as a time of peace and believe his death marked the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the only socialist country to successfully escape the domination of the Soviet Union, splitting with Stalin in 1948 to pursue a neutral foreign policy during the Cold War. The country fell apart just over ten years after Tito's death in 1980.
Decades later, many people in Serbia and throughout the region organize celebrations of his reign, especially during his birthday every May 25.
