Split: The Role of Hajduk

Being a big football (soccer) fan, I’ve always been fascinated by the role of a football club in cultural history: there are great histories here which tend to pass unknown to non-football fans, stories which far transcend the game itself. The reason Barcelona became so big, and the part Espanyol played in that story, is a stirring tale on its own.

The history of Hajduk Split tells a parallel tale to Barcelona, in as much as, during times of extreme political oppression, the football club became a critical point of identity when such individual nationalism was prohibited. During the long years of communist rule and the enforced unification of Yugoslavia, Croats were forced to conceal their pride and hide their history; hide, indeed, their identity. They were, officially at least, Yugoslavian, and not Croatian. But, as history has repeatedly shown us, you can’t change what is in people’s souls.

Like the Catalans of Barcelona during Franco’s strangling reign, Croats generally, and Dalmatians in particular, used their football club as their vehicle for pride and identity. By sporting club colours, they were able to display Croat pride in the only public way they could, albeit partly clandestine. Hajduk was a byword for the stifled nation of Croatia.

As a legacy, the club badge appears in many forms throughout the city and region to this day: in the form of graffiti, in the form of official artwork, and even, for goodness sake, on sugar sachets:-

You will also see “1950” emblazoned everywhere, even etched in stone on mountainsides. 1950 was the year that the “torcida” was formed: the Hajduk “ultras” who dared to push their Croat pride through unity with the football club, even during the most oppressive periods of Tito’s communist regime when such a stance was both illegal and dangerous. The torcida still exist to this day.

Wandering into the Radunica neighbourhood in Split, we found ourselves in one of the original torcida heartlands, home to this rather wonderful street art:

In the nearby village of Kastel Stari, we came across this rather brilliant street art, depicting the torcida ultras in defiant pose, presumably from that communist era:

Football crowds here may not match the numbers back in England, but the fierce pride is still very evident. The club badge, like the iconic chequered shirts of the national team, has become a symbol of freedom from repression.