In March 2014 Zagreb said farewell to the architect Slavko Jelinek (1925-2014), co-creator of Zagrepčanka, the building that more than any other symbolizes the aspirations and energies of Zagreb in the 1970s. Completed in 1976, this office block on Savska cesta is still the city’s highest –at least, that is, if you include the radio mast on the top. It also remains one of the few skyscrapers that people in Zagreb actually express a genuine fondness for, not least because it symbolizes a time when their city seemed to be on the threshold of some progressive, modern future. Indeed the Seventies saw the culmination of Zagreb’s emergence as a skyscraper city. With the housing projects of Novi Zagreb and the Sava riverbank (initially conceived in the 1950s) now nearing completion, the Zagrepčanka building was seen as the crowning glory of a forward-looking epoch.

At the start of the decade however Zagreb found itself the focus of European attention for rather different reasons. The Croatian Communist Party had begun 1970 by shaking off the unitarist policies hitherto favoured by the Yugoslav communist leadership, embarking on a campaign to give Croatia more political weight within the Yugoslav Federation. Dubbed the “Croatian Spring”, the campaign soon grew into a popular movement. There were suggestions that Yugoslav leader President Tito looked favourably on Croatia’s new direction. However what could have been a period of great political change ended up as a decade of might-have-beens. Tito opted to clamp down on the movement in November 1971: Croatia’s pro-autonomy communist chiefs were forced to resign, student leaders were imprisoned, and the republic entered a long period of political timidity – an era only brought to an end by the Yugoslav crisis of the late 1980s.

The increasing greyness of the political scene contrasted sharply with an upsurge in urban culture. Zagreb’s art scene had always occupied a position independent from both the commercial gallery-art of the West and the socialist art of the East, something that became increasingly evident in the ironic, subversive and mischievously abrasive art that came to the fore as the Seventies progressed. Under the trailblazing curatorial leadership of Želimir Koščević, the Student Centre Gallery (then a much more important place than it is nowadays) championed the new, hard-to-categorize art of performances, happenings, and conceptual gestures. The generation of artists who came to prominence at this time - Mladen Stilinović, Sanja Iveković, Goran Trbuljak and the late Tomislav Gotovac among them- are nowadays considered classics of Croatian contemporary culture, and works by them form the inspirational core of the collection at Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU).

Many of these emerging cultural energies came to public attention via Polet, the agenda-setting youth magazine that had disappeared in 1969 only to be relaunched in 1976. It was edited by Pero Kvesić, a writer whose short-story collection An Introduction to Pero K (1975) had helped to define a new, independent, jeans-wearing generation - it remains a cult title today. By the late Seventies Polet had become Croatia’s answer to the NME, mixing enthusiastic coverage of the latest rock bands with subversive social comment.
Polet was one of the best training grounds that Croatian culture ever had: almost every writer, photographer and designer who ever worked for the magazine went on to become a leading practitioner in their field.

It’s nowadays difficult to reconstruct the nocturnal Zagreb in which Polet-reading hipsters hung out: popular cafes like Korzo, Medulić and Tingl-Tangl are no more; while Kavkaz, Gradska Kavana and Blato have changed beyond recognition.

The year 1976 also saw the Rolling Stones perform two consecutive nights in Zagreb’s Dom sportova sports hall (a venue that was itself a child of the Seventies, opened in 1972). It was the Stones’ first appearance in communist-ruled Europe since the near-riot that was their visit to Warsaw in 1967. Daily newspaper Vjesnik’s review of the concert was unexpectedly reserved: the Stones had been anticipated as the very incarnation of rock and roll, and yet at the end of the day were just flesh-and-blood human beings giving a concert. In terms of media coverage, the event was in any case outshone by football: the European Championships were being held in Yugoslavia at the same time. Zagreb’s Maksimir stadium hosted both a semi-final, in which Czechoslovakia beat the Netherlands 3-1; and the third-place play-off, which saw the Netherlands vanquish the Yugoslavs 3-2.

Otherwise, the Seventies were something of a lean decade, sports-wise. Despite enjoying domestic and European success in the 1960s, the city’s football team Dinamo Zagreb suffered an almost total trophy drought in the 1970s – although they did win the nowadays almost totally forgotten Balkans Cup, in which they triumphed against Sportul Studentesc of Bucharest, in 1976. In basketball, Zagreb’s premier team Cibona (then playing under the name of Lokomotiva) won the inaugural edition of the European Korać cup in 1972, but otherwise failed to make much of an impact.

The most epoch-defining event to shake Zagreb in the Seventies came in December 1977 when Slovene punk rock band Pankrti performed at an exhibition opening at the Student Centre Gallery. Their appearance had an electrifying effect on an audience that seemed to have been waiting for this kind of cacophony all their lives. The appearance sparked a slow-burning musical revolution led by local bands Prljavo Kazalište and Azra. Both groups released their first records in 1979, going on to enjoy massive success in the years that followed.

Prljavo Kazalište founder-member Jasenko Houra once said that many of Zagreb’s first-generation punks were basically Rolling Stones fans who couldn’t play their instruments – and therefore opted for punk as the easiest means of expression available. The boys from Dartford certainly had a lot to answer for.

Jonathan Bousfield