The decline of department stores is part of a broader process of capitalist restructuring, most clearly illustrated by the proliferation of shopping malls in suburban areas and the rise of digital commerce. The loss of local department stores can be hard on residents because they were built to meet the needs of the community and make city centers more human. In her article, Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek focuses on department stores in socialist Yugoslavia and their legacy.
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On January 26, 2026, the department store chain Na-Ma announced its final sale. Established in 1945, Na-Ma, short for Narodni magazin (the People’s/National Department Store), was one of Yugoslavia’s largest retail enterprises. Despite operating at a profit, Na-Ma spent more than twenty-five years in bankruptcy after its privatization in the 1990s. In order to settle its debts, the chain was ultimately forced to sell its last two remaining stores: a flagship store in the very city center (formerly run by an enterprise from Austria and Hungary) and a large modernist store from the late 1960s in another central commercial area. While the first building was recently bought by a private company, which has to maintain its retail function and employees for at least two years as decreed by the city government, the future of the late 1960s modernist building remains uncertain.
By the 1990s, Na-Ma owned 18 department stores, employed around 4500 workers, and was established as the staple of everyday life in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Residents have reacted negatively to the news of closure, and their reminiscences and criticism filled the comment sections of numerous articles published in the media. While the reactions generally expressed resentment over the loss of a place that became the symbol of the city, some specifically referred to the socialist period, angered at the never-ending consequences of the largely criminal privatization processes.
Although the media brought Na-Ma’s history back into the spotlight, the frequent identification of the enterprise with its flagship store in many ways sidelined the socialist heritage in public discourse. As I want to show, however, the frustration over the destruction of an institution that many came to perceive as common good has everything to do with how department stores were imagined, planned, built, and operated in socialist Yugoslavia.
Retail and postwar reconstruction
In Yugoslavia, the government initially established Narodni magazin as a centralized department store chain, with stores in each of the republics. In the context of postwar poverty, department stores served as places where citizens could acquire basic, rationed goods. Nevertheless, already then, the government gave them an important future role in advancing the production, sale, and consumption of consumer goods and services as well as in improving the labor conditions of retail workers. Following the economic and administrative decentralization in the early 1950s, the department stores of Narodni magazin became individual entities on the level of their cities and were joined by hundreds of newly established retail enterprises.
The introduction of the self-service system in the late 1950s represented a crucial moment for the modernization of retail in Yugoslavia. Its inventors came from the US and brought their expertise and technology to Yugoslavia in the 1950s. They did so through trade missions and the legendary supermarket exhibition at the Zagreb Trade Fair in 1957. The retailers, economists, and other experts interested in modernizing the largely underdeveloped retail sector seized the opportunity to import not just the consumer goods and technology necessary for running the self-service system, but the entire supermarket, which was rebuilt in Belgrade.
Transnational knowledge exchange
Already from the early 1950s, experts were active in establishing institutions for the production and dissemination of knowledge on modern retail, with the aim to both improve its scientific and technological standing as well as to popularize it among the broader population. An important part of this process was the transnational knowledge exchange between experts in Yugoslavia and their colleagues in the Western and Eastern world, which remained a constant throughout the Cold War period.
While Western-centered histories usually place the peak of department stores in the turn of the twentieth century, in different corners of Europe, including Yugoslavia, they rapidly spread between the 1950s and the 1970s. Either standalone, or parts of larger shopping zones, the emergence of new department stores represented an important part of welfare provisions both in European welfare states and state-socialist systems. In the late 1950s, the government of Yugoslavia explicitly put the increase of personal consumption and the living standard of its citizens high on the agenda and linked it to the availability of consumer goods and services.
Afterwards, retail enterprises and department store chains rapidly spread in urban centers. During the 1960s, the largest chains, such as Na-Ma, but also Robne Kuće Beograd, Na-Ma in Ljubljana, and Merkur in Skopje, became the key players in the modernization of urban retail. While older stores were refurbished with furniture and equipment needed for the self-service system, new stores were constructed in developing neighborhoods, built as a part of the government’s effort to provide housing for the rapidly growing urban population.
The heart of the neighborhood
Just like their colleagues in other parts of Europe, architects and urban planners in Yugoslavia designed department stores as main elements in reconstructed and newly built city and neighborhood centers. Focused on the question of how to build new and better societies after the war, architects and urban planners across Europe advocated for the construction of centers as humanized, pedestrian spaces where the residents could spend their leisure time and socialize. Department stores played a major role in the creation of these centers, and their design was influenced by the founder of shopping centers Victor Gruen and his belief that retail spaces should have not just a commercial, but also a civic role.
Locally, these ideas were adopted by architects and urban planners such as Lidija Podbregar-Vasle (a leading expert in commercial urbanism who promoted the importance of department stores in making pedestrian centers more human-friendly) and transformed into concrete forms by Aleksandar Dragomanović, who designed the modernist department store Na-Ma in the center of Novi Zagreb in 1966. Dragomanović repeated this design once in Vukovar and twice in Novi Sad. Another architect who implemented these ideas was Živko Popovski. He designed the City Trade Center in Skopje in 1973 as part of the city’s reconstruction after a devastating earthquake. Both architects were in direct contact with the architectural duo, Jacob Bakema and Jo van den Broek. Their shopping center, the Lijnbaan in Rotterdam (1953), was a highly influential model for multifunctional retail spaces that foster community.
This community-building aspect was particularly crucial in Yugoslavia, where department stores were promoted by architects and urban planners as a means of strengthening the social self-management system in neighborhoods. As Dragomanović put it, department stores should “take people away from the large features of automobile traffic and bring them to the world of pedestrians, the world of human footsteps, where all the residents of the neighborhood meet.”
By the end of the 1960s, department stores had expanded from city centers to peripheral neighborhoods and completely new housing estates, turning them into a regular part of everyday life. In most places, these department stores were usually the first larger retail spaces where the residents could fulfill most of their needs in terms of consumer goods and services. In addition to their commercial role, department stores also created new areas for socialization and leisure, which often starkly contrasted to their previously unurbanized locations, making them important features in both the urbanization and decentralization of cities.
Benefits for workers and consumers
Starting in the 1970s, department stores began to emerge more rapidly in smaller towns and rural areas across Yugoslavia. These stores appeared in places such as Ribnica, Metković, Jajce, Paraćin, Bitola, Bar, and Pejë. While some still followed the high modernist design of the 1960s – built like cubes of concrete, stone, and steel with large glass storefronts – the new stores of the 1970s and 1980s adopted a much more pluralistic design. One remarkable group was formed by stores that combined modernist functionalist design with references to local, vernacular traditions and expressions.
The façade of Ante Paljaga’s department store Razvitak in Mostar (1970), one of the earliest such examples, was covered in concrete panels depicting motives and ornaments from stećci, decorative tombstones from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The use of vernacular elements reflected the tendency to incorporate the department store into the local context and use it to generate a sense of community, but also a newly found respect for local building traditions, marked by a sensitivity towards preserving historical and natural characteristics. Not only did pluralism appear in architectural and urban design, but it also appeared in retailing techniques. For example, department stores now offered vending machines, sales catalogs, 24/7 service, free deliveries, furniture showrooms, beauty salons, restaurants, travel agencies, and currency exchange offices.
Department stores brought in income for local communities, created new jobs, and cooperated with industrial enterprises in the area. Retail enterprises, especially large chains, also significantly contributed to the professionalization of the retail workforce by organizing various courses, in foreign languages or consumer psychology, sending workers to universities, and including them in mobilities to similar enterprises abroad.
In addition to education, department store chains also organized housing, holidays in their own resorts, and services like subsidized canteens, hairdressing salons, and public transport. Workers could, moreover, receive financial aid for events like weddings and funerals, health recoveries or for damages caused by natural disasters like earthquakes and floods. This made department stores, just like other socialist enterprises, a source of distribution of welfare services, which was particularly significant for the social mobility and the standard of living of female workers, who formed the majority of their staff.
Death of department stores?
The economic crisis of the 1980s, marked by high inflation, shortages, and unemployment, significantly reduced the number of new department stores. Nevertheless, even then some retail enterprises tried to adapt to such circumstances, like Na-Ma who opened its first discount store in 1989. By 1990, there were more than 400 department stores in Yugoslavia, but following the war and privatization processes, many faced a similar fate to Na-Ma, and were sold or simply closed. In areas particularly affected by the war, many department stores, like the aforementioned Razvitak in Mostar, were destroyed by bombs.
On a global level, the collapse of department stores in former Yugoslavia represents a more violent case of a broader process of the death of department stores, which have since the 2000s been replaced by suburban shopping malls and digital commerce. Due to their urban positioning, the closure of department stores, however, risks emptying out city and neighborhood centers of various commercial and social content. This has sparked a discussion among city governments and urban planners about the future of these retail spaces and the evolving role of city centers.
While some city governments in Europe have bought empty department store buildings in order to have a bigger say in their future use, in Zagreb, and in other cities on the Balkans, this has so far not been the case. If residents are attached to their local department stores, it’s because many were built with their needs in mind during a time when city centers were given an explicitly humanizing role. Therefore, asking city governments to take care of retail spaces and assign them new roles in culture and education simply reflects a desire to preserve their civic role since the end of World War II.
Note from the editors: At BG’s “Kin City” festival, Paula Mikat and Cléo Mieulet presented their project to socialize a shopping mall and turn it into a care center. This project is part of a broader effort to repurpose department stores and shopping malls as platforms for social transformation. Listen to their talk here.