Tito's wife, from a life of glamour to virtual isolation
Former first lady of Yugoslavia lived in a crumbling house, surviving on state pension
Jovanka Broz
1925 - 2013
Jovanka Broz, who spent three decades as Yugoslavia's First Lady but was left stateless and forgotten as war shattered the socialist federation built by her husband "Tito", died yesterday in Belgrade.
She was 88 and had lived largely in isolation since the death of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, squirreled away in a crumbling state-owned villa in the Serbian capital without a passport or ID.
Broz, an ethnic Serb, and Tito, an ethnic Croat and 32 years her senior, first met during the second world war while she fought as a marksman in the first female brigade of the Partisans. But it wasn't until she was assigned to work with the communist leader after the war that their relationship developed. They married in 1952.
Unlike the grey, staid Communist leaders of the Soviet bloc, Tito and his wife revelled in ostentation and glamour. Dead three days short of his 88th birthday, Tito's funeral gathered heads of state and dignitaries from across the cold war divide, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher and ailing Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev.
His wife had already been removed from the public eye in the late 1970s, as the party elite had grown increasingly suspicious of her influence over the elderly president.