Prowres in southeastern europe

[GOTNW]

Wrestling fandom is a fascinating thing. Most of the historians are obviously focused on the big areas-the ones that matter when discussing Hall Of Fame candidates and whatnot. Yet I (being from a country where wrestling is an even bigger niche) never cease being fascinated with the placed where you'll stumble upon pro wrestling shows. There's pro wrestling in Chicle, Vietnam and the Czech Republic and it all sounds so interesting and fascinating. I wish we could learn the slightest details of every pro wrestling culture of even the tiniest shows. That's what this topic is going to focus on-I'm sure at least some will get a kick out of it and considering how close Germany, Austria and Italy are who knows what kind of bits and pieces of european wrestling history (which is hardly the most researched place, especially outside of the "major" markets) I could dig into.

[gordi]

I lived in the Czech Republic for 7 years in the 90s. Literally none of my Czech friends and associates had ever been to a live wrestling show. It was possible to watch the WWF on TV if you had a satellite. I think it was on a German station. I was delighted to hear that there is pro wrestling there now. Looking forward to reading about it.

[Matt Farmer]

Not sure what time periods you are looking to research. But at one time or another nearly every country had some form of pro wrestling at a major league level.

 

If you want to take a look at some older research from around the globe, I'd recommend a site I've helped with. The Historical Wrestling Society. http://www.prowrestlinghistoricalsociety.com/index.html there is also a Facebook page.

[GOTNW]

2000s TV & popularity

Wrestling was never on croatian TV as far as I can remember (and probably never was). It aired on serbian TV from around 2007-2009. At its peak it aired at prime time (8PM) on a popular channel [1] on a work day. It got moved to a late night time slot after a while and was eventually cancelled. This was one of the causes of a mini-wrestling boom-pretty insignificant on a cultural level but huge in terms of an increasing number of people you could talk to about wrestling. If there's one thing you need to know about balkan mentality it's that people love to complain aboutt things and then somehow hypocritically partake in them regardless of what they said. Reality TV shows like Big Brother, Farm, Love Is In the Countryside, Wife Swap all pretty much get murdered in any kind of commenting, let alone serious critique. They also do great ratings and maintain profitable for the TV stations. I imagine wrestling was similar for the older generation, but they quickly forgot about it like every other reality show. But it did really well in a specific demographic- the more passionate fans were young males/children (amongst whom WWE was most popular) and they're generally the ones who've remained in our discussions to this day, with the majority of them now in teens or early 20s. There were even WWE sticker albums, which are generally only published for football/soccer. It" peaked" with a house show in Belgrade in 2009. The capacity of the Arena is "18 000 to 25 000 spectators" [2]. Only source I could find in terms of how many people were there was a person in the arena who said "not much. 7/8 thousand people".

One major bosnian TV station [3] picked up wrestling in 2009. Its best time slot was 9PM on a Monday. They dropped it in 2010/2011 and it caused an insane registration boom on our local message board. Demographically pretty much the same story as in Serbia, but with the show airing a few years later members of our community from Bosnia tend to be a few years younger. This was also the last time pro wrestling was that accessible over here. There are still come channels that carry wrestling but they're foreign (WWE has a great time slot on Eurosport at 9PM Monday and SPORT-1/former DSF carried (maybe still does) Smackdown which aired at 10PM on Saturdays. Eurosport also carried TNA and New Japan for a while, presumably before WWE latched onto them.

1.http://www.foxtv.rs/

2.http://www.kombankarena.rs/en/pages/details/61/61/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB+%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA+%D0%90%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5

3.http://www.obn.ba/

 

Not sure what time periods you are looking to research.

 

Anything I can find really. Starting with present day and working my way backwards but will also use this thread to post updates about new shows and what's going on in the scene.