Prowres in Southeastern europe II

[GOTNW]

Since the last thread got nuked. What I wanted to post:

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/Профил+Комбанк+Арене
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.

[GOTNW]

A random tidbit from a 1909 newspaper. It's in italian. Why are there newspapers on Italian in Croatia? This should be a good starting point if you're interested in that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istria

 

 

 

Interesting that it mentions Frank Gotch as famous for the time, that'll give me more material for searching. Trieste is a disputed territory and Raičević is most certainly not an italian surname but whether he was of croatian or slovenian ethnicity/origin doesn't really matter. He even has his own wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Raicevich

Is he a well known name among wrestling historians?

 

source for the article:

http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=1&t=1&C=56&godina=1909&broj=000315&stranica=001&u=catch

[Indikator]

The vicinity to Trieste is probably the reason for the newspaper. Not that it would be that weird otherwise, I've read German newspapers from Rio de Janeiro, Latvia and Missouri. In the Rio one you actually had Raicevich as the hero for the Italian emigrants. He was something like a world traveling Antonino Rocca, he might have wrestled in like 50 different countries. It's bizarre to read in said German newspaper how the Italian emigrants reacted to their hero pretty much how Rocca and Sammartino would have been treated decades later. Another traveling Italian hero would have been Olympic winner Ubaldo Bianchi, he probably was everywhere around the Mediterranean Sea after WWI. He had his own troupe and didn't venture that much out of his comfort zone, so I would definitely rate Raicevich higher. Phil Lions has researched a lot more recently, he specializes on Bulgaria

[GOTNW]

1974. drama

 

sources:

http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=1&t=1&C=3&godina=1974&broj=000020&stranica=013&u=ke%E8er
http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=1&t=1&C=3&godina=1974&broj=000044&stranica=013&u=ke%E8er

I just figured out there are pics of the scanned newspapers as well!

 

 

 

 

What does it all of that say? Well basically someone hyped the show a lot, people showed up to see a new form of entertainment out of curiosity (400 paid for the first show), the show sucked and the crowd booed ("whistled" is the term used) the hell out of them the entire time. The articles are written very professionally with no malice towards wrestling itself. The first article also mentions many of the viewers had seen wrestling on TV or in cinema and had an idea of what they would see but the show just sucked so bad.

[GOTNW]

random 1978. show

 

 

obligatory back up:

 

KEČERI U KOPRIVNICI
U Koprivnici u Školskom centru, 15. srpnja u 1930 sati održava se svjetski kup u keču. Nastupaju vrhunski svjetski kečeri.

 

 

source:

http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=0&z=823&C=20&godina=1978&broj=000028&F=&H=&vrsta=&grupa=&lang=&stranica=001

Talk about vague. World class wrestlers in a small croatian town? Eeeeeeeeh. The search only showed this, but I checked next week's issue just to make sure and:

I had no luck in finding how big the school venue is, says it was almost full. Article says ticket prices were high and "fans" very disappointed, looked more like a circus than a sport.

source:

http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=0&z=823&C=20&godina=1978&broj=000029&F=&H=&vrsta=&grupa=&lang=&stranica=001

[Jetlag]

Interesting subject. Sergje1 has uploaded a Battle Royal from hungary from the late 70s or early 80s to YouTube. Thats about the only wrestling footage from that region that I know of. As you may know, Mile Zrno is a well known croatian wrestler who worked in germany and austria a lot and has a reputation. Maybe you can contact him through facebook or something, I don't think he's ever been interviewed by an internet fan. There are also some videos of greek pro wrestling in creepy looking locations.

 

It seems a little weird pro wrestling seemingly never boomed in south eastern europe and eastern europe. Given that these countries have a great wrestling tradition, and all things fighting, grappling and wrestling related are popular there, I'd say there's untapped potential. I know there is a ZERO1-offshoot promotion in Belarus or somewhere which is just bizarre.

[PeteF3]

I think it's as simple as the fact that most of that area of the world was behind the Iron Curtain. Hard for a wrasslin' promoter to be allowed to flourish in that kind of economy.