If you grew up anywhere in the former Yugoslavia, you already know the answer. The Stojadin was not just a car. It was part of the family. The first car, the car your father drove and your uncle still has rusting in a garage somewhere. For everyone else, here is the story.
Where it came from
The Zastava 101 was born in Kragujevac, Serbia in 1971. The factory was Zastava, a Yugoslav arms manufacturer that had been building cars under Fiat licence since the 1950s. The 101 was built on the Fiat 128 platform. Italian engineering, Yugoslav production, Balkan character.
Between 1971 and 1991, around 1.2 million were produced. Roughly 37 percent of them were exported. Not just to Eastern Bloc countries, but the Zastava 101 was sold in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France, where it was marketed as the Zastava 1100. It was one of the few Yugoslav-made products that crossed the Iron Curtain in both directions.
The names
In Serbia they called it Kec. In Croatia, in Pula specifically, people call it Stojka. Everywhere else it became Stojadin, a nickname that captures something the official model number never could. The name likely comes from sto jedan, one hundred and one in Serbian and Croatian, though some insist it is simply because the car was as common as a person named Stojan or Stojadin. Either way, by the time production ended it had become a character rather than a vehicle.
The Confort
Not all Stojadins were equal. The trim level hierarchy ran from basic to Lux, with the mid-range variant sitting in between. In most markets it was called Comfort. On the French market, where Zastava was selling in reasonable numbers, it became Confort (the French spelling). The name stuck across the entire production run.
The Confort came with a slightly better interior, additional chrome trim, and equipment that distinguished it from the base model without reaching the full Lux specification. It was produced for only a few years, which makes surviving examples rarer than the standard variants. The Yugorama Stojadin is a Confort.
What it could do
The Zastava 101 was not just a city car. In 1975, a team set out from Kragujevac with five Zastava 101s and drove to Kilimanjaro. Forty-five days, approximately 11,000 kilometres, including off-road sections across Africa. All five cars made it.
On the rally circuit, Jovica Paliković drove a Zastava 101 Rally at the Tour d’Europe and outran drivers in Porsches. The car also appeared at Monte Carlo. These were not honorary entries but the 101 was genuinely competitive in its class.
The films
The Stojadin made it onto screen too. Petar Božović drove one as Kum Žorž in Ljepota poroka in 1986. A Zastava 101 Lux from 1978 had a role in Koko i duhovi. The car appeared in the 1974 Yugoslav film Košava alongside Bekim Fehmiu and Tanja Bošković. It even made it into the 1977 French film Armaguedon. A car that appeared on both sides of the Iron Curtain, on rally stages and African expeditions, and in cinema, that is a biography most vehicles do not have.
This one
The Yugorama Stojadin was restored from a car that had previously worked in film production in Croatia. Apart from the paint and bodywork, the restoration included importing mechanical parts from Serbia. Much of the interior work was done by hand, restoring and repainting plastic components, preserving original upholstery where it still existed, cleaning and rebuilding sections that could not be replaced because the parts simply no longer exist anywhere.
The goal was not a museum piece. It was a car that runs, that sounds exactly like it should, and that takes people through the streets of Pula the way it was always meant to…slowly and with the windows down.
Where to find it
The Stojadin is based in Pula, Istria. La Yugo Vita is a private two-hour tour of the city’s Yugoslav-era history from the back seat of this exact car. If you want to experience it yourself, here is everything you need to know.