Hello, Hello! This is Radio Zagreb!

These are the best known words heard on air in Croatian. They are repeated every 15th of May to mark the anniversary of Radio Zagreb, which started airing in 1926. Few people know that the recording is not original; that this greeting was first aired by a man, Ivo Štern, who was the station manager back then, and only a couple of decades later did Božena Begović recreate it from her memory. Even fewer people know that Božena Begović was one of the most versatile and free-thinking authors of the early 20th century. Daughter to Croatian novelist Milan Begović and Dubrovnik pianist Paula Goršetić, Božena spent her childhood in Split and Hamburg and completed her grammar school and acting academy in Vienna. In 1923, she returned to Zagreb, where she continued acting and then announcing at the newly launched radio station. Later, she also translated (in fact, she was the first to translate Miroslav Krleža into German), wrote plays and poems, and relentlessly fought against fascism. After WW2, she became the director of the Croatian National Theatre drama section and later managed the Pioneer Theatre, today’s Zagreb Youth Theatre. For all these reasons, this production is an homage to this exceptional yet forgotten woman, whose life has written some of the most important and saddest pages of women’s history of emancipation in this corner of the world.