Vera Svoboda

Vera Svoboda Njikoš was a Croatian singer of popular, folk and old-town songs, often called the "queen of tamburica music". She was born on 15 August 1936 in Osijek and spent her childhood in Mikleuš, where she went to elementary school. Back in Osijek she attended the Franjo Kuhač music school, graduated in English at the Pedagogical Academy and taught English for a short while at an Osijek school.

As a girl she loved the shows and operettas of the Osijek children's theatre, auditioned for it at the end of secondary school and acted in Snow White and Cinderella. There she met her future husband, Julije Njikoš, the theatre's répétiteur, a musicologist who later produced and arranged most of her songs. Her first public appearances were at school concerts, and in 1952 she passed the audition for soloists at Radio Osijek with "U đardine kad si ruže brala". She sang in the women's choir Šokadija and recorded for the radio.

"Dan plavetan kao lan", sung at the Slavonija music festival in 1972, marked the real start of her career and stayed with her: she often sang it twice or more at a single concert. In the 1970s she was one of the most popular singers in Yugoslavia. For Croatia Records, formerly Jugoton, she recorded fifteen LPs, five CDs and some twenty cassettes, and for Croatian Radiotelevision more than 300 songs. She appeared fifty times at Đakovački vezovi, sang at the Osijek tamburica festival and the Days of Julije Njikoš, and gave concerts for Croatian emigrants from Austria and Norway to Australia, New Zealand and Kuwait, as well as about 400 charity concerts from 1990 on.

She received the Order of Danica Hrvatska with the face of Marko Marulić in 1995, the Status golden plaque of the Croatian Musicians Union in 2000 and the Porin for lifetime achievement in 2022, and listeners of Radio Martin named her the singer of the century of folk and old-town songs. Vera Svoboda died on 1 April 2024 and was buried at St. Anne's cemetery in Osijek on 5 April. The playlist gathers her romances and old-town songs, from "Koliko te ljubim" to "Tiho noći".