”Praise be to Jesus and Mary, my dear people,” Croatian singer Marko Perković, known as Thompson, told a crowd at Zagreb's Hippodrome. He called on ”all of Europe” to return to its traditions and Christian roots. Only then, he declared, can Croatia be strong again.

Thompson is a nationalist icon in Croatia, and banned in many European cities for promoting extremist ideology. On 5 July, he held one of Europe's biggest-ever solo concerts – and, by many accounts, the largest pro-fascist gathering since World War II.

He started his most famous songs off with the salute ”Za dom!” (”For the homeland”), met by half a million voices shouting back: ”Spremni” (”Ready!”) – equivalent to ”Sieg Heil”. The slogan was used by Croatia's Nazi puppet regime during WWII.

Some 500,000 tickets were sold for the far-right pop star, a former soldier from the Yugoslav wars whose nickname comes from the Thompson gun he carried. His folk-rock ballads glorify Croatian nationalism and, often, the Ustaše movement responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma.

While civil rights groups condemned the event as an attack on democratic values, Croatian media hailed it as the greatest cultural event in the country’s history, glossing over its fascist undertones.