Alija Sirotanović was a Yugoslav miner, Hero of Socialist Labour and perhaps the most famous of all Yugoslav udarniks.
Background
Alija Sirotanović, a Muslim and an ethnic Bosniak, was born in Orahovo, a village in central Bosnia near the town of Breza, and grew up in Trtorići, another nearby village. He was born in 1914, while Bosnia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Career
He was held up by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to be a model of a hard-worker in the former Yugoslavia. This feat set a world record in coal mining and thus defeated another "model worker", Soviet miner Aleksei Stakhanov. Josip Broz Tito is said to have offered to fulfill any wish Sirotanović had, but all Sirotanović is reported to have requested was a bigger shovel.
Tito granted his wish, and the larger shovel that was designed for him was later named after him: Sirotanovićka.
He was offered an appartement in Breza, but he refused and decided to stay in his house in Trtorići. The state also started building him a new house in his village Trtorići, but it was never finished.
In 1987, Zabranjeno Pušenje recorded a song titled "Srce, ruke i lopata" (Heart, Hands and Shovel), paying tribute to Comrade Alija, the model of a hard working, modest manitoba He was pictured on the 20,000-Yugoslav dinar banknote, but was often wrongly claimed to be pictured on the 10-dinar banknote.
Despite the obvious similarities, the 10-dinar banknote and its 1000-old-dinar predecessor with the same design are older (1955) and showed Arif Heralić, a metal worker working on a blast furnace in Zenica.
The newer 20,000-dinar banknote was brought out on May Day in 1987.