AKUD Lola is the successor of the tradition of the Ivo Lola Ribar Youth Cultural-Artistic Society, which was established in 1944, straight after the liberation of Belgrade.

The Society was named after Ivo Lola Ribar, the popular youth and student leader from the pre war and war era, who died in 1943 at the age of 27 in Glamoc Polje, currently Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was on his way to Egypt as a member of the delegation for negotiations with allied troupe representatives. Coming from an eminent Belgrade family, his father was the president of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia National Parliament; Lola enjoyed a reputation among his peers for being an excellent pupil and student as well as a skilful orator. Lola gained his nick name in early childhood because of his lively, cheerful and restless nature and it stayed with him as an adult. As a boy Lola developed a preference for Serbian folk stories and poems and his idol was Prince Marko, about whom he knew lots of poems by heart.
The famous army commander, Zivojin Misic, who was the Ribar family’s neighbour, was particularly fond of Lola and often sat him on his knee and talked to him. At one youth meeting in 1938, at the time when our country was, the same as the rest of Europe, threatened by fascism, Lola said: “Everybody should know, the spirit of Cegar and Orasac is still alive in this country, the readiness and resistance of a nation which knew how to fight is still alive, the Hayduk spirit is still in the hearts of our youth”.

In the later period the Society grew from the Youth to the Academic Society since the majority of its members are future or current students. The Society uses the name Lola which is extremely apt considering that this word in our language means a man who likes to dance, sing and play.