The article discusses the issue of the historical imaginations of the Croats and the Serbs. On the basis of both their narrations about the nation, it shows differences in conceptualising the past. The semiotic apparatus was used to show why Serbian narrations feature a tragic ending, while Croatian ones have a happy ending. I show the most fundamental mutual stereotypes (understood as a kind of encyclopaedia with a hierarchically organised structure of knowledge) in order to show where and how the two different (Serbian and Croatian) historical imaginations confront each other.