Remembering Haludovo: The Penthouse Years and What Came Later

Introduction. Haludovo as a Living Memory and as Dead Concrete

The relevance of the media (media products, mediated events) for individual and collective aspects of memory has been widely acknowledged among memory studies scholars. Nevertheless, the perspective which analyses the connection between memory and current media industries is fairly recent. Based on the close ties between the media and processes of remembrance, it emphasises topics that have been largely neglected thus far in cultural memory discourse. This is a still a young and amorphous field of research and can be considered as part of the media-cultural studies approach to memory studies (Zierold 2008). This paper contributes to the growing interest in media products in terms of their impact on the creation and preservation of memory by individuals and groups in contemporary societies, especially in the region of former Yugoslavia, which has experienced severe and rapid transformations over the past decades.

“Communicative memory” was a term originally proposed by Aleida and Jan Assmann based on their differentiation of Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of “collective” memory into “cultural” and “communicative” memory. “Communicative memory” may be defined as an interactive practice located within the tension between individual and group recall of the past. Contrary to “cultural” memory, it can be conceived as the short-term memory of a particular society. It relies on the living bearers of memory and communicators of experience. According to Jan Assmann, the temporal horizon of communicative memory shifts in relation to the given present time. Contents of this memory can only be fixed through “cultural formation”, in its proximity with everyday life (Assmann 1995, 127–9). This implies a wilful agreement between the members of a group as to what they consider their own past to be and what meaning they ascribe to this past in interaction with the identity-specific grand narratives of the group. Communicative memory devalues certain aspects while placing more value on others (Welzer 2008). Jeffrey K. Olick draws our attention to the two different concepts of culture involved in cultural memory studies: “one that sees culture as a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds versus one that sees culture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society” (Olick 1999, 336). In other words, it is necessary to differentiate between two levels of intersection of culture and memory: the individual and the collective. In practice, both levels continuously interact. “Media memory”, understood as “collective pasts that are narrated by the media, through the use of the media, and about the media” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 2011, 1), is an important element of this interaction. At the intersection of media studies and memory scholarship, “media memory studies” discuss, among other things, how the media operate as memory agents (how they shape different versions of the past) and how “media memory” serves as an indicator of wider social and political changes (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 2011, 2). Mediated memories thus constitute an important segment of “communicative memory” in contemporary societies, but their role is often downplayed within memory studies scholarship. This case study is a contribution to the seemingly insufficient academic interest in “media memory” within memory studies in Southeastern Europe.

The “nexus of memory” in this study is the Haludovo tourism complex in the vicinity of the small town of Malinska on the Croatian island of Krk. Haludovo was a major generator of change in the local community in Malinska and on Krk in general, especially in terms of the rapid transformation of local economies on the island during the socialist period. Apart from its scale, what made Haludovo exceptional in the context of the growing tourism industry in Yugoslavia was its short-lived partnership with the adult magazine Penthouse, founded in the UK by photographer Bob Guccione. This paper looks at the history and pop-cultural mythology of Haludovo in socialist Croatia and its subsequent fate in the postsocialist period, situating this tourism complex in the wider historical framework of the development of the tourism industry in Yugoslavia. This history is then explored as a source of “media memory”, with a focus on the episode dedicated to Haludovo in the Croatian documentary TV series Slumbering Concrete (2016). Our study is a collaboration between a media scholar and an architectural historian who was also a scriptwriter and host on this series; we drew on these multiple perspectives to situate the Haludovo case in a wider framework of discussion on “media memory” in television and cinema. According to Maria Todorova, “favoring the term ‘remembering’ over ‘memory’ emphasizes lived experience but one inflected by the exigencies of the moment at which the act of recollection (remembering) takes place” (Todorova 2010, 13). In this study, both documentary and fictional narratives of “remembering” summer holidays on the Adriatic coast during the socialist era are discussed as an important segment of the larger media picture of “remembering” everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia (Petrović 2016), along with its political subtexts.

Haludovo on the Tourist Map of Socialist Yugoslavia and Postsocialist Croatia

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Adriatic region was an arena of modernisation whose main driving force, like in some other regions of the Mediterranean, was mass tourism.^[1] The global rise of mass tourism offered opportunities to set up a new economic basis for the deprived Adriatic region and to secure an influx of foreign currencies. Tourism thus became a desirable branch of the local economy, encouraged and subsidised by the state. The Yugoslav model of urban transformation of the coast was based on integral urban planning (as an instrument of control and allowing for the coordination of urban, social, and economic development), matching architecture with economic parameters.^[2] Regional planning advocated sensible interaction between tourism development and the existing natural and urban environments. The close involvement in the planning process of art historians and experts on the preservation of the rich cultural heritage of the Adriatic coast generated lively public debates on modernisation issues.

As noted by Iris Meder, highbrow architecture designed for tourists played the key role in Yugoslavia’s concept of tourism—in striking contrast to other Mediterranean destinations such as the coastal resorts of Spain and Italy. Moreover, openness to Western tourists “cemented its image as a holiday destination in the cultural memory of Germany and Austria, if not of Europe more broadly” (Meder 2016, 402). Yugoslavia focused the expansion of its tourism infrastructure on attracting a clientele from the capitalist West.^[3]

Yugoslav architects engaged in elaborating very different types of tourist facilities, from modest bungalows to complex architectural agglomerations and new urban communities designed for tourists (including facilities that structurally adhered to the “village” model). High-profile tourism architecture became a rapidly growing sphere of state-of-the-art design experimentation. According to the “fundamental principle of this architecture […] that the public should have access to all coastal areas” (Meder 2016, 403), a variety of holiday formats were developed, from private rooms and self-catering apartments, vacation homes for workers and camping sites, to first-class hotels with full board and massive capacity. Inclusivity—in terms of access—and variety made Yugoslav resorts attractive both for domestic and international visitors. In the early 1970s, at the peak of the construction boom, tourism complexes were growing in scale.

Pioneering research into these possibilities was conducted by Boris Magaš, one of the most prominent Croatian architects of the twentieth century (Žunić 2014). Architect Magaš began his work in the field of tourism by building the Solaris resort on a flat peninsula north of the Dalmatian town of Šibenik. This hotel complex introduced notable innovations and a new scale of tourism architecture; it was conceived as a tourist town marked by a continuity of exterior and interior spaces (Magaš 1969). Shortly after completing the Solaris resort, Magaš won the 1967 architecture award granted by the Borba newspaper—the most prestigious architectural accolade in Yugoslavia. Yet, it was Magaš’s follow-up assignment that captured both the popular imagination and the attention of media professionals owing to its unique history in the socialist Yugoslav context and its paradigmatic subsequent fate in the period of economic transition in Croatia. The Haludovo hotel complex was built in the close vicinity of the small town of Malinska on the Croatian island of Krk (1969–1972). “The central hotel, located on the hilltop, claimed the position of the city’s ‘castle’, the linear sequences of apartments and hotels alluded to the city walls, and the inner complex was composed of clusters of atrium villas” (Mrduljaš 2018, 81). All premises shared the amenities offered by the resort and Palace hotel; in addition, it had 17 tennis courts, a mini football pitch and minigolf, as well as waterski, paragliding and diving centres (Basauri et al. 2012). The complex was initially designed to host 1650 guests and expansion was planned to a capacity of 5000 beds (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Open-air pool of the main hotel, view from Hotel Palace.

Source: Private collection of the Magaš family, Rijeka, Croatia.

When it opened, Haludovo was a great source of pride both for the local community and for its creator (Ekl 1972; Magaš 1972; Mrduljaš 2020). Forty years later, shortly before his death in 2013, Boris Magaš gave an interview which was included in Michael Zinganel’s exhibition “Holidays After the Fall”: “The architect unemotionally put forth his opinion that a conceptualisation such as Haludovo would have no function in today’s world. It would be okay to tear the complex down, he said, and to build something new and better suited to present needs” (Meder 2016, 404–5). Haludovoʼs history turned out to be probably the most exceptional, most turbulent, and most emblematic experienced by any of the “slumbering concrete” monuments to the socialist ideals of affordable Arcadias along the Adriatic coast.

In Malinska and on the isle of Krk, a predominantly agricultural area, tourism emerged on a modest scale already in the 1930s. After World War II, tourism facilities were developed gradually, but with its 25 ha Haludovo far surpassed anything built up to that point, not only on Krk, but along the whole Yugoslav coast. The luxury resort became a major generator of change in the local community as well as a popular “icon”. What made Haludovo even more attractive in the context of the growing tourism industry in socialist Yugoslavia was its short-lived partnership with the famed men’s magazine Penthouse. Haludovo was launched in 1972 in partnership with Penthouse, founded by Robert “Bob” Guccione in the UK in the mid-1960s. Guccione succeeded in promoting Haludovo internationally as a gambling Mecca and jet-set paradise, which was, of course, completely at odds with the values and lifestyles prevailing in socialist countries, Yugoslavia included.

For the Belgrade weekly NIN, Guccione recounted in 1972 how he had come to Haludovo in the first place. In 1970, he had been invited to the Croatian seaside town of Umag to collaborate on a project related to the tourism industry. He had never visited Yugoslavia before and was thrilled by his first encounter with this “virgin land” and its enormous opportunities for development. He was convinced that the Yugoslav tourism industry had a great future. He eventually withdrew from involvement in Umag but continued to explore the Adriatic coast, searching for new locations. Consequently, he got to know some executives from the Brodokomerc business conglomerate in Rijeka who took him to Krk, presented their new investment (Haludovo), and launched 18 months of negotiations and preparation finalised by the grand opening of the Penthouse Adriatic Club (Devičanska zemlja, 2 July 1972). Guccione provided 70 American employees, including “bunny girls” (attractive women dressed as French maids) whose appearance ensured them almost mythical popularity (Dimitrijević 2016, 93). Nevertheless, their working status was problematic; the question was raised as to whether the “bunny girls” should have the right to participate in the Yugoslav system of workersʼ self-management? “The conclusion was that, as foreigners, they should be exempted, but the very irony of that question highlighted the contradictions of transferring the commercial ideals of high-end hedonism into a socialist state” (Kulić, Mrduljaš, and Thaler 2012, 47).

The partnership fitted well into the Social Plan of Development for the Socialist Republic of Croatia for the period 1971–1975, which anticipated significant qualitative changes in the tourism economy and encouraged the construction of “new facilities primarily in areas appropriate for summer holidays” (Duda 2010b, 294). This plan announced the gradual abandonment of the egalitarian concept of social tourism in an attempt to shape a new concept targeting a wealthier clientele, materialising in such endeavours as the “Istrian Hilton”—the Hotel Adriatic in Umag. Like Haludovo, this hotel had a casino, including striptease shows and acts by international celebrities such as Tom Jones.

Soon after its glamorous opening ceremony in the summer of 1972, Haludovo captured the popular imagination: local gossip and the media reported about the “most opulent” and “most decadent” hotel in the socialist world, where even Saddam Hussein spent quality time surrounded by Penthouse models. In the June 1972 issue of Penthouse, the resort was described as follows: “Richly located on the idyllic island of Krk, a few miles south of Trieste and directly opposite Venice, this mile-long Xanadu of glittering buildings will become for international cognoscenti a premier playground for summer and winter seasons alike” (quoted in Stanković 1972). According to Radio Free Europe, “the Anglo-American Penthouse Casino (for foreigners only) can compare ‘with the finest casinos in Las Vegas and other principal gambling centers’” (Stanković 1972). Of the 26 casinos in Yugoslavia when Haludovo opened, only four were fully in Yugoslav ownership (Umag, Rabac, Opatija, and Bled). Others were partially (6) or completely (16) owned by foreign investors. As they attracted a great number of foreign tourists as well as hard currency, the Yugoslav state and ruling party cultivated a benevolent attitude towards this form of entertainment. A popular type of gambling in Yugoslavia was the so-called “gambling charter tour”. Special charter planes arrived from America, England, and France (including buses from Italy and Austria), bringing guest gamblers. Their costs were covered by the hotels as most of the gamblers lost all their money there in the process. Haludovo was built on the strength of loans from Poljobanka, a bank based in Novi Sad, Serbia. Like the tourism complexes in Cavtat, Babin Kuk, and Bernardin, it had a casino for foreign guests (Tomažič 2013). Besides, Haludovo boasted

everything a leisure enthusiast could possibly want: plush carpets, glittering chandeliers, poolside cocktail service, a bowling alley, lush hanging gardens, beaches, its own medical center, a fishing village, saunas, a sports bar, hand-sculpted statues, a beauty salon, a masseuse, and an enormous kitchen stocked with lobster, caviar, and champagne. During this early, heady period, it was estimated that hotel guests consumed 100 kg (224 lb) of lobster, 5 kg (11 lb) of caviar, and hundreds of bottles of champagne each day. The hotel had both indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and at one point, there were rumors (still unverified) that one of them was filled entirely with champagne (Lynch 2013) (Figure 2).

Figure 2:

Hotel Palace, indoor and outdoor pools.

Source: Turistkommerc archive, CCN 221 0120, Zagreb, Croatia.

Bob Guccione perceived himself as a new type of Cold War strategist who had found a novel way of bringing together the opposing sides divided by the Iron Curtain. He saw the Yugoslav system of workers’ self-management and the workers’ council in Haludovo as providing a “flexible business climate” suited to his Sicilian temper. “As the porn baron told one newspaper, ‘The workers’ council is a joke. They’ve agreed to everything we want to do. They bent the rules as much as they could to let us in. The Yugoslavs are really ideological soulmates’” (Lynch 2013). This resulted, in the words of Slovene journalist Agata Tomažič (2013), in a stunning combination of “sex, drugs, and self-management”. In 1973, only a year after the lavish opening party, the resort (and the entire Brodokomerc enterprise) filed for bankruptcy and Penthouse was no longer involved in Haludovo’s troubled history (Figure 3).^[4]

Figure 3:

Hotel Palace and seafront.

Source: Private collection of the Magaš family, Rijeka, Croatia.

With the retreat of the Penthouse “peace corps” and its entourage, Haludovo enjoyed a period of peace and relative prosperity, gradually abandoning aspirations to jet-set exclusivity and hosting a mainly middle-class domestic and international clientele. In 1990, Haludovo was even the venue for the drafting of the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, an undertaking which assembled law experts Vladimir Šeks, Smiljko Sokol, Nikola Filipović, and Jadranko Crnić, among others (Tomažič 2013). With the fall of socialism in Yugoslavia came war, and Haludovo’s fortunes changed dramatically. In the 1990s the resort provided accommodation for refugees before being relaunched, sold to an Armenian investor, closed, nearly demolished, and again put into limited operation.^[5] The resort’s central hub, the Palace Hotel, welcomed its last guests around New Year 2002. For the most part, the complex is at present in a notorious state of decay, exerting a morbid appeal sometimes dubbed “ruin porn”. Haludovo has thus found a prominent place among the most photographed ruins of the Adriatic.^[6]

The floors buckle. The skylights have all shattered, leaving shards of serrated windowpane hovering overhead. A long trail of blood leads up two flights of stairs to the top floor. And then there are the unsettling tags, probably written by high school students but still disturbing: “DIE HELP ME HELP ME” and Saxa loquuntur, which is Latin for “the stones talk” (Lynch 2013).

To sum up, it is something of a horror show. As noted by Luciano Basauri et al. (2012, 349): “Today the modernist tourist environments, as specific ‘parallel cities’, act as morphological antipodes to the informal, deregulated coastal development, a reverse side of modernization.” Haludovo serves as the prime example of—indeed monument to—this reversal.

Haludovo’s Slumbering Concrete

The 1972 short documentary Mi ne prodajemo Holivud (We are not selling Hollywood) by Belgrade film and TV directors Jovan Aćin and Dejan Karaklajić opens with several scenes of encounters between Bob Guccione and his “bunnies” with Malinska locals (especially elderly Mediterranean “nonnas”) on the narrow streets of the old town during a photo session. As we see in one shot, one of the streets is called Radnička ulica—Workers’ Street. This not only emphasises the contrast between the “Penthouse aesthetics” and traditional local culture but also with the political and ideological system in Yugoslavia. Moreover, it stresses their “harmonious coexistence” on the Croatian island. (In fact, some of the “bunnies” dressed in skimpy French-maid dresses were local girls from Krk). The elderly ladies look slightly puzzled, but do not seem displeased by the unusual sight of the American porn businessman walking hand in hand with his escorts tripping on high heels and in miniskirts through the streets of Malinska. Some of the ladies even take part in the photo session in which the models pose against other “landmarks” of local culture—for instance, the street sign Drži čistoću! (Keep clean!) and a communist five-pointed star. Local children also seem to be having a lot of fun.

The film then focuses on the formal part of the opening ceremony of the Haludovo resort. The first speaker is Ivan Faraguna, general director of Brodokomerc—the Rijeka-based company which launched and maintained the resort. In his welcome address, Faraguna emphasises his vision of Krk as a bridge of friendship between Yugoslavia and the United States. In a courteous speech, Bob Guccione refers to his half-naked “bunnies” as a “new kind of peace corps” and “little soldiers of the Cold War”. The film’s title quotes Guccione, who basically says in his speech that his intention is not to sell Hollywood to Yugoslavia but to sell Yugoslavia to the world. During the speeches, we get a glimpse of more details from the opening ceremony: some close-ups of the “bunnies” and foreign visitors to Haludovo—mostly glamorous young and middle-aged women—with a special focus on the lavish catering.

As “a small indication of what Yugoslavia has to offer”—in Guccione’s words—the programme continues with a dance number by the “Lado” folklore ensemble from Zagreb, followed by more scenes of life in Haludovo (dance parties and gambling at night, yachting during the day) and marching “bunny girls”. Next is a song introduced in Italian and performed a cappella by the popular Croatian “Renaissance pop” band, Dubrovački trubaduri.^[7] The song, which is the opening soundtrack of the film, is dedicated to a Penthouse “bunny”, also referred to as mala bionda, and takes us back to the streets of Malinska where the film began. Again, we see scenes of interaction between locals and the Penthouse crew, the nonnas and the photo reporters, the “keep clean” street sign (which actually prohibits watering cattle at that spot), and Workers’ Street packed with children. The film closes with the sign-off: ‘Haludovo’—island of Krk, July 8, 1972.

Along with other documentary material from the socialist period, including newsreels and promotional films detailing the construction of Haludovo and its accompanying infrastructure, its glamorous look upon completion and dynamic nightlife from gambling to bowling, this film was incorporated into a narrative of the rise and fall of socialist modern architecture in the documentary series produced in 2016 by Hulahop for Croatian Radio-Television (Hrvatska radiotelevizija, HRT) titled Betonski spavači (Slumbering concrete). Meanwhile, the synopsis for the third season has recently been supported by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (Hrvatski audiovizualni centar, HAVC), but production is still on hold. The first episode of season 1, titled “Socialism Meets Capitalism”, was dedicated precisely to Haludovo. Presented by Maroje Mrduljaš and directed by Saša Ban, the episodes in this series explore the fate of once prestigious monuments of modern architecture built during the socialist era, which became obsolete in the postsocialist period and were abandoned and otherwise degraded mostly in the course of hasty privatisation. In the words of scriptwriters Saša Ban, Maroje Mrduljaš, and Nevenka Sablić, these “abandoned, forgotten, dilapidated spaces slowly being occupied by nature seem like the remains of an ancient, long-gone civilisation”. The “brutality of the bare space and melancholy of decay” today attract an increasing number of architects, artists, urban researchers, and tourists searching for remains of a “not-so-distant history”. Season 1 of Slumbering Concrete focuses on abandoned tourist buildings and facilities along the Croatian coast where Haludovo, now a “spectacular ruin”, claims a “place of (dis)honour”.

Haludovo is described here as a “meeting point of the world’s dictators and politicians, American weekend gamblers, the Yugoslav music scene, and ordinary citizens. It was an incredible combination, possible only here and only in the first half of the 1970s”. The authors of Slumbering Concrete emphasise Haludovo’s intense impact on Malinska and its population. Accordingly, “the astonishing number of 20,000 (private) apartments in Malinska reveals the size of the void that Haludovo left behind. The small coastal town has largely expanded and transformed its identity”. The shift from “traditional” to “deregulated”, largely through private initiative, has had modest results in terms of contribution to the quality of urban life.

When war broke out in Croatia in 1991, Haludovo lost its tourist clientele and soon was occupied by refugees from the war-afflicted areas. This temporary use effected the subsequent state of neglect. Nevertheless, the person most responsible is certainly the long-time majority owner of Haludovo, Armenian-Russian businessman Ara Abramyan, who persistently refused to initiate the reconstruction of the complex, demanding that the beach area should be closed for public access and use. In spite of the attempts to promote Haludovo as a luxury resort for foreign visitors, its beaches and other facilities had always been open to the local population and for day trippers who lived or stayed elsewhere along the coast. Maroje Mrduljaš recounts his personal experience of visiting the beach in Slumbering Concrete:

Let’s not forget that this has always been a public space. Haludovo was not an enclosed complex, and this was actually the main meeting place between tourists who came to Haludovo and citizens—people would come from Rijeka to spend the day on the beach. I used to come here with my parents and we all socialised as equals. You didn’t have to have any money to be able to consume this tourist infrastructure. So you come, enjoy something constructed mainly for the hotel but that also serves everyone else who has come here to enjoy the sea and sun.

Subsequently, the mayor of Malinska asks the following question: “If we used to, back when we were a one-party, socialist, communist state, let people walk freely through the complex, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be so today.” What makes this episode of Slumbering Concrete especially interesting is the incorporation of eyewitness accounts by people involved in Haludovo’s history in different ways: Josip Pinezić, the first general manager of Hotel Palace, and his younger brother Ivan, the hotel’s last general manager under state ownership; Boško Juraković, former assistant general manager of Haludovo and director of hotel accommodation; and Ernest Mavrović, musician and entertainer. Moreover, it includes local activists involved in the struggle to bring Haludovo “back to life” and, more importantly, to return it to the local community and the Croatian public in general: Zdenko Cerović, professor at the Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management in Opatija; Malinska mayor, Robert Anton Kraljić (who frequented the resort as a teenager); and Vesna Štropini, former president of the workers’ council, who in 2016 still worked at Haludovo as one of its 24 remaining employees. They share with the filmmakers and the audience their memories of Haludovo’s former glory and its almost mythical aura, their bitter experiences with the subsequent stages of privatisation and its consequences, and their displeasure with Haludovo’s current state and circumstances (Figure 4).

Figure 4:

Ernest Mavrović, a former musician at Haludovo, showing a custom-designed cup from the hotel; film still from the Slumbering Concrete documentary.

Source: Hrvoje Franjić, Croatian National Television and Hulahop.

The Pinezić brothers are shown the short film We are not selling Hollywood on a laptop. They had both attended the film’s central event—the grand opening on the terrace of Hotel Palace. “This should be corrected”, says Josip Pinezić, referring to the text of the song by Dubrovački trubaduri. “Why do they say ‘beautiful bunny’ in the song? They aren’t ‘bunnies’. Because they couldn’t take the name for their waitresses from Playboy.” Pinezić continues his recollections: “Traveling by boat from Venice and passing Dubrovnik, the guides would say: ‘This country isn’t behind the Iron Curtain. This is Yugoslavia, a free country.’” “In those days”, he reminds the audience, “one page of (advertisements in) Penthouse was worth 15,000 USD.” “I bought my car (fićo)^[8] for 1000 USD”, says his brother Ivan. “I bought a Peugeot 404 in 1967 and paid 3200 dollars for it”, adds Josip. The conversation with the Pinezić brothers discloses some of the reasons why collaboration with Penthouse did not last. Sometimes it was impossible to contact the US by phone for days, air conditioners were yet to take hold in Yugoslavia, and the supply of “exclusive foods like cornflakes” was a huge challenge. Other participants share different kinds of memories. Boško Juraković presents his collection of discarded official documents and photographs of the resort. Along with his photo collection, Ernest Mavrović shares other memorabilia and his “sound memories”—original tracks recorded in the summer nights at Haludovo during performances of his band, Exodos.

The entire episode dedicated to Haludovo rests on various forms of memory. Instead of assuming a position of authority, the creators of Slumbering Concrete entrust the (hi)storytelling to the protagonists of the past and present events on the island of Krk. Even the documentary footage used throughout the episode, including the film Mi ne prodajemo Holivud, assumes the role of a historical protagonist in dialogue, as it were, with the meticulous contemporary images of Haludovoʼs ruined architecture. The ruins are not presented as isolated, dead objects but are clearly contextualised and firmly connected both with the historical memory of Haludovo and its symbolic roles in the present.

On the Political Engineering of Remembrance

Architecture and urban planning are especially problematic areas for contemporary revisionist politics of memory because their achievements in the socialist period are difficult to deny, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. As revisionism has pervaded other social spheres and totalitarianism has become the central concept in interpretations of the socialist period, socialist architecture is increasingly marginalised. The methods of its marginalisation include simple abandonment as well as utter neglect, which has especially affected memorials marking events connected to World War II. In such a context, abandonment, negligence, ignorance, refraining from action—all become deeply political acts. Perhaps the best Croatian example is the fate of Vojin Bakić’s masterpiece, the inhabitable gigantic sculpture “Monument to the Uprising of the People of Kordun and Banija” on the Petrova Gora hills, which has become a victim of total neglect. Legally, the building does not even exist as it is not listed in the land registry, and can therefore neither be protected as a monument nor reconstructed. This has not prevented telecom companies from installing transmitters for mobile telephone networks.^[9] Precisely these memorials dedicated to World War II events have been the first to attract wider international attention owing to the book Spomeniks by Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers, published in 2010. The book renders the decontextualised monuments through an Orientalist, exoticising lens; their fascinating forms are deprived of any meaning and interpretation. Kempenaers’s approach is inadvertently congruent with the dominant “politics of oblivion” in the region where form may just about be acceptable but by no means the original meanings, which must be muted (Figure 5).

Figure 5:

Abandoned pool; film still from the Slumbering Concrete documentary.

Source: Hrvoje Franjić, Croatian National Television and Hulahop.

Surprisingly, the next type of architecture to face maximum decay have been tourist facilities, which in some ways border on the realm of monuments. On the territory of former Yugoslavia, a magnificent ruin set in nature, and modernist at that, will nowadays often be perceived as an abandoned monument. This applies to Hotel Pelegrin in Kupari, the Children’s Health Resort in Krvavica, and certainly to Haludovo as well. In terms of their architectural qualities, Hotel Marina Lučica in Primošten, Hotel Plat in Mlini, and the Belgrade Children’s Resort in Jelsa (Hvar) can be added to this list. Indeed, the original concept of expressive, free-standing structures dramatically set in nature was, in a way, “monumental”. Moreover, these facilities were heterotopias with specific regimes of use and where life was to be different—“better”, “more luxurious”, and “more cheerful”. As such, they were perceived by the local population as something special and very distinct. Ultimately, the local communities absorbed the hotels into their everyday life.

Very few complexes from the socialist period in Croatia are protected as cultural monuments, with exceptions such as the Children’s Health Resort in Krvavica, Motel Sljeme in Trogir, and Motel Panorama in Preluk near Rijeka (Cultural Property Register). Nevertheless, the most energetic discussions regarding the protection of modernist architectural heritage are currently focused on the realm of tourism. It is difficult to establish exactly why hotels have become ruins. To state direct ideological intention would be an oversimplification, though not entirely groundless. Rather, incapability and incompetence on the part of the new owners and new society in handling the over-ambitious tourism complexes have predominated—heterotopia was difficult to sustain. Local political will exists: both in Malinska and Primošten, for example, the local communities want to see the complexes renewed. However, the new owners are either unwilling or incapable of accomplishing such a task, and there are no legal mechanisms which would force them to do so (unused property is not subject to tax, mainly because this would turn the state and local governments into the largest debtors). A significant number of tourism complexes taken over by (Austrian) hotel groups such as Valamar and Falkensteiner have been renewed and are currently in operation, proving that the reconstruction of modernist tourism architecture is feasible. Local mentality also plays a role: in Istria, for example, buildings have not been left to ruin and all facilities have been restored. The number of derelict hotels increases as one travels south.

In Slumbering Concrete, the problematisation of ruined tourism architecture rejects the approach initiated by Kempenaers and is not dedicated to the celebration of architectural form. Instead, it undertakes a double-edged critique. The first “edge” presents a vivisection of the surrender of this architecture and its original values to decay; in other words, the politics of oblivion is under scrutiny. The criticism of contemporary society as incapable of making use of these invaluable spatial resources is just as productive. If the former thrust of the critique is somewhat abstract, the latter has clear and simple economic and social agendas. The architecture is situated in multiple contexts. The buildings, now “dead concrete”, are revisited as generators of once vivid life, with clear potential. The observers emphasise the feeling of nostalgia provoked by the film excerpts shown in the framework of the series. Nevertheless, anxiety about an uncertain future (though not necessarily pessimistic) is all-pervading.

The fact that innocent memories of summer nights at hotel bars and beaches can become a delicate political issue has been partly demonstrated by the fate of Slumbering Concrete itself. Like in other countries of the region, cultural production and cultural life in Croatia are highly dependent on public financing by the Ministry of Culture and municipal governments, and consequently on the current political situation in the respective state. The same holds true for the national public broadcasters. In response to this situation, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (Hrvatski audiovizualni centar, HAVC) was founded in 2008 as a publicly financed institution aimed at securing independent decision-making with respect to the public funding of film production. Detached from the Ministry of Culture, HAVC was created with a view to being less susceptible to political influence. Film director Hrvoje Hribar successfully led HAVC from 2010 to 2018, when he was accused of corruption by a number of right-wing organisations. This resulted in his replacement and investigation by the State Attorney’s Office (Državno odvjetništvo Republike Hrvatske, DORH) which found that under Hribar’s management HAVC had operated impeccably. In response to the bad publicity surrounding the whole affair, Hribar resigned from his post, followed by a large share of HAVC employees (Markovina 2018). HAVC supports the development of (film and television) projects and occasionally covers production costs. For Slumbering Concrete, support from HAVC in the development phase automatically meant production by Croatian Radio-Television, HRT. It is important to note that the Social Democratic Party (Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske, SDP) held power in 2011–2016. In this period, the creators of Slumbering Concrete applied for support from HAVC, filmed the episodes, and the first season was broadcast on national television which covered the production costs. In the meantime, the political situation in the country changed, and in the last few years the third season of Slumbering Concrete has been on hold. This season includes discussions about the national and ideological monuments of Yugoslavia, such as the Federal Executive Council (Yugoslav government) building in Belgrade, monuments to the victims of World War II, and museums dedicated to the anti-capitalist revolution. From today’s perspective, it seems that tourism was perceived as a less controversial topic in the eyes of the national broadcaster, even though it was controlled by social democrats at the time. The controversy stems from the social climate generated in Croatia from the early 1990s onwards, which treats Yugoslavia, its socialist ideology and related issues, as a taboo topic. Thus, the seemingly exotic and marginal (apolitical) subject of abandoned tourism architecture in fact served as a “gate opener”, allowing discussion about the socialist past—a discourse which had been largely absent from the media sphere.^[10] This helped both HAVC and HRT, after 25 years of demonizing socialism, to finance a project which systematically explores the destruction of modernist values, not only in the cultural but also in the social sense. The series was meant to progressively provide the revisiting of socialism with a gradual “dose” of ideologically provocative topics. Slumbering Concrete thus represented an important breakthrough by promoting the architectural achievements of socialism in Yugoslavia in the Croatian mainstream media. The series aligned well with the process of the re-evaluation of modernist architecture from the socialist period, which had already taken place in the context of architectural history in Croatia and former Yugoslavia but was largely absent from wider public discourse.

Leading Croatian film critic and writer Jurica Pavičić noted the critical potential of the series after the first season was aired, saying:

It is especially curious to watch Slumbering Concrete today when, like a hamster running in a wheel, Croatian society had again, and after who knows how many times, started arguing about the issue of lustration […]. In that lustration, white uniforms, societies of veteran fighters, sculptors who erect heroic monuments, the writers of ideological textbooks—none of them fared badly. All those phenomena demonstrated a “surprisingly” impressive vitality during the period of transition. But that is why all the ex-Yugoslav societies knew well what they should “lustrate” most urgently. The actual legacy of thorough modernisation, secularisation, industrialisation, and enlightenment was to be lustrated […] [Lustration] encompassed real, tangible modernity, including modern architecture. The monuments dealt with in Slumbering Concrete are not only abandoned, they are lustrated […] Because this country is not meant to be modern […] Slumbering Concrete is but an unwanted disturbance, a buzz of recall of a time when this was not the case (Pavičić 2016).

Both during its production and in the response of audiences this series demonstrated just how strongly the generations which had lived with this modernist architecture were attached to it. The series triggered an “eruption” of remembrance. For over two decades, socialist architecture and the processes associated with it had been repressed, concealed, and uneasily hidden. Along with it, entire periods of people’s lives were obliterated by the dominant ideology which degraded them, effectively proclaiming them worthless. Emotions are visible in the series, communicated by the protagonists who had waited years for an opportunity to tell their stories. Equally telling is the response of local communities to the screenings of individual episodes. Thus, the re-evaluation of architecture gave generations with muted voices an opportunity to re-assess their lives, social values, and personal achievements. In 2017, the community of Malinska organised the event “Haludovo Retro Nights” which both celebrated and mourned a better past. The event’s finale was the public screening of the Haludovo episode of Slumbering Concrete at the seafront.

The complexities of Haludovo’s history have resulted in odd proposals. A professor of constitutional law at Zagreb University’s Faculty of Law, Branko Smerdel, wrote in the preface to the book Constitution of the Republic of Croatia and Its “Krk Draft” (1990):

In the historic period which political science terms the constitution moment, Malinska, Krk, and Haludovo were the crucial heart of destiny in the accomplishment of the millennial project of a free and independent Croatia. It would be truly worthwhile to remind future generations thereof with a monument to the constitution and constitutionality which would communicate the importance of the “Krk Draft”. For such a monument I cannot think of a better place than the atrium of the restored, central luxury hotel of the Haludovo complex, which could, in times of globalisation and multiculturalism, bear the name “The Constitution Mall” (Galović 2018). (Figure 6).

Figure 6:

The ruined lobby of the Palace Hotel; film still from the Slumbering Concrete documentary.

Source: Hrvoje Franjić, Croatian National Television and Hulahop.

According to a peculiar reversal of logic, if Smerdel’s patriotic proposal for the monument were to be realised, it would first be necessary to renovate the entire hotel which has fallen into ruin owing to the very political system the monument would celebrate. The creators of Slumbering Concrete used architecture—more precisely, ruins, as powerful symbols—to start a discussion about the ideological manipulation of memory. They worked with living memories, with the actual protagonists of past events, both as participants in the series and as members of the audience. In 10 or 20 years’ time, it will probably be impossible to capture such accounts as both the people and the buildings will be gone. Slumbering Concrete seems to have appeared at the last moment. It is also surprising and somewhat telling that the documentary’s Facebook page did not attract any aggressive comments accusing the authors of communist leanings or other, almost inevitable, points of “public criticism”.

Films, Memories, and Summer Vacations

Summer nights on the Yugoslav Adriatic were revived in the Slovenian theatre play Kaj smo izgubili, medtem ko smo živeli (What we lost as we lived) produced by the company Beton Ltd. (Primož Bezjak, Branko Jordan, and Katarina Stegnar). However, Haludovo has not starred in a theatre production or feature film so far. Yet, memories of “happier times” at the seaside along with the use of documentary material from the socialist period—newsreels and promotional films—have been incorporated in interesting ways into fictional film narratives of the transitional transformation of the post-Yugoslav Adriatic. In the socialist period, a large number of films were dedicated to the topic of the modernisation of everyday life, leisure, and tourism in the Yugoslav republics. Some examples include: Sava Popović, Svi na more (To the sea), 1952; Oldřich Lipský, Zvezda putuje na jug (A star goes south), 1959; Puriša Đorđević, Leto je krivo za sve (Summer is to blame for everything), 1961; Dimitrie Osmanli, Mirno leto (A quiet summer), 1961; Žorž Skrigin, Velika turneja (The big tour), 1961; Wolfgang Staudte, Herrenpartie (English title: Destination Death), 1964; Obrad Gluščević, Lito vilovito (Mad summer), 1964; Nikola Tanhofer, Bablje ljeto (Indian summer), 1970; Dušan Vukotić, Gosti iz galaksije (Visitors from the Arkana galaxy), 1982; Daniel Marušić, Servantes iz malog mista (Cervantes from the small town), 1982; Živko Nikolić, Lepota poroka (The beauty of vice), 1986 (cf. Šentevska 2012). Compared to this abundance of productions, the relative scarcity of feature films dealing with tourism in the postsocialist period indicates that the topic itself somewhat lost its social and artistic importance in the period of war, economic transition, migration, and other challenges which claimed more presence on the agendas of filmmakers and sponsoring bodies. Yet, films which do reflect the transitional transformation of the tourism industry in former Yugoslavia typically compare “then and now” and largely rely on “mediated memories”, both fictional and documentary. Two paradigmatic approaches are represented in the 1999 Croatian production Maršal (English title: Marshal Tito’s Spirit), directed by Vinko Brešan, and the 2014 Serbian-Montenegrin co-production Atomski zdesna (English title: From Zero to Hero), directed by Srđan Dragojević. Maršal recounts a bizarre occurrence in a fictional Croatian island town, where the ghost of the late Marshal Josip Broz Tito appears to a group of mourners— former partisan soldiers—at the local graveyard. We soon discover that the “ghost” (Boris Buzančić) is a local mental hospital patient with a delusional disorder, who believes to be Tito himself. However, this apparition triggers a series of comic events and indeed provides a satirical depiction of the “transitional” tourism industry in Croatia. The local mayor (Ivo Gregurević) has successfully privatised the local bar, hotel, and the Museum of the Revolution, and now wants to capitalise on the interest of partisan war veterans in the (almost abandoned) island, intending to transform it into a sort of “Marshal Tito theme park”. In his own enthusiastic words: “We’ll arrange to bring the spirit of Honecker here. That’s the German market, they have cash. Then Stalin’s spirit might appear here as well, then the spirit of Mao Zedong. One hundred and twenty million Russians and a billion Chinese, hey! Think locally, act globally.” As an educational tool for preparing local citizens for the upcoming tourist season, mayor Luka uses vintage film newsreels detailing preparations for the Youth Day celebration throughout socialist Yugoslavia. In an attempt to revive their crumbling tourism industry, the locals are thus engaged in painting socialist mottos, divided into three groups: Živija …, Doli …, Smrt … (Long live …, Down with …, Death to …). They are also mobilised into participating in enactments of socialist “rituals”, such as May Day parades and the celebration of Tito’s birthday marked by Štafeta mladosti (the Relay of Youth). Armed and frustrated with the new postsocialist order in Croatia that has largely deprived them of their former privileges, the old partisans seize power on the island and establish a sort of mock geriatric socialist order. Their only opponents, who try to return things “to normal”, are local policeman Stipan (Dražen Kühn) aided by two “mentally challenged” sidekicks (Bojan Navojec and Predrag “Pređo” Vušević), and secret agents Mulderić and Skulić sent from Zagreb to investigate the paranormal occurrences (of course, as a nod to Mulder and Scully of The X-Files). Maršal amply exploits the still vivid memories of socialism as reflected in the socialist rhetoric and iconography (or, rather, their parody).

The second example of approach to the transitional transformation of the tourism industry in former Yugoslavia puts more emphasis on the present “capitalist” side of the story. The film Atomski zdesna assembles a group of tourists from different republics of former Yugoslavia (a Bosnian family from Tuzla, a Serbian couple from Niš, a Croatian veteran of the Homeland War with his girlfriend, an elderly lady from Belgrade with her middle-aged bachelor son, a Gastarbeiter couple from Vienna, etc.) in a Croatian resort. There, a group of timeshare salesmen—also from all the former Yugoslav republics—desperately try to sell them stakes in the Flamingo resort. The salesmen’s jobs depend on this particular group of potential buyers. Of course, almost everyone in the group has come for a free holiday and is nowhere near able to afford this “deal”. Atomski zdesna opens with documentary images of happy (socialist) children running down a beach to plunge into the sea, and “working people” lying on the sand on their well-deserved summer holiday. As noted by Nevena Daković, combinations of fiction and documentary footage in feature films

function as agents of nostalgia; signifiers of memory, emotions and the past; expressions of Zeitgeist or Weltanschauung; genre constituents or bearers of new meanings. Their manifold effects include the re-evaluation of the past, the correction of official public and collective history through metaphorical and symbolic restructuring, the emphasis on the repetitive model of events and the circular temporal regime, as well as the mapping of nostalgic individual and private remembrance (Daković 2008, 117–8).

In Atomski zdesna, the opening title “reminds us” that the “SFRY guaranteed each worker two weeks of free summer vacation”. This is only partly true, as the vacations were not entirely “free”. According to Igor Duda,

[a] decision of the Yugoslav government from July 1946, entitled all the employees to a right to at least fourteen days of rest. Additional laws in the fifties and the sixties regulated its length even further, while its final form dates from 1973 when the Workersʼ Mutual Relations Law limited this period to 18–30 days, depending on the years of employment and the degree of jobʼs difficulty (Duda 2011, 30).

The government resorted to a model of social tourism in which accommodation and travel costs were partly covered, usually by union or state funds. In the 1950s, only the best, i.e. most productive, workers could enjoy free vacations. Later, workersʼ benefits included cheaper accommodation “and a vacation regress/subsidy paid once a year in cash, usually a third of an average salary” (Duda 2011, 30). As for accommodation costs and average salary ratios,

[f]or example, in 1963 a monthly salary was able to pay for 42 days of vacation in the Gavrilović resort in Rijeka. But even the prices of the commercial accommodation were not out of reach because in 1970 a salary could buy 25 days of vacation, through an agency, in Bol on the island of Brač (Duda 2011, 32).

In Atomski zdesna we find out little about Flamingo’s history, except that it had already existed in the socialist era. According to Croatian war veteran Bruno (played by Goran Navojec): “Look, before the war, a Croat could not get in here, unless he was a Serb”—in other words, a “commie”. Before the war, Flamingo had been a resort for tourists from western Europe. “Today, Flamingo is free”, says Metod, the Slovene chief sales manager (Brane Šturbej). During his presentation, Metod shows his potential customers a dilapidated “workers’ resort” from the socialist period. With the conviction of mayor Luka in Maršal, he continues: “Summer vacation is not for just anyone. Because a summer vacation has to be deserved. Summer vacations are for people like you, who took advantage of freedom from communism and took your destiny into your own hands. For you, the winners!” The situation becomes extremely complicated when the champion salesman from Belgrade (Srđan Todorović) is forced to close the “deal” with the Bosnian couple (Branko Đurić and Nataša Janjić Lokas), traumatised by war and in extreme distress over the fatal accident of their little son, Svendi. The film closes with a looped image of (socialist) children holding hands on the beach against the setting sun. Apart from newsreels from the film company Filmske novosti, Srđan Dragojević used material from the 1969 Croatian TV production Radnici i godišnji odmor (Workers and vacation), directed by Dragan Kalajdić, for the opening and closing sequence of the film.

It is no coincidence that both the first documentary TV series dedicated to the fate of socialist architecture and two feature films which playfully engage with Yugoslavia’s historical legacy take place on the Adriatic coast and tackle the goings-on in the tourism industry. Tourism and the Adriatic coast (on the symbolical as well as on the everyday level) represented a common and shared space for the large majority of Yugoslav citizens in the socialist period. This generational, lived experience is one of the last and particularly strong reminders of the values as well as contradictions of the no longer existing country and now defunct social system. This is why the fate of the tourism complexes, among which Haludovo takes precedence due to its magnitude and turbulent history, so tellingly reflect the radical social changes which came with the demise of socialism and the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Conclusion

The ambitiously conceived, once opulent, and now abandoned tourist resort on the Croatian island of Krk still attracts media attention owing to its short-lived partnership with the adult magazine Penthouse. To the Yugoslav socialist economy Haludovo contributed a new business model and changed the tourism paradigm. Instead of featuring local, Mediterranean natural and cultural amenities, this resort offered a hotel casino as its focal point of interest. The subsequent fate of Haludovo and the nearby town of Malinska became a symbolic showcase of the social conflicts that marked the postsocialist transitional tourism economy, including latent public resistance to the new concepts of ownership over natural resources and the existing tourism infrastructure. In parallel with the decrease of large-scale investment, the downside of modernisation on the Adriatic manifested itself in deregulated suburban “apartment development” as citizens in places like Malinska searched for their place in the tourism industry by building their own facilities. After 1991, the majority of tourism complexes from the socialist period more or less successfully adapted to contemporary tourism standards. They still make up the larger part of hotel capacity in the successor states of Yugoslavia. Haludovo, in contrast, became almost iconic in its “spectacular” failure to adapt to the postsocialist tourism economy.

Although based on examples from Croatia only, season 1 of Slumbering Concrete may be seen as an instance of communicating memories and tourism experiences of citizens of former Yugoslavia. The techniques used by filmmakers and TV professionals—from narrative devices to experiments with montage—include work with documentary footage of the “golden years” of the rise of tourism on the Adriatic. This material is juxtaposed on the one hand with eyewitness accounts, personal recollections, and popular cultural mythology surrounding the bygone era of equal rights, brotherhood and unity on the Yugoslav beaches. On the other, it is set against contemporary narratives of social segregation, conflicts, and injustice. The episode dedicated to Haludovo in Slumbering Concrete is no exception in this respect. Both season 1 of this documentary TV series and the feature films discussed in this paper operate in the post-Yugoslav context and connect “media memory” of what it meant to live, work, and holiday in former Yugoslavia with reflections on what it means to live, work, and go on holiday today. These memories are not summoned to evoke nostalgia for a better, less traumatic, or more comfortable past—they are mobilised in an active debate with the present.