YU Y UGOSL AV AVIIA’ A’SS SUNNY SIDE A HISTORY OF TOURISM IN SOCIALISM (1950s–1980s) (1950s– 1980s) Edited by Hannes Grandits and an d Karin Taylor Taylor
Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side
Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side
Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–1980s)
Edited by
Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor Taylor
Central European University Press Budapest–New Budapes t–New York
© 2010 by Hann Hannes es Grandits Grandits and Karin Karin Taylo Taylor r Published in 2010 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, 11, H-1051 Budapest, Budapest, Hungary Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 +36-1-327-31833 Fax:: +36-1-327-318 Fax E-mail :
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[email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-977 978-963-9776-696-69-22 clot clothh Yugoslavia's sunny side : a history of tourism in socialism (1950s-1980s) / edited by Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-9639776692 (hardbound) 1. Tourismourism--Y -Yugoslavia. ugoslavia. 2. CommunismCommunism--Y -Yugoslavia. ugoslavia. I. Grandits, Hannes. II. Taylor, Karin. III. Title. G155.Y8Y84 2010 338.4'791497--dc22 2010011443 Printed in Hungary by Akaprint Kft., Budapest
Table of Contents
Acknowledg Ackno wledgments ments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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JOHN K. WALTON Preface: Some Contexts for Yugoslav Tourism History History.. . . . . . . . .
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ARIN TAYLOR & HANNES GRANDITS K ARIN Tourism and the Making of Socialist Yugoslavia: An Intro Introductio ductionn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
PART I: “HOLI OLIDA DAYS YS ON COMMAND”
IGOR DUDA Workers into Tourists: Tourists: Entitlements, Desires, and the Realities of Social Tourism under Yugoslav Socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
33
R ORY ORY YEOMANS From Comrades to Consumers: Holidays, Leisure Time, and Ideology in Communist Yugoslavia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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IGOR TCHOUKARINE The Yugoslav Road to International Tourism: Opening, Decentralization, and Propaganda in the Early 1950s 1950s . . . . . . . . . . 107 PART II: TOU OURI RISM SM AN AND D TH THE E “YUGOSLAV DREAM”
NEVENA ŠKRBIĆ ALEMPIJEVIĆ & PETRA K ELEMEN ELEMEN Travelling to the Birthplace of “the Greatest Son of Yugoslav Yugoslav Nations”: The Construction of Kumrovec Kumrovec as a Political Tourism Destination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 K ARIN ARIN TAYLOR My Own Vikendica Vikendica:: Holid Holiday ay Cottages Cottages as Idyll Idyll and Investment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 MAJA MIKULA Highways of Desire: Cross-Border Shopping in Former Yugoslavia, 1960s–1980s 1960s–1980s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2111 21
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Contents
PART III: TOURISM ECO CONO NOMI MIES ES IN TRANSFORMATION
K ARIN ARIN TAYLOR Fishing for Tourists: Tourism and Household Enterprise in Biogra Biogradd na Moru . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 DRAGAN POPOVIĆ akcija , ORA ORA)) Youth Labor Action (Omladinska (Omladinska radna akcija, as Ideological Holiday-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 IGOR DUDA What To Do at the Weekend? Leisure for Happy Consumers, Refreshed Workers, and and Good Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 K ATE MEEHAN PEDROTTY Yugoslav Unity and Olympic Ideology at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 SYNOPSIS
PATRICK HYDER PATTERSON Yugoslavia as It Once Was: What Tourism and Leisure Meant for the History History of of the Socialist Federation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
Acknowledgements
First of all, many thanks to the contributors of this volume who provided us in their essays with rich empirical evidence and illuminating analyses of various aspects of Yugoslav tourism development between the 1950s and 1980s. It was a pleasure to collaborate during our workshop at the University of Graz, as well as in the process of revising the essays and transforming them into final versions. Igor Duda and Dragan Popović were much appreciated members of the research project “Tourism and Leisure Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia,” which formed the framework for this joint book endeavor. The project (P18153-G04; April 2005 to August 2008) was made possible by the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). We would also like to express our gratitude to the project’s host institution, the Centre for Southeast European History at the University of Graz, headed by Karl Kaser. We are indebted to Sunniva Greve who worked with patience to proofread several of the contributions, and thanks also go to Sabine Krammer who helped with formatting the final manuscript. Research for this book was supported by numerous interviews and the comments of collaborators and friends. In Croatia, we especially views and thank Hrvoje Budak for his persistence in collecting inter views gaining access to occasionally skeptical institutions. Many thanks also to Vinko and Marijeta Stagličić in Biograd na Moru, and Dr. Miroslav Jelić in Zagreb who contributed key documents and bio biogra graphi phical cal accounts. In both Serbia and Montenegro, Lidija Popović and Ivana Dobrivojević energetically assisted our research, while Spomenka Krajčević provided steady encouragement and vital insights. The collection as a whole also benefited greatly from the thought ful comments of Wendy Bracewell and Ulf Brunnbauer Brunnbauer..
Preface: Some Contexts for Yugoslav Tourism History John K. Walton
A quarter of a century ago an elderly lady of my acquaintance, who had spent most of her life in a deeply provincial small town in northern England, used regularly to holiday in Yugoslavia. Her politics were unthinkingly of the Right: she was a stalwart supporter of the British Conservative Party and of Margaret Thatcher, and after a life time of reading the right-wing British press she was automatically opposed to socialism in any shape or form. But she loved Yugoslavia passionately. She did not regard it as “communist,” in the pejorative Cold War sense, and extolled the friendliness and freedom of its people as she “knew” them, in the classic style of an inquisitive tourist with nothing beyond a courtesy vocabulary in the language. This perception, common to many British visitors to socialist Yugoslavia, resonates perfectly with the stereotypes about Yugoslav exceptionalism and hybridity that are interrogated and partially endorsed, in carefully nuanced ways, in this excellent book. I am honored to have been invited to write this preface, and take great pleasure in doing so. Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor have put together probably the best single volume on the history of post-war tourism in any individual country, albeit one that no longer exists. It examines both domestic and international tourism, with an overwhelming emphasis on the former, which is unusual (certainly for a country with a Mediterranean seaboard) and refreshing. Club Méditerranée makes a fleeting (indeed tantalizing) appearance, but the actors in these dramas are not the international tourism companies who dominate so much of the literature, but Yugoslav organizations, agencies, and especially individuals, from Tito himself (in guises ranging from acerbic commentator on “wild” tourism development, to object of pilgrimage to a shrine and outdoor museum established during his lifetime) to a spectrum of
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“workers and intellectuals,” including mechanics and shop assistants. The book relates tourism systematically to economic and political change, and to the Yugoslav socialist project of building a nation in “brotherhood and unity.” Indeed, the political dimension is of outstanding importance, as the relationships between tourism and the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of the Yugoslav state, together with the recurrent evidence of Tito’s own direct involvement in tourism policy and the role of tourism in consolidating the legitimacy of the post-war (and post-1948) settlement, constitute a central political theme running through the book. The book also returns repeatedly to such themes as the availability of time and space for the enjoyment of leisure (not necessarily in ways that were over-determined by the state’s drive to propaganda and control), the increasing accessibility of travel within and beyond the country’s boundaries, the opportunity to enjoy a measure of discretionary spending on consumer goods, and the expanding scope for the ownership of private property and small businesses. A feature of all the chapters is the imaginative and enterprising use of source material, including oral history, which helps to uncover the “unofficial” side of (especially) domestic tourism, the complexity of family economies, the importance of personal relationships and bending the rules, the development of the week-end retreat (often without benefit of planning permission or cost of local taxation payments), the meanings of consumption, and the relationships between ideology and experience, between the personal and the political, as people carved spaces for the expression of individual identity and informal bonding within the interstices of the regime. Change over time, variation between places and republics, tensions between the individual, the family, the friendship group, and the imagined “collective,” and questions of age and gender are all examined. So is the nature of Yugoslavia’s idiosyncratic version of a consumer society, which seems to have been more concerned with offering free time and personal fulfillment than a cornucopia of consumer goods, attractive though the latter were when visitors from the “West” displayed them at resorts or when the opportunity arose to enjoy cross-border shopping. Gary Cross’s thesis that, in inter-war Britain and the United States, the enduring triumph of consumerism led to income maximization being preferred to expanded free time, seems to stand in revealing contrast with the Yugoslav experience, although we must also remember the evidence for widespread
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reluctance to take holidays away from home, together with the extent of moonlighting and weekend work on smallholdings, that this research also reveals.1 The book is so effectively “topped and tailed” by the clearly-sign posted Introduction, together with the concluding reflections by Patrick Patterson (which set such a stimulating and assumptionquestioning agenda for further work), that there is little need for further comment from an outsider on its actual content. Some contextual remarks might, however, be helpful. Research on the history of tourism in Europe has been disproportionately directed to the West, especially Britain and France; and there has hitherto been very little work in this vein on Central and Eastern Europe, and next to nothing on Yugoslavia itself, especially in English.2 Publications are now starting to appear on (for example) Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, and the Baltic States; but there is nothing to compare with the present work in coverage and scope within a single country.3 Moreover, in thematic terms, there is a growing body of writing on the history of the role of the state in organizing and endowing “social tourism” facilities under authoritarian regimes of various political colorings, from the Third Reich and Fascist Italy to the much more complicated case of Peronist Argentina.4 This provides an impor tant comparative context for the present book. The historical roles of tourism as a perceived route to economic development, a provider of “hard” currency to improve the balance of payments, and an agent of international diplomacy are also being explored with increasing assiduity in the context of (for example) France, Spain, Tunisia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, and in the particularly interesting case (for present purposes) of Cuba, a socialist society apparently in transition, which (in strange 1 Cross (1993). 2 There is some historical content in Allcock (1991). 3 Gorsuch and Koenker (2006); Gorsuch, (2003);
Kostiainen (2003); Williams and Balacz (2000); Ghodsee (2005); Steward (2000); Worthington (2003). For colleagues with the relevant linguistic competences, the book by Gaj (2001) will be of interest, and there will be other publications on aspects of tourism history in the languages of individual countries. 4 Baranowski (2004); Semmens (2005); Balducci and Bica (2007); Orioli (2008); Pastoriza (2003).
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correspondence with Franco’s Spain) both needs the tourist dollar and finds it difficult to manage the tensions that are generated by the economic and cultural impact of international tourism.5 It would be very interesting to locate the Yugoslav experience more precisely on this spectrum, and comparisons with Cuba might be particularly revealing. But this is to move on to a focus on international “mass tourism” (an over-generalized category that cries out for deconstruction)6 that is peripheral to (though certainly not absent from) the concerns of this book. Its central virtue (among many) is the new perspectives it brings to the history of domestic tourism, a theme which has so far been explored mainly in the very different settings of Britain, France, Italy, the United States, Argentina, and Australia, and (as noted above) in the special cases of authoritarian regimes in Germany and Italy between the wars.7 In Yugoslavia’s case the definition of “domestic tourism” has itself changed over time, though not during the period covered by this book: before the creation of “Yugoslavia,” visitors from Bohemia, Hungary, and Austria itself to (for example) the Austrian section of the Adriatic coast were domestic tourists within the Austro-Hungarian empire, while by the end of the twentieth century what had been regarded as domestic tourism within Yugoslavia now crossed international boundaries, where it still existed at all. Yugoslavia (and its antecedents in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires) appeared relatively late on the European scene as a destination for tourists or a generator of internal tourism activity.8 There are a few allusions in the present book to tourism before the Second World War, especially the legacy of elite tourism on the “Dalmatian Riviera,” but they are scattered and tantalizing, and it is clear that this is a field ripe for development. As the British, along with the Germans and (on the Adriatic) the Austrians, Czechs, and Hungarians, were so prominent in extending and consolidating the frontiers of tourism from the eighteenth century onwards, and especially in the Endy (2004); Pack (2006); Hazbun (2008, Chapters 1–2); Berger (2006); Wynn (2007); Merrill (2001); Schwartz (1997). 6 Wright (2002). 7 Walton (1983); Walton (2000); Barton (2005); Boyer (2005); Battilani (2001); Aron (1999); Shaffer (2002); Schluter (2008); White (2005). 8 Walton (2003). 5
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“railway age,” some introductory commentary on British perceptions of Yugoslavia from a tourism history perspective may be thought appro priate, especially insofar as they may point towards potential avenues of further research. British travelers in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century produced colorful descriptions of parts of the future Yugoslavia,9 but the first indications of an emergence of commercial tourism do not really surface until the 1890s, a decade after the first real stirrings of an elite tourist season and the provision of associated amenities became apparent at Opatija/Abbazia. One of the services the present book performs, incidentally, is to cast into sharp relief the poverty of some existing material on the history of Yugoslav tourism, as evidenced by a recent book chapter on the “Opatija Riviera,” which, for the socialist period, focuses solely on a Western European sun and sea “mass tourism” model, takes no account whatever of domestic tourism between 1945 and 1990, makes no mention of “social tourism” of any kind, and represents the whole period as characterized solely by “unplanned activities.”10 In Bradshaw’s guide to “bathing places and climatic health resorts” for 1893, which lists several hundred spa, sea-bathing, and other health resorts across the whole of Europe (including Russia, Turkey, Sweden, and Norway, and what seems like every tiny spa resort in remotest rural Spain), the only readily recognizable location in those provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that were to form the future Yugoslavia was indeed Abbazia. This was described as a “winter station,” “new and rising,” with a Grand Hotel and resident doctors, but “statistics are still wanting.” The only other identifiable tourist location was Krapina-Toplitz (Krapinske toplice), also in Croatia, which had an “excellent establishment” and accommodation for the treatment of “nervous affections” and skin problems.11 Spa resorts were the most important tourist locations across most of Europe, and their near absence from the future Yugoslavia in this international source is arresting. The long list of watering-places and climatic stations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was completely dominated by Austria, Hungary, and the future Czechoslovakia. This was such a well-informed 9 Allcock and Young (1991); Steward 10 Corak (2006, esp. pp. 278–80). 11 Bradshaw (1893, pp. 1, 175).
(2005).
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and far-reaching publication that we must take the absence of references as absence of activity beyond the local and regional level, there by confirming the lateness of Yugoslavia’s entry on to the already well populated stage of European tourism at the end of the century. By the early twentieth century, as Karin Taylor’s chapter on Biograd indicates, tourism was developing steadily along the Dalmatian Coast. This would not be apparent from a perusal of D.E. Lorenz’s handbook for “the Mediterranean traveler,” published in 1905: it deals extensively with Spain, North Africa, Malta, Greece, and Turkey, but ignores Dalmatia, and the future Yugoslavia, completely.12 But The Queen book of travel, an elite publication aimed at wealthy Britons, provided a paragraph on this coastline in its 1907 edition, proposing Raguza (Dubrovnik) as the best base for “a lengthened stay,” and recommending three hotels there. It also offered half a page on Abbazia, which was “both a winter resort, and a summer sea-bathing station; to English people it is best known as the former.” It was “a fashionable resort , with prices according.” Krapina-Toplitz reappeared, with an encomium for, “Model management with wonderful cures as a result.” But this was all, and the limited coverage is again revealing, missing as it does the exclusive archipelago resort at Brioni (Brijuni), which, like the other destinations, recruited almost all of its visitors from within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even for the gossip columnist Charles Graves, who devoted his life to sampling elite tourist environments from his base in London, Brioni was, even at the end of the 1920s, “too far away” for him to visit.13 Brioni/Brijuni was at that time in Italy, and came within Yugoslavia’s expanded borders after the Second World War, when Tito chose it for his official summer residence. Between the wars, however, British awareness of what was now Yugoslavia as a tourist destination developed, slowly but surely. However, Donald Innes’ Balkan Saga, published in 1937, can stand as representative of an enduring genre of “Balkan” travel books whose dominant emphasis is on quaintness, “otherness,” bad roads, dubious sanitary arrangements, bandits, strange customs, unpalatable food, unpredictable encounters, and embarrassing friendliness. The Yugoslav section of the journey falls squarely 12 13
Lorenz (1905). Hornsby (1907, pp. 281–2, 286); Graves (1930, pp. 20–2).
