Hotel Marina Lučica

This aspect is also a key to understanding its architecture.
As well as bringing in thousands of millions of German marks, Italian lira, US dollars and other indispensable hard currency for Yugoslavia’s socialist economy, tourism was at the same time a space for interaction with the world—a place for meeting unusual foreigners and their unusual cultures, and also a showroom of the political openness of unusual Yugoslavia, a no-man’s-land between East and West. Today, when the Yugoslav peoples are stewing in hatred and Serbian tourists are still not welcome in Croatia twenty years after the end of the Yugoslav wars, it sounds incredible that in the 1960s, just fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, Germans and Italians (who, nota bene, committed some of the most atrocious crimes precisely in Dalmatia) were not only welcome but also the most numerous guests of Dalmatia’s hotels. And it was in this Yugoslavia, a libertine island in the communist East, that the fashion of nudism arrived amid the rapid development of tourism, together with other wonders from the West: Coca Cola, rock ’n’ roll and la dolce vita. It is only a seeming paradox that Yugoslavia’s socialist society was much more open and receptive to these freedom-loving, “decadent” trends then rather than now.

Around the time Marina Lučica opened, my sister and I went on a holiday with our parents every year to Komiža on the island of Vis. Our parents were by no means progressive, liberal intellectuals—on the contrary, our father was a classical socialist proletarian, a worker at the shipyards and a convinced communist, while our mother was a modestly educated civil-service clerk from a Catholic family. And yet, together with us children, they bathed fully naked without this posing any problems for their convictions or their milieu. It was exactly this openness and modernity of Yugoslav society in the 1960s that made the nudist hotel Marina Lučica possible, just as the narrow-minded anti-modernity of contemporary Croatia can only explain the practice as having been a tool of Yugoslav communism to stifle traditional values.

Almost forty-five years later, Western decadence is a greater external enemy for capitalist and neoliberal, but deeply conservative and Catholic Croatia, than it was for communist Yugoslavia. Even nudism is stigmatised as aggression against traditional Christian morals and practically excluded from the services offered to tourists: there is not a single nudist beach on the whole Šibenik Riviera, let alone a nudist hotel. Nor does Hotel Marina Lučica exist anymore—this monument to a time and a society that respected public space has been neglected like all other monuments from the period of socialism. It has been wrecked, abandoned and is now overgrown with weeds; local drunks, drug addicts and homeless people have moved in, finally turning it into a dilapidated monument of a harsh new age and an insatiable, avaricious new society.

The story of Hotel Marina Lučica is a textbook case of the downfall of Croatian architecture, culture and tourism, as well as the economy, society and ultimately the state itself.

When Aleksandra Domanović stayed at the hotel with her parents as a nine-year-old in August 1990, tourism in Dalmatia was at its height, with record figures that have never been attained since. But Yugoslavia’s political drama was also at its height: the Berlin Wall had come down and, in reply to the aggressive, hegemonic nationalism of the new Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević, multi-party elections were held in Croatia the following spring. They were won by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), a nationalist-populist party that seriously flirted with the legacy of the Nazi-backed Croatian puppet state during the Second World War. Old hatreds were reignited, and in reaction to the electoral victory of the HDZ, armed rebels from areas with an ethnic-Serbian majority set up barricades on roads from the hinterland towards the coast and practically occupied a quarter of Croatia’s territory. That was 17 August 1990, just one day after Aleksandra and her parents ended their summer holiday in Dalmatia and returned home.

The Domanovićs were among the last guests at Marina Lučica. Given the threat of war, tourists fled Dalmatia in the following days, and soon the season came to an end. The next summer would begin with Croatia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, then war flared up and ushered in the final, bloody collapse of Yugoslavia. Croatian tourism died off, and the luxurious nudist resort on the rocky shore facing Primošten would first of all be turned into a base for the Croatian Army, and later a centre to accommodate the many refugees—Croats expelled from the occupied areas.

When the last displaced persons left Marina Lučica several years after the end of the war, the formerly state-run hotel was a devastated ruin in the portfolio of the Croatian agency for privatisation. In a typical case of mafia-style privatisation, the agency sold Marina Lučica to a dubious Hungarian firm, which was set up just a few days before the bid with no more than a few thousand Euros of subscribed capital. To date, thirteen years later, the Hungarian phantom company has not invested a single euro in the hotel, instead burdening it with liabilities for all manner of loans, shady financial operations and the ex- traction of money, and forcing out the former employees.

If you ask why the hotel was not simply refurbished and put back into operation—an obvious question because, in contrast to all the rest of the priva- tised and filleted Croatian economy, tourism remains its only profitable resource—the answer is simple: socially responsible tourism and its architecture are too confining for the mathematics of unscrupulous profit-making. If it is not possible to erect a shiny ten-storey resort for smooth-faced American dotcom tycoons, Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs and Chinese Nouveaux riche on the foundations of a run-down socialist hotel—serious capital will bypass the pros- pect, complain about the “anti-business climate,” and leave the venture to corrupt local authorities and the lurking financial sharks.

Another hotel by the same architect, Hotel Marjan in Split, mentioned further above, is a good example of this. Unlike Marina Lučica, Hotel Marjan was bought during the privatisation phase by a local tycoon with astronomical aspirations, who even usurped the post of mayor so as to further his business plans; he used tax-payers’ money to do up the infrastructure of his private hotel and then added monstrous concrete annexes, which irrevocably distorted Perković’s original design. He ran up massive debts in the process and ended up bankrupt, so today Hotel Marjan stands uncompleted, like a gigantic tombstone to the mutated ambitions of its owner and the monstrous avarice of our time. Paradoxically, while Hotel Marjan is defunct, Perković’s other landmark in Split— the building of the similarly privatised, cheaply sold, dismembered and liquidated socialist giant Koteks on the other side of the harbour—has since been taken over, storey after storey, by the hostels and apartments of unlicensed tourism, resulting in an improvised hotel-cum-favela.

The saga of the famous Hotel Marina Lučica in Primošten can be read in the same way: not just as a tale of neglect for cultural heritage, but also as an illustration of Croatia’s contemporary history. It is a story about the downfall of each of the individual qualities that it represented for decades. Let’s list them one by one: modern-minded, socially responsible architecture; the active coex- istence of the contemporary and the traditional; the responsibility of the economy and the community for the environment and public space; sustainable development (i.e. a balance between profit and social benefit); a model of tourism that respects the hosts and guests alike; the cultural modernity and openness of society; memory of and respect for one’s own heritage; and ulti- mately a country with its own political integrity and sovereignty.

Each of these qualities stands nullified in the ruins of Perković’s harmonious, cascading building, which has been overgrown by the encroaching pinewoods and is fading into social oblivion. But it is not just a matter of qualities having been abandoned: we are dealing with a grave weakness, almost a physical handicap of the new era—an age of ruthless and insatiable profit accumulation, free of any social obligations or responsibility towards the environment.

Modern, socially responsible architecture has been nullified and replaced with monstrous, kitschy design to serve the cheap tastes of owners and guests. The active coexistence of the contemporary and the traditional has been nullified and replaced with narrow, ready-made pseudo-tradition detached from all reality. The responsibility of the economy and the community for the environment has been done away with and replaced with aggressive metastases of private interest in public space. The balance of profit and social benefit has been replaced with the terror (oppression?) of private capital. The model of tourism that respects hosts and guests alike has been replaced by a global entertainment industry, where the guest is a commodity and the host is superfluous. Cultural modernity and political openness have been replaced by society’s neo-conservatism, a recoil from the modern, coupled with almost paranoid xenophobia. Respect for the heritage of recent decades has been nullified as a dangerous, irrational nostalgia for communism and replaced with deep, dark oblivion.

Finally, the political integrity and sovereignty of the state that built Marina Lučica has been nullified and replaced with romantic symbols and plastic accessories of Croatian nationhood—baubles for the ignorant natives— while big-league capitalism goes about its business; neither “independent” Croatia nor its citizens own any of their resources today, just as Primošten no longer has anything to do with the hotel that once provided work for its citizens and housed its visitors.

The eerie, deserted ruins owned by a Hungarian “letterbox” company are therefore more than just the remains of a hotel: they can be seen as the ruins of an entire era and society. Only superficial tourists and their superficial hosts will interpret that era and society with concepts of socialism and Yugoslavia. Like long-forgotten cities in the South-American jungle, the ruins of Marina Lučica are the remains of an entire lost civilisation steamrolled by the frantic, egoistical new age and now merging into dense pine woods somewhere on the rocky shores of Dalmatia.