My husband and I are sitting on the seaside at Šimuni on the island of Pag. The season hasn’t began but. The shore is nearly utterly empty. I strive not to consider something, but it surely’s in useless. A bit farther from us, a tanned girl with two small preschool youngsters has discovered her spot. She’s introduced her mom alongside as nicely. Her husband, I assume, stayed house. When persons are stripped down on the seaside, it’s simple to categorize them by class. Whenever you’re half-naked, all that continues to be are manners, and the way in which this girl carries herself tells me she would by no means take out a can of Slovenian Argeta pâté on the seaside. She is tanned, however her youngsters are coated in three layers of the strongest suncream and dressed from head to toe. They’re carrying little caps. The solar can’t even get near them.
I really feel a slight irritation, however since I stay in Zagreb, I’m used to it. Not less than, that’s what I feel till the youngest youngster begins wailing inconsolably as a result of his mom has gone someplace. The grandmother is helpless. It’s clear she’d somewhat be anyplace else. The kid’s mom returns. She kneels and pulls her offspring into a decent embrace. She begins to rock him. Aside from a handful of Slovenian vacationers, my husband and I are her solely viewers, but she insists on the melodrama. She loudly repeats to the kid 100 occasions, suffocating him: ‘I will never leave you. Never! Never!’ I flip round to test whether or not HRT (Hrvatska radiotelevizija, Croatian Radiotelevision) has arrange its cameras someplace close by, however there’s nothing in sight. The girl rocks the kid like a rag doll. Her mise-en-scène is the Dalmatian pebbles and a waitress within the background. Simply for the time being while you’d count on a grand pink curtain to drop onstage, the ramp of the Lastovo, a ten-ton vessel operated by Croatia’s nationwide ferry firm Jadrolinija, crashes down 30 kilometres to the west in Mali Lošinj, crushing three crew members. All of them die. Finish scene.
An invasive species
‘An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, writes the Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid in her 1988 essay A Small Place, ‘an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you’. Kincaid argues that each particular person is a possible vacationer, although some are too poor to ever change into one. The creator could also be writing in regards to the Caribbean, however all the things she says applies simply as nicely to the blue Adriatic. Tourism is, in any case, a common evil.
For Croatia’s context, nonetheless, we have to revise and develop the notion of a vacationer. It’s not sufficient to stay to the same old distinction between home and overseas guests, because the media have educated us to suppose. It’s apparent, for instance, that the lady I discussed is a vacationer. My husband and I are additionally vacationers on the Adriatic. Nevertheless it’s simply as simple to acknowledge Jadrolinija’s CEO, David Sopta, who’s affiliated with the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), as ‘a piece of rubbish pausing here and there’. Aren’t the home executives who’re destroying the shipbuilding business, ravaging the shoreline and forests, probably the most despised form of outsiders? After they damage one location, their firm merely relocates them elsewhere, permitting them to proceed their destruction undisturbed. They by no means take duty. They by no means face penalties. Like vacationers, they’re an invasive species.
We might simply write a complete novel in regards to the scourge of armed and smug Italian vacationers who come to Croatia for poaching, however why not additionally deal with former Croatian MP Josipa Rimac, the textbook instance of a privileged vacationer who has no regard for the shoreline? All through her political profession, this well-known HDZ politician has proven much more curiosity in partying and crusing than she has within the well-being of Croatia. Every of those politicians who’re merely utilizing Croatia (former president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, MP Ante Sanader, former EC vice chairman/European Commissioner for Mediterranean Dubravka Šuica) are, as Kincaid succinctly put it, ‘an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish’.
Pillaging paradise
The simplest technique to acknowledge a bit of garbage is by its incapacity to think about the Croatian coast with out the union of mass tourism and unlawful improvement. It exploits the shoreline for revenue and makes use of Zagreb for cash laundering. That’s why, once I see an costly automobile with Cut up plates in Zagreb (a sight that’s changing into more and more widespread), the particular person behind the wheel is as uncovered as they might be on a nudist seaside: it’s clear that they’re an impostor who, in Dalmatia in addition to in Zagreb, is simply one other outsider. Catamarans and ferries drift across the Adriatic islands like outdated scrap metallic, whereas executives purchase and drive brand-new luxurious vehicles. Whereas public infrastructure crumbles, their households spend three-month-long summers in top-tier, non-public motels and villas. And because the rich cruise round Zagreb buying and selling in property, down south each drystone wall is slowly turning into strengthened concrete, and the deafening noise of building is hammering its approach into all of our heads. The native lowlife, promote out their inherited land for euros to foreigners to allow them to afford a greater automobile and drive off, even perhaps to Brussels to change into foreigners. The value per sq. metre in Cut up didn’t climb to €8,500 by itself. Everyone is aware of it! So as to drive up the value of a sq. metre, the lowlife let that ramp fall.
The accident that killed three sailors was not the top of Jadrolinija’s issues (although fortunately, subsequent incidents unfolded with out additional lack of life). Every one introduced me again to the remarks made by David Sopta, who in fact remained on the helm of Jadrolinija. As a substitute of stepping down, he stated he was sorry that the loss of life of the sailors had ‘simply slightly overshadowed’ the corporate’s good outcomes ─ particularly, the acquisition of 5 new catamarans ─ and insisted that the main focus needs to be on the vacationer season ‘because that is the company’s principal mission’. The language utilized by this HDZ government is totally dehumanizing. Three human lives change into a secondary concern in comparison with 5 new vessels. Inside the firm’s hierarchy, ‘results, mission and the season’ take priority over the employees. Revenue is extra useful than human life ─ that is the message of the occasion cadres.
By now, ‘season’ has change into a byword for theft, however not the sort everybody thinks of after they hear in regards to the Adriatic coast. Overlook the viral pictures of outrageously excessive restaurant payments for espresso and meals that Croatian media promote as information each summer season. Tourism is the organized looting of the Croatian shoreline. That’s the theft I’m speaking about. However journalists wanting to jot down in regards to the organized prison enterprise often called ‘the season’ wouldn’t must sip espresso on Dubrovnik’s elegant principal road Stradun – they would want to go after the true culprits in Zagreb. But, since solely the poor keep house in the summertime to sadly ponder life, everybody else can’t wait to change into cheerful vacationers, together with left-leaning intellectuals and journalists. Each summer season, Zagreb abandons its political and cultural engagement to lounge on the seaside, and it’s exhausting to jot down critically about tourism from a solar lounger. That’s why we have to seize the winter, once we are all equally depressed, to take care of mass tourism, from which nobody has ever really had a break.
As quickly as we cease taking the idea of tourism as a right as one thing inherently constructive, it all of the sudden turns into clear that Dalmatia is just not a paradise ruined by impolite waiters and poor restaurant choices, however somewhat a hell administered by native politicians and traders who cut back individuals to eking out a livelihood in lowly hospitality roles as waiters, sailors and cooks. Personally, I’d be probably the most disagreeable waitress in all of Dalmatia if ready tables had been my solely choice for incomes a residing! In spite of everything, simply because somebody was born within the south doesn’t imply they had been made for the service business. Simply take a look at the islanders! Generally I feel they’re the one individuals in Croatia who’re even larger misanthropes than I’m. Folks from the mainland simply overlook the cuttlefish ink within the Dalmatian soul as a result of the true, melancholic picture of the south doesn’t match the banal postcards that Zagreb’s tabloid media shove in our faces yearly. Within the press, Dalmatians are by no means portrayed as oppressed – they’re all the time depicted as buffoons and grasping primitives, cannon fodder for HDZ. And worst of all, Dalmatia itself begins to stay this lie. It readily accepts it. After which that ugly picture of the coast displays onto Zagreb, which additionally turns into repulsive.
Dismantling Croatia, stone by stone
Each information story I open paints the south of Croatia as a madhouse. ‘Man arrested after trying to poison child with rodent poison near Trogir’, reads a latest information headline from Dalmatia a few city midway up Croatia’s coast. The artwork historian and conservator Cvito Fisković wrote this about Trogir over 60 years in the past: ‘Malaria and poverty have disappeared, class differences between the nobility and the common folk have faded away, the bells are growing quieter, the old dialect is dying out, but in summer, the shallows are filled with the noisy games of youth, and in winter, under the beams of old ground floors, the smell of grilled fish mingles with the ever-warmer conversations of the young, their ventures ever bolder, their loves ever more sensual’. A lot has modified since then. Malaria could also be gone, however poverty is making a comeback. So are class variations. Dalmatians not have time to benefit from the shallows in summer season as a result of they’re enslaved by the tourism machine with a purpose to fill Croatia’s price range. Winter in Trogir? There isn’t any winter in Trogir as a result of, like the remainder of Dalmatia, Trogir ceases to exist in winter. Except, in fact, somebody is making an attempt to kill a toddler with rat poison.
The plundering of the Adriatic coast has been occurring for many years, and it didn’t start with the Croatian Democratic Union, although plainly this occasion is now the first executor of all suspicious building tasks. In his 1955 textual content For the City Integrity of Korčula, through which he advocates for the restoration of outdated homes within the city of Korčula, Fisković warns that ‘one should not stumble over the small profits that individuals “enjoy” in this neglect’. However at the moment, he might nonetheless enchantment to the Cut up City Planning Workplace and the Dalmatian Conservation Institute to guard the general public curiosity. Sadly, if we fast-forward 70 years, we find yourself with white PVC home windows put in on Klis Fortress – home windows that might have remained a part of this heritage website from the fifth century had people not protested and pressured the HDZ mayor, Jakov Vetma, to have them eliminated. If the contractors had even the slightest concern for Klis, it could by no means have occurred to them to make use of plastic frames, however these small tourist-driven earnings are dismantling Croatia, stone by stone. City planning that when stored these pursuits in test not exists. Now, we have now HDZ and the Ministry of Tourism to care for ‘restoration’.
Tourism’s atmosphere
My husband and I’ve been spending our summers in Pag for the previous few years, staying with Uncle Toni and Aunt Ruža. We hire a small room with a rest room, and with no kitchen, at a really low worth. We all the time trip low season to save cash and keep away from the warmth – and most significantly, for the birds. Pag has fantastic ornithological reserves – Veliko, Malo and Kolansko Blato – the place you’ll be able to observe species that don’t exist on the mainland. However the final time we went to one in every of our typical birdwatching spots close to Kolan, we had been met with a building website: somebody had began constructing an unique weekend resort proper on the shore. And as you proceed towards Lun, with its beautiful historical olive bushes, you move by Novalja, which is now utterly deformed by new building. I don’t even know easy methods to describe the influence of this cultural destruction on Pag’s minimalist panorama. There’s something eerie about scanning for shiny ibises and whimbrels by binoculars, solely to search out concrete and sunburned vacationer backsides.
A headline I learn on morski.hr says all of it: ‘City of Novalja plants olive trees for 45 euros, pays 1,186 euros per piece? HDZ mayor explains…’. However do we actually want any extra explanations? Now that the seasonal solar is not frying our brains, issues are clearer than ever. Just a few olive bushes can’t disguise HDZ’s ‘good results’. Not in Novalja, nor anyplace else.
After all, the problem of devastation isn’t restricted to Dalmatia. Greater than 40 years in the past, author Srebrenka Iveković-Marinović and artwork historian Berislav Valušek warned of the systematic destruction of the city of Opatija, simply west of Rijeka. Of their newspaper article ‘The Tourist Queen and the Cultural Dwarfs’ (Danas, 18 Might 1982), they outlined a sequence of issues that plague the Croatian coast to this present day. The authors defined to Yugoslav readers that structure and greenery had been the defining options of Opatija, setting it other than different locations, and that these very parts had change into ‘the target of shooters with short-range thinking’. They argued that environmental destruction might solely be worthwhile within the quick time period. In the long term, all this rampant demolition and redevelopment would result in the disappearance of Opatija’s originality, which, in fact, is precisely what occurred. Of their article, they harshly criticized the Lodge Admiral, which on the time had three TV lounges as a substitute of work: ‘That hotel is, even in terms of architecture, a good example of the level of awareness of those in power’. Of their view, the Admiral didn’t match into its environment and symbolized a wave of inappropriate new constructions and expansions that had been ‘slowly but surely destroying the historic unity of Opatija’s villas, palaces and motels’.
It’s price noting that those that fought in opposition to coastal devastation and unlawful building again in Yugoslavia had been largely artwork historians and conservators, individuals who truly knew what they had been speaking about. On the opposite aspect, we have now the so-called ‘cultural dwarfs’ – those that cater to traders and take away cultural landmarks to make coastal cities look as sterile and impersonal as doable. For these items of garbage, crime serves as a technique to ‘culturally’ distance themselves from the poor. It’s clear that in Croatia, tourism deepens class divisions and promotes the segregation of residents who can’t afford holidays or house renovations. On the similar time, as their atmosphere is more and more remodeled into an unsightly and unique vacationer vacation spot, the choices for native residents shrink. They will select to stay poor, or to change into a part of the machine. I feel this alternative between two evils completely explains HDZ’s reputation in Dalmatia.
Betraying the Adriatic
The south of Croatia, nonetheless, has not solely been devastated when it comes to building. It has additionally been culturally destroyed. It might be stuffed with music festivals and occasions, however the native inhabitants can’t attend as a result of they’re organized completely for foreigners. Dubrovnik has change into an unique vacation spot for Individuals and rich vacationers. If entry to public seashores isn’t actually blocked by unlawful concrete obstacles and concessions, then Croatian residents are sometimes priced out of the coast. In spite of everything, not all obstacles are bodily; a lot of them fall inside the cultural sphere – gastronomy, for instance. In the summertime, it’s extremely tough to purchase contemporary seafood in Zagreb. At first, I believed all of the fish stayed in Dalmatia, however after talking with Dalmatians, I noticed that even they don’t have quick access to it. The summer season college organized by Praxis on Korčula, the general public assemblies on Hvar and Dubrovnik seminars on socialism and sophistication points, the place figures like Miko Tripalo and different Croatian philosophers and communists as soon as spoke are issues of the previous. Cultural exercise in Dalmatia has been diminished to newbie souvenir-making. As a substitute of critically studying the seventeenth-century Croatian author Junije Palmotić’s polemical poem Gomnaida in the summertime (which has by no means been extra related), we’re coping with literal shit spilling onto our seashores!
The ‘cultural dwarfs’ talked about by Valušek and Iveković-Marinović haven’t solely spent a long time constructing grotesque new developments, however in doing in order that they have additionally demolished a tradition through which individuals had grown up and lived constantly for hundreds of years. The discourse on the Croatian shoreline, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean usually has been diminished to semi-literate newspaper articles about youngster poisonings and the entrepreneur-turned-politician Željko Kerum. As soon as an actual place to stay, the coast has change into, in winter, a graveyard of empty properties. New tourist-driven building has displaced the native inhabitants. Together with the inflow of luxurious vehicles, the south manifests itself in Zagreb within the type of cashiers, hairdressers and people working in tradition. Many from the south flee to Zagreb to outlive as a result of tourism consumes all the things in its path, together with regular life. Istrians and Dalmatians are compelled to stay within the capital, and this compelled relocation turns Zagreb into a spot they despise. For my part, the long-term answer to this downside lies in excessive property taxes and, much more importantly, the decentralization of Croatia. Sadly, we all know that prime property taxes received’t be launched till foreigners change into locals, that’s, till they’ve purchased up all the things that may be purchased and renovated. As soon as their voters have bought off all their household properties to vacationers, then and solely then will HDZ lastly impose taxes.
Like property taxes, decentralization has change into a necessity, and never just for the survival of Dalmatia, the Kvarner Gulf and Istria. The benefits would go each methods, as a result of simply as Dalmatia is useless within the winter, Zagreb is a horrible place to stay in the summertime. If the Croatian shoreline had been allowed some autonomy from the capital, Zagreb would lastly lose its function because the perpetual villain. In the beginning, the capital should cease claiming possession over the coast and treating it as if the Velebit mountain vary had been only a barely bigger model of Zagreb’s personal mountain Medvednica. This separation would encourage Zagreb to develop higher seasonal actions and open the general public swimming pools that bear upkeep each summer season and stay closed to the general public throughout the worst warmth waves. Secondly, Croatia appears to be like completely different when considered from the south, and that completely different perspective needs to be nurtured and revered. ‘Regions are people, and people are regions’, says the Croatian poet and traveller Antun Gustav Matoš in a 1969 information to tour locations from Zagreb. That information doesn’t embody the Adriatic coast. Solely these locations which are geographically and culturally near Zagreb are listed. As a substitute of Kvarner and Istria, it lists Slovenia and Slavonia.
However crucial motive to collectively battle in opposition to the tourist-driven obsession with the Adriatic is local weather change. World warming is the primary level of convergence between tourism and unlawful improvement, however mainstream media not often write about it. Final 12 months, there was an enormous mussel die-off in Mali Ston Bay. I don’t suppose that horrifying information even made waves. Partly as a result of sea temperatures are solely thought of related when discussing vacationer consolation, and partly as a result of vacationers sometimes don’t like mussels, however as a substitute desire the meat dishes they’re used to. Southern Europe is getting hotter. Fires have gotten extra frequent and last more. Those that care have been warning in regards to the lack of consuming water throughout peak season, particularly in locations whose infrastructure merely can’t assist the huge variety of in a single day stays that gas the state price range. The Adriatic coast is a useful treasure, however it isn’t limitless. It consists of pure assets and folks, each of which Croatian society is relentlessly consuming by mass tourism. Does that imply we must always utterly abandon the ocean sooner or later? After all not!
Our relationship with the Adriatic doesn’t must be purely touristic for us to get pleasure from it. ‘I am lying on the warm sandy shoal of the Northern Adriatic, watching the play of cotton-like clouds over Vrbnik’, writes Gustav Krklec. As he places it, he lies and daydreams on the island of Krk, ‘on a shimmering, sparkling July sand carpet’, eager for solitude, which is disrupted by the encircling clamour – the vacationer bustle that ‘bypasses all social conventions and established customs’. Nevertheless, Krklec, in his 1958 article for Zagreb’s Vjesnik, additionally quotes the wanderer Matoš: ‘Travelling, that is the poetry of modern civilization’, the author doesn’t look kindly on the overseas vacationers simply starting to find Yugoslavia. An incidental encounter with a Westerner who ignorantly locations Yugoslavia behind the Iron Curtain makes it clear that Krklec doesn’t see himself as a vacationer. He’s mendacity on the sandbank, however that sandbank can also be a part of Yugoslavia. He didn’t come to the Adriatic to flee politics, as a result of the Adriatic coast is just not some imaginary, escapist vacation spot, and lounging on the seaside, for that matter, is much from apolitical. So what has occurred within the meantime that so radically modified our notion of the south, and the way did we betray the blue Adriatic so badly? Mass tourism and unlawful improvement have taken a dump on all of us. That’s what has occurred. We bought the scumbags, the bastards and their firms.
Breaking free
Let’s return to the start of my textual content, to the irritation I felt watching somebody’s pretentious behaviour damage my view. Vacationer behaviour is extremely theatrical as a result of, as Krklec noticed, it ‘bypasses all social conventions and established customs’. In that melodramatic, philistine swaying of a kid, within the egocentric, performative love of a mom, I acknowledged a sample I ceaselessly encounter in Croatia – not simply in household dynamics however in on a regular basis politics. Croatian politics has been stripped of actual relationships and diminished to imaginary patriotism that rocks the Croatian public, as if to assuage and defend it from a hostile world. However the true, inside enemy, because the outdated Yugoslav communists would say, is exactly that grip, that swaying movement which lulls us right into a false sense of safety. I feel it’s clear from my textual content which occasion’s grip is choking us, in whose vice our heads are slowly being crushed. To interrupt free from it, we should first liberate Dalmatia, after which Dalmatia will liberate Zagreb. After that, the remainder shall be simple.
This text was first printed by Kultur Punkt. Its translation from Croatian into English was commissioned as a part of Come Collectively, a venture leveraging current knowledge from group media group in six completely different nations to foster revolutionary approaches.
