Yugoslavia's Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–1980s)

Tourism and the Making of Socialist Yugoslavia; An Introduction

Tourism and the Making of Socialist Yugoslavia An Introduction Karin Taylor Hannes Grandits The song More, More (“The sea, the sea”)1 by Croatian rock musician Darko Rundek evokes the longings of a family preparing for their seaside summer holiday. Each year they draw up a list of things to take with them weeks before setting off for the Adriatic: And don’t forget: Charcoal, the barbecue, three deckchairs, The sun umbrella, flippers, goggles, Sunglasses, playing cards, Tennis shoes, the thermos flask, Tarzan and Karl May2 [books], the swimming ring, Badminton rackets, flip-flops, a ball, Ham, bacon, the camera, And the big container full of wine.3 Unfortunately, they fail to fit everything into the tiny car that became an icon of holidaymaking in Yugoslavia in the 1960s: 1 On the album Apokalipso, Jabukaton edition, 1996. 2 Karl May was the author of numerous adventure stories based on travels to exotic lands. These extremely popular German-language books were translated into Croatian in the 1960s. 3 Our translation. I ne zaboravi: drveni ugljen, roštilj, tri ligeštula suncobran, peraje, maske, naočale za sunce, karte, tenisice, termosicu, Tarzana, Karl Maya, šlauf, badmington, japanke, loptu, šunku, špeka, fotoaparat i veliki kanister s vinom. 2 Karin Taylor and Hannes Grandits But in the end all kinds of things are missing, Because our Fićo is too small. The song ironically savors the Yugoslav “good life” between leisure fantasies, a vital consumer culture, and prosaic everyday constraints. Enticingly, the sea beckons the tourist masses with the promise of summer pleasures. The trip to the old holiday paradise (the song was recorded in 1996) evinces a sphere of life that the majority of people living in Yugoslavia began to participate in and relate to during the heyday of the socialist era in the 1960s and 1970s. The annual summer holiday—godišnji odmor—became a social practice closely linked to the commanded transformation of a largely peasant country into an industrialized state after World War Two. Seen in contemporary terms, the items listed enthusiastically for the holidays differ little from those that families in Western Europe might have taken with them. Although British holidaymakers would perhaps have substituted wine with beer and Italian tourists preferred other adventure novels, the song’s lyrics suggest that the basic ideas of what constitutes a conventional family holiday at the seaside in the latter half of the twentieth century were essentially alike. As scholars of tourism since Dean MacCannell have argued, tourism is a form of modern leisure associated with consumption , modes of economy, social transformation and cultural identity: “tourism is the cutting edge of the worldwide expansion of modernity .”4 Rundek’s song has a bitter twist at precisely this point. In addition to the fact that childhood is irretrievable, the “modern” country remembered here with irony and poignancy, i.e., socialist Yugoslavia, fell violently apart in the early 1990s. As a result, most of the recent work on Yugoslavia—either in the realm of history or anthropology—has concentrated on investigating the sources of conflict and uncovering cultural fault lines and social discontent. The work of historians has focused on political struggles in socialism and the constructions and realities of ethnic strife. In the Yugoslav successor states, the dominant political histories of the late 1990s and at the turn of the twenty-first century have tended to bolster national territorial and cultural claims, while historians based outside these countries dissected various nationalisms. In contrast, this volume 4 MacCannell (1999 [1976], p. 184). shifts the perspective from divisive and exclusive political histories to the exploration of social and economic conditions, practices and identities in a sphere of life that was common to most citizens of Yugoslavia once socialism had been consolidated and living standards rose: the holiday. Tourism and the Promotion of State Policies Up until the establishment of the socialist state, recreational travel in Yugoslavia had been the prerogative of a small urban upper and middle class of educated professionals and trades people. Collective holiday trips organized after 1945 for workers and peasants represented an unfamiliar and sometimes even unwelcome experience to people unused to travel and relaxation away from home. Yet, similar to the rest of Europe, they rapidly assumed the right to annual holidays as part of a modern way of life. In their volume on tourism in twentieth-century Eastern Europe, Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker point out that...