Brioni, Tito’s summer playground, comes to life again

To reach the Croatian archipelago of Brioni one usually drives from Pula, a city in south-western Istria, to arrive at the fishing village of Fažana. From there, a ferry takes you to the islands. “When we first came to Brioni a few years ago, we couldn’t help but feel as if we were on the set of a Wes Anderson film,” write Sabina and Reiner Opoku in the foreword of their book Brioni Islands. “The morbid charm conveyed by the remnants of the Habsburg Empire’s grandeur, along with the architectural traces of the glory days of Yugoslav socialist realism, created a strange allure.”

Along with its surprising flora and fauna, the archipelago has long cultivated an atmosphere of “cheerful absurdity”. The islands in their modern form were conceived by the then 50-year-old entrepreneur and Austro-Hungarian patriot Paul Kupelwieser in 1893. His first mission there was to eradicate malaria. He then returned, accompanied by the forester, surveyor, master builder and road engineer Alois Zuffar, to create his utopian dream. Together they uprooted Brioni’s dense scrub vegetation and planted tens of thousands of new trees. Forest landscapes, rolling meadows, paths and promenades developed over the years. Various fauna, including a tiger, zebras and giraffes brought there by the German zoologist Carl Hagenbeck, were introduced. Initially, there was a guest house with 14 rooms; later, the hotels Karmen and Neptun, together housing a couple of hundred guests, were added. 

It wasn’t long before Brioni attracted artists, writers and musicians. Kupelwieser transformed it into a luxurious seaside resort, which lured the likes of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Thomas Mann and James Joyce. When his autobiography was published in 1918, his brother Karl wrote: “Brioni, which was once so deserted, is now famed both at home and abroad as a veritable paradise.” 

It wouldn’t have seemed unlikely to meet Bill Murray behind a reception desk, or Anjelica Huston on a ferry

In 1953, Yugoslavia’s president, Josip Broz Tito, designated its largest island, Veli Brijun, to be his summer residence. For 26 years, he ruled part-time from his sprawling white villa on its shore. Under Tito, the island continued to draw illustrious guests: among those on the long roster were Queen Elizabeth II, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Willy Brandt and Haile Selassie, as well as cultural icons like Josephine Baker, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. In 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru came to discuss cold war-opposition strategies with Tito, in what eventually helped establish the Non-Aligned Movement with Egypt, India, Indonesia and others. The 1953 Cadillac Eldorado convertible that Tito liked to be driven around in doubtless impressed them all. It is still here, in immaculate condition, available to paying guests for scenic excursions.

The car, as with so many other remnants of the era, is a tribute to that bygone age. The man-made landscape feels suspended in time; with the exception of a handful of slick contemporary rental villas, almost everything else on Veli Brijun dates back to the cold war. This includes the Karmen, which faces the port and was built during Brioni’s Italian rule in the 1930s-’40s, on the site of another hotel. The rooms are still decorated in the scheme of late-communist aesthetic. But the monumental artworks are falling into disrepair. These days anyone requiring luxury of the conventional five-star kind will need to content themselves at the Grand Hotel Brioni in Pula, across the narrow strait.

On first visiting the island in summer 2019, the Opokus observed Brioni’s charming melancholy: “It wouldn’t have seemed unlikely… to meet Bill Murray behind a hotel reception desk, or Anjelica Huston on the bridge of a tourist ferry,” they write in the introduction to their book. “Or Owen Wilson on the back of an elephant.” Brioni does have an elephant – named Lanka – brought here many years ago as a gift to Tito from the then-prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi.

The Opokus’ book celebrates Brioni and offers insight into its history. But more than that, it seeks to be a launch pad for awareness of its potential as a destination for contemporary and future culture. “[It] could become a place to inspire new thinking about our society and culture in general, and new ways for a sustainable life within our global environment,” they write. “Building on their political legacy they might – once again, in a different sense – become islands of the nonaligned; an ideal setting for cultural events which would bring together people and ideas that might not otherwise intersect.” 

There’s already one venue: the Ulysses Theatre, on Mali Brijun, the archipelago’s second-largest island – formerly a 19th-century fort, now a satellite of Croatia’s pre-eminent theatre company. Productions range from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Molière, through to Brecht and Tennessee Williams; Ulysses’ founders can name Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes among their stage collaborators. Such is Brioni’s cheerful absurdity – and unexpected allure. 

Brioni Islands by Reiner and Sabina Opoku will be published by Skira at £75 at the end of November, skira-arte.com