TY - CHAP
T1 - Nature(s) of power
T2 - environment, politics and pestige on Brijuni Islands in the twentieth century
AU - Prokić, Milica
AU - Petrić, Hrvoje
PY - 2024/3/15
Y1 - 2024/3/15
N2 - In their latest incarnation as a national park, the Brijuni Islands are, for the most part, open to thewider public and regular holiday-makers. Over millennia however, this small archipelago of fourteenislands in the northern Adriatic has been off limits to most, as an exclusive place for the variousEuropean economic and political elites. The islands served as a summer residence to affluent Romanfamilies of antiquity, as spa and holiday resort for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and as a poloplayground to Nazi and Fascist propagandists Goebbels and Alfieri. This place of exceptional beautyand natural diversity, with its vast stretches of greenery, its vineyards and mandarin groves, routinely described as ‘heaven on earth,’ was crucially shaped by extensive human interventions into its environment—by whichever socio-political force claimed Brijuni as its dominion over time. After the Second World War, the islands became a summer residence to Josip Broz Tito. On the wave ofBrijunis’ tradition of luxury, the Yugoslav president hosted foreign government officials in the villasand golf courses of the archipelago, which also boasted a safari park. The Non-Aligned Movementleaders sent elephants, gazelles, and camels to the park as tokens of friendship to Tito—which is to say that even the fauna of Brijuni cannot be described as apolitical. Looking into the long, layered past of the Brijuni archipelago, this chapter seeks to identify the key aspects of its islandness that made it the chosen place for political power to be forged, held, wielded, and displayed. It examines how various socio-political and economic agents built and shaped the environment of Brijuni, particularly over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing from diverse materials—including unpublished cartographic sources, archaeological finds, memoirs, journals, and periodicals—it weaves together the stories of landscape, politics, and power as inextricable co-shapers of the archipelago.
AB - In their latest incarnation as a national park, the Brijuni Islands are, for the most part, open to thewider public and regular holiday-makers. Over millennia however, this small archipelago of fourteenislands in the northern Adriatic has been off limits to most, as an exclusive place for the variousEuropean economic and political elites. The islands served as a summer residence to affluent Romanfamilies of antiquity, as spa and holiday resort for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and as a poloplayground to Nazi and Fascist propagandists Goebbels and Alfieri. This place of exceptional beautyand natural diversity, with its vast stretches of greenery, its vineyards and mandarin groves, routinely described as ‘heaven on earth,’ was crucially shaped by extensive human interventions into its environment—by whichever socio-political force claimed Brijuni as its dominion over time. After the Second World War, the islands became a summer residence to Josip Broz Tito. On the wave ofBrijunis’ tradition of luxury, the Yugoslav president hosted foreign government officials in the villasand golf courses of the archipelago, which also boasted a safari park. The Non-Aligned Movementleaders sent elephants, gazelles, and camels to the park as tokens of friendship to Tito—which is to say that even the fauna of Brijuni cannot be described as apolitical. Looking into the long, layered past of the Brijuni archipelago, this chapter seeks to identify the key aspects of its islandness that made it the chosen place for political power to be forged, held, wielded, and displayed. It examines how various socio-political and economic agents built and shaped the environment of Brijuni, particularly over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing from diverse materials—including unpublished cartographic sources, archaeological finds, memoirs, journals, and periodicals—it weaves together the stories of landscape, politics, and power as inextricable co-shapers of the archipelago.
KW - islands
KW - Yugoslavia
KW - environmental history
KW - Brioni
KW - Brijuni
KW - Tito
UR - https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2023/10/13/entire-of-itself/
U2 - 10.3197/63831593227779.ch02
DO - 10.3197/63831593227779.ch02
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9781912186846
SN - 9781912186839
SP - 51
EP - 75
BT - Entire of Itself?
A2 - Prokić, Milica
A2 - Šimková, Pavla
PB - White Horse Press
CY - Winwick
ER -