Nature(s) of power: environment, politics and pestige on Brijuni Islands in the twentieth century

In their latest incarnation as a national park, the Brijuni Islands are, for the most part, open to the
wider public and regular holiday-makers. Over millennia however, this small archipelago of fourteen
islands in the northern Adriatic has been off limits to most, as an exclusive place for the various
European economic and political elites. The islands served as a summer residence to affluent Roman
families of antiquity, as spa and holiday resort for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and as a polo
playground to Nazi and Fascist propagandists Goebbels and Alfieri. This place of exceptional beauty
and 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 of
Brijunis’ tradition of luxury, the Yugoslav president hosted foreign government officials in the villas
and golf courses of the archipelago, which also boasted a safari park. The Non-Aligned Movement
leaders 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 Drawing from diverse materials—including unpublished cartographic sources, archaeological finds, memoirs, journals, and periodicals—it weaves together the stories of landscape, politics, and power as inextricable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.