The island of violence: Goli Otok, the Yugoslav prisonscape

Goli otok, a small island in the Croatian Adriatic was uninhabited until 1949, when its limestone
terrain was commandeered as a political prison for people accused of siding with Stalin in the Tito-
Stalin dispute. Upon release, they brought disturbing memories back to the mainland: stories of
extreme violence raging among the imprisoned in the quarries of the sun-scorched, wind-whipped,
barren island. Their hard, resoundingly corporeal experience of forced ‘political re-education’ became a symbol of human suffering in the former Yugoslavia. The inmates were forced to build their own prison out of the island’s stone, as well as to afforest some of its hostile terrain, shading the tree saplings with their own bodies against the hot Mediterranean sun. This forced labour undertaking had triggered dramatic changes to the island’s biophysical environment. In turn, its terrain and its peculiar microclimate greatly shaped the disquieting human experience beyond the effects of the intra-human violence. With this island-human interrelation as the focal point, this chapter brings the stony island into view as a dynamic and responsive entity that crucially shaped (as much as it was shaped by) the bodies, the lives, and the labour of its prisoners. It builds on the notion that each island is peculiar – with its own environmental traits, endemic species, cultures, communities and behaviours. As geographer Peter Conrad notes, in this sense, islands ‘narrow and concentrate the rules of selection’; as such they are ‘the breeding grounds for idiosyncrasy’. Goli otok is an apposite point of departure towards studying prison islands as a distinct category in the studies of environmental history - with their human and other than human inhabitants, fused into prison-human- island assemblages. Through the case study of Goli otok, this chapter engages with the crucial question the historian of islands as places of human incarceration and exile must address: if all islands immanently foster zoo-biological endemism and distinctive communities, can we speak of (prison) islands as shapers of peculiar, site-specific, or, better yet, island-specific, ‘endemic’ human violence?