I haven’t pinpointed exactly why exploring abandoned buildings is so thrilling. Maybe it’s the feeling of discovering something, the closest I’ll get to discovering uncharted land. Maybe it’s the privacy of discovery — being alone in an abandoned building, experiencing a place frozen in time just for you. Or maybe it’s 10% physical and 90% imagination as you wander the halls of an abandoned Croatian hotel, envisioning the heavyweight communist politicians who notoriously roamed its halls. Did they discuss quelling ethnic divisions in Lenin’s name? The quality of last night’s champagne and which caviar was on the menu that night? I wondered as I picked up a blue and white ceramic shard in what was once the dining room of the Haludovo Palace Hotel.
Malinska, a city on the Croatian island of Krk, was once the playground of the wealthy communist elite. Many lavish hotels adorned the glittering turquoise shoreline and the Haludovo dwarfed them all. Financed by the founder of Penthouse Magazine as part of dictator Tito’s campaign to attract western investment in the region before the breakup of Yugoslavia, it was a sprawling monument to decadence. Yugoslav leaders and notorious foreign celebrities and dignitaries (including future Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and allegedly the generationally notorious Saddam Hussein) came to soak up the sun at the hotel’s beach club, two swimming pools, and expansive promenade. But with the closure of an unprofitable casino, which only allowed foreigners to gamble per Tito’s decree, the steady flow of wealthy Yugoslav politicians soon dried up. Then the breakup of Yugoslavia triggered one of the bloodiest wars in European history, and the now mostly empty hotel was used to house refugees and internally displaced civilians. After the war, the outdated complex no longer attracted the world’s powerbrokers. It closed officially in 2001.
Today, it’s an iron skeleton of its former opulence, picked clean of furniture, decor, and personal items by a generation of urban explorers. Although camouflaged from both the coast and the road by overgrown trees, I wasn’t the only one who found it that afternoon. I could hear the echoing crunch of shoes on shattered glass ringing down the seemingly endless hallways from the far flung wings of the building. Due to the massive size of the complex, I had relative privacy to explore the mid century monstrosity and only caught brief glimpses of other people from afar.
The foyer, now a collection of rusted steel beams supporting loose ceiling panels, opened immediately into a sprawling, graffitied ballroom. Most detailed grandeur was gone, replaced by a carpet of broken glass and beer bottles from generations of bored teenagers. Following one tendril of the maze on the first floor led to indoor and outdoor swimming pools with views of the shimmering Adriatic. Following others led to solariums overgrown with vines, a spa with an intricately decorated floor tiles mostly intact, and a cracked tennis court.
Squatting and lifting my unduly heavy backpack, I desperately wished the elevator wasn’t out of commission as I gingerly put one foot in front of the other up the floating cement stairs. Without railings to guide me, I tried maintaining a balanced, careful pace without to lingering on the stairs long enough for my fear of heights to kick in.
The upstairs hotel rooms were even less recognizable than the ground floor. Most furniture was pilfered or broken, cabinets smashed in, and empty walls spray-painted. Surprisingly, the ceramic fixtures of the bathrooms were mostly intact. The toilets and bathtubs had been spared the fate of the broken windows and doors. There were even personal effects left by the bath, but ignored for sanitary reasons. The most notable was a paper bag with a label in both Croatian and English for women to deposit their used menstrual products, one complete with a dark stain.
The second floor was more of the same. Wings of smashed hotel rooms, as if someone celebrated their visit to this living relic of history with a baseball bat. Some broken bed frames remained, but most recognizable hotel trappings were missing. The architecture was the star here.
I spent that day wandering the decaying halls, searching for clues about the lives lived in grandiose excess for a few days, and that night using a Q-tip to remove shards of glass from the treads of my sneakers. My only souvenirs, besides the blue and white shard of pottery from the dining room. Unlike the glass, it had been worn smooth over the years like a shell tumbling in the surf, so it didn’t slice my leg when I put it in my pocket. A fragment of communist history ignored by 20 years of other passersby, now just for me.
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