Abstract
This chapter provides the historical framework for understanding the specifics of fishing tourism in one of Slovenia’s foremost coastal towns, Izola. Although the dominant characteristics of contemporary Mediterranean coastal tourism (the discrepancy between material and symbolic aspects, consumerism, capitalist relations of production on the coast, etc. ) are more or less applicable to any number of different coastal regions around the world, the East and North-Eastern Adriatic shores have historical peculiarities that merged with this general contemporary development and need to be considered if we are to understand more fully the present-day coastal dynamics in this area. Yugoslav tourism has an important place in this story as it reflects on the meaning of consumption and on the relationship between individual experience and ideology, be it Western, Yugoslav or post-Yugoslav one. The peculiarity of the cohabitation of domestic and international tourism in SFR Yugoslavia reveals both the specificity of socialist past as well as the introduction of capitalist relations of production for the coastal region. Tourism development within the NE Adriatic grew out of different political experiments and personal experiences that should be taken into account when trying to understand the present situation.
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Notes
- 1.
In the following text we will use the word Yugoslavia referring to the period between 1945–1991.
- 2.
The development of holiday houses was often connected with nationalization of private properties. On Debeli rtič, near the Italian border, police holiday houses were built on the property of a “French count”. Nowadays the Ministry of the Interior owns these holiday houses, but some reminders of the Yugoslav as well as pre-Yugoslav past are still present, as, for example, the common toilets and kitchen or terraced gardens stretching from house towards the sea as well as the trees planted by the count (personal communication, May 2010).
- 3.
Uslovi privredjivanja samostalnih ugostitelja. Domovi odmora, turističke vile i vikendice, Stalna konferencija gradova Jugoslavije, 1968. Unpublished report, National Library of Serbia (cited in Taylor 2010: 180).
- 4.
Often caravans would be parked on the non-urbanized land and slowly such areas developed into illegal caravan holiday settlements with huts (such was the example of Portić in village Peroj near Fažana in nowadays Croatia).
- 5.
After 1991, and during the war, some of the camps were used as refugee settlements and were later renovated (as for example the camp named 13th of May in Fažana, Croatian Istria). Also along the Slovene coast, there are still several camping sites today. Camping site Jadranka in Izola and another one in Strunjan, though privately owned, they still resemble the connection with the socialist holiday camps; the same wooden huts, and immobile caravans, occupied by the same guests, who have been coming year after year and who would hire for a longer stretch of time their own same pitches, where they would put up their immobile homes, and take care of the vegetation they planted and their small kitchen gardens (personal observation and communication, May 2010).
- 6.
Slovene families who go on camping holidays along the Croatian coast today stressed similar qualities as their parents’ generation. Child memories of “Adriatic” vacations are often stressed as an important factor in their holiday choice (personal communication, May 2010).
- 7.
The word Švaba was used in SFR Yugoslavia for Germans and carried pejorative connotations.
- 8.
Nowadays most of these hotels are sold to foreign investors.
- 9.
SOZD is an acronym for sestavljena organizacija združenega dela, meaning joint organization for coordinated labour.
- 10.
SOZD TIMAV was divided into several work organizations Droga Portorož, TOP Portorož, Preskrba Koper in Jadran Sežana. Work organisations connected in several aspects (food production for hotels) as the idea was the new organization of agriculture, fishery, trade and tourism within the coastal region (Lisjak 1999).
- 11.
TOP Portorož offered also tourist transportation on fishing boats. The first boat to be converted to transport of tourists was a fishing boat with drag nets named Lastovka [swallow/flaying gurnard].
- 12.
This brand was sold to the chain of supermarkets Spar and it is now used for the promotion of Slovenian goods. At the time, an interview with the Founder of Studio Marketing Jure Apih was published, which generated heated debates over authorship, triggered by the act of selling this brand. The objection was that this was a marketing campaign promoting tourism in Slovenia and was in concordance with raising patriotic feelings, and the idea that Slovenia as a country is not any more truly connected with SFR Yugoslavia (Hladnik-Milharčič 2012).
- 13.
Čevapčiči is a grilled dish of minced meat, found traditionally in the countries of SE Europe. They are considered a national dish in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also common in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, as well as in the Republic of Macedonia. Within SFR Yugoslavia čevapčiči were many times associated with summer holidays, barbecues on the beach or summer picnics in general.
- 14.
One of the tourist workers on the fishing boat has said how the Dalmatian music played on the tourist trips simply goes with the environment. Such obvious or natural place of Dalmatian music played in the context of Slovene coastal towns is, according to the interlocutor, perfectly understandable to local people and perhaps German tourists who still remember Yugoslav holidays, but not so obvious to other foreign tourists or Slovene younger generation. Dalmatian imagery will be further discussed in the Chap. 6.
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Rogelja, N., Janko Spreizer, A. (2017). Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Coastal Tourism. In: Fish on the Move. MARE Publication Series, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51897-8_5
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