Over centuries of habitation, the palace of Diocletian in Split was adapted to the needs of the residents, who built their houses among the columns and arches of the former emperor’s retirement home. It is all an extraordinary hotchpotch, with Roman arches appearing out of later buildings and passing through cafes. But underneath the palace, the basement was for centuries ignored, left much as it was, with little modification. During the Middle Ages it was gradually filled up with refuse and rubble. Only in the 1950s was the importance of what lay beneath the palace realised, and gradually the basement has been cleared away. Nowadays, the cavernous halls, with their huge archways, and the little rooms around them, are open to the public.
When I visited, the halls of the palace basement were occupied by various artistic installations, some of them involving TV screens and soundtracks. I was not moved. There was no overarching theme. I felt it was an inappropriate setting, that no thought had been given to how to fit the installations into that particular space, of how the space and the installations could enhance each other. Rather, it seemed the installations had just been plonked there for no reason. They detracted from the experience of visiting the palace basement. This was in contrast with the wonderful experience of visiting the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul in 2003, the cavernous underground crypt built in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, whose installations and low music enhanced and were enhanced by the Cistern, adding to the whole experience.
Yet there was one installation that I did find striking. It was a short televised documentary concerning a popular communist-era war film based on the true story of a teenage partisan hero, Boško Buha. The actor who played the part of Buha, Ivan Kolundžić, now a middle-aged man, had, in the 1990s, joined the Croatian forces during the independence war. In the documentary, Kolundžić gave two interviews, one as himself, and the other in the spirit of the Yugoslav, partisan tradition of which the Boško Buha film was an inspirational part. The two interviews are juxtaposed, giving two diametrically opposite views on Yugoslavia, communism and the war for Croatia’s independence.
Ivan Kolundžić as Boško Buha
In the recollection of one Kolundžić, Yugoslavia was a country in which all were united, and could travel freely without borders. By building self-management socialism, the Yugoslav variant of communist ideology, they were creating a just society. This was the beautiful dream to which many Yugoslavs were once committed, and the ideal for which partisans like Boško Buha had given their lives. As the narrator of the film noted in her interview with Kolundžić, this was the vision she grew up with, watching films such as Boško Buha. It was the vision of the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of the Yugoslav peoples.
For the other Kolundžić, Croats had never believed in the Yugoslav ideology, which had been imposed on them. They had given the appearance of going along with it merely to avoid persecution. For that Kolundžić, joining the struggle to liberate Croatia in the 1990s had been the natural thing to do, as had been the emphasis in that struggle on religious, Catholic values, so alien to communism, but so bound up with Croatian nationalism.
Kolundžić appeared convincing in both roles. To the question at the end of documentary, which Kolundžić should we believe, he replied with a smile, “me”. Watching the documentary with me were two young women, too young to have any memories of their own of Yugoslavia. Too young certainly to have been exposed to the idea that there might have been something noble in the effort to build a state based on multi-ethnic harmony, contrary to the usual 20th century practice in eastern Europe of population exchanges, expulsion and forced assimilation, all in the name of the nation state. They smiled, a faint giggle, as they passed on to the next exhibit. Yugo-nostalgia in today’s Croatia is perhaps little more than an eccentricity of a few old fogies from a past era.
But there is something uncomfortable and challenging about the Kolundžić documentary for those who accept uncritically the now dominant national ideology that Yugoslavia was always doomed, that the multi-ethnic state was a sham, and that Croats never believed in it. Undoubtedly some always loathed Yugoslavia, and were never reconciled to it. Unquestionably too, by the end of the 1980s disenchantment with the common state, with its flawed constitutional set-up, its economic failure and all its disappointed promises had undermined its legitimacy in the minds of a great many Croats, and others. But Kolundžić, speaking as Boško Buha, reminded Croats that, at some level, the Yugoslav idea had once had a positive message, at least for some.
Travelling through Dalmatia, one is repeatedly confronted with signs of the still powerful draw of Croatian nationalism, and the overwhelming influence on the national psyche of the war of the 1990s. The posters of the war hero Ante Gotovina, convicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague, the graffiti about the tragedy of Vukovar, and the pre-election posters of the ruling HDZ, all reflect the pervasiveness of Croatian national feeling. In such an environment the notion that Yugoslavia ever had any place in Croatian hearts gets short shrift in most quarters. But, as the documentary in the Split underground gently reminded, Croats were once part of Yugoslavia, they participated in it, helped build it, and at least at some level, some of them even believed in it.
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