PIŠE JURICA PAVIČIĆ

In the whole story of Kacin's weekend on Krk, there is another layer that is not so obvious The virus has turned all the regressive aspects of Adriatic development into desirable ones in the short term Jelko Kacin cleans his pool in front of the house on Krk Jelko Kacin cleans his pool in front of the house on Krk Getty Published: August 15, 2020 9:16 PM Facebook Twitter Messenger E-mail RELATED NEWS A small number of tourists on the Peristyle NEWS FROM LILIPUT Praise to tourism 60%: Is it a measure that tourism exists without frying all other life along the way? NEWS FROM LILIPUT There used to be a myth in Croatia that the poor 'skinned' us, and interestingly, today we are bloodsuckers This Friday, the newspaper you are reading has unveiled a new vivid example in a long collection of political hypocrisy. They revealed that Slovenian government spokesman Jelko Kacin was spending the summer in his cottage on Krk only a few days before he threatened to put Croatia on the problematic list due to the proliferation of kovids. A senior Slovenian government official drove to the nearest Croatian island. He spent a few pleasant days there. He enjoyed the sun and the pine trees, walking, swimming in the sea. And when he got home, he concluded that it was too dangerous for other Slovenian citizens to do the same as him. He concluded that it was by no means advisable for Slovenian citizens to travel to the Croatian Adriatic, unless those Slovenian citizens were his family and himself. The newspapers, of course, received a small burst of Kacin's political hypocrisy with the expected malice. There is nothing to cheer up the opposition media so much as when a ruling politician preaches one thing and does another, applying one rule to another and another to himself. There is also nothing that destroys political careers so much as such acts of civic hypocrisy. After all, Kacin could learn something about this from the adviser to the British Prime Minister Dominic Cummings , who was also caught with his fingers in the jam of similar political hypocrisy. During the toughest lockdown, he drove nicely from London to his parents' farm in Durham, demonstrating something that unites politicians of all meridians in such a fraternal way: that they don't think the rules they set or intend to set for others don't apply to them. The political hypocrisy of the Slovenian politician is, of course, the first, most noticeable and most banal aspect of the "Krk case". However, in the whole story of Kacin's Croatian tourist weekend, there is another layer that is not so obvious - and I think it is interesting. And it consists of the word "cottage." Namely, Jelko Kacin - did not spend his summers in a hotel or a camp or an apartment. He spent his summers in a family house named after his wife, which - I suppose - he started building for Yugoslavia. Kacin is one of the thousands of Slovenian citizens who have famous "cottages" on the Croatian coast, and to this number should be added numerous citizens of BiH and - of course - a much larger number of Croatian homeowners. In the last fifteen years, the famous "cottages" have seemed like a dying phenomenon. After flare up as a social phenomenon in the 70s, after reaching a historical peak in the 80s, holiday homes of domestic and semi-domestic owners became in the 21st century somewhat outdated, outdated and by no means cool. According to historians such as the Austrian Karin Horvat (who wrote the study), "cottages" emerged as a phenomenon in the mid-1960s, when the Yugoslav middle class began to accumulate surplus value and some savings. As socialism was at the time, with that austerity that middle class could neither buy shares nor expand big businesses. Therefore, he invests it in real estate, which the owners often built, added to and arranged themselves. Not only socialist savings were invested in them. Even more, another form of socialist capital was invested in them: and that is free time. People who worked until three had long afternoons to go to a cottage or basement, where they would steal the rest of the working day from the employer (the state) and invest in their own bucolic gardens. By themselves, these cottages were a semi-tan-hybrid culture. They combined modern and premodern. The imperative cultural innovation promoted by the ruling ideology - to go to the sea in summer - was combined with the pre-modern desire of the peasants of yesterday to have their own garden, pome, beans, kiwis and cherries. Village garden by the beach: that was the measure and definition of our culture. But in the transition, everything has changed. With capitalism came the long working hours. One part of the workers in capitalism lost weekends (which, interestingly, is seldom mentioned when talking about the work of shops on Sundays). With the globalization of the real estate market, plots by the sea have become inaccessible to the working class. Weekend areas such as Ciovo, Grebastica, Vir or Valsabione have become so dense in construction that they have become the embodiment of urban ugliness. The third and fourth generations of peasants no longer had any nostalgia for the land, and no eros aroused in them the idea of ​​a bed of chard and chard. By the early 2000s, the cottage had turned into a cultural dungeon, the epitome of bad lifestyle. The idea of ​​the cottage was coupled with a summer vacation with my mother-in-law and mother-in-law, a summer spent over the stove, with swimming in always the same rebuilt and concrete bay, with a lack of curiosity and adventure. The cottage experienced its money mutation at the same time. It has become an asset that can be monetized. One part was cashed in by turning it into apartments, as a tourist investment. Other owners sold it to foreigners, and that money was often used for the first apartment for children, tuition fees, studies. I can think of many cases where my grandfather's real estate, built after three in the afternoon under socialism, was used to pay for grandchildren's real estate in Canada, Britain or Zagreb. The cottages thus went to their historical decline - cultural, urban, economic. And then there was an unusual turnaround that changed a lot, even that. And that reversal brought a new factor - the virus. Namely, COVID-19 appeared, and with it new forms of (non) risky behavior. What we know for sure after the summer of 2020 is that even in an epidemic, people do not want to just give up the good things in life. Despite the virus, they want to keep partying, they want to have fun, listen to music, drink and eat. But - of course - they do it differently. And in that fine adaptation of the "old normal", the rating suddenly jumped unexpectedly. Suddenly it turned out to be quite convenient to sit in a car in Ljubljana (or Zagreb or Rijeka), drive to Omišalj (128 minutes, according to Michelin Routes), park that car in your yard and spend ten days in your house, hanging out. in a circle of shops and beaches where about the same thirty people stop by. All the monotonous, regressive, claustrophobic, unexciting sides that made the cottages repulsive to people suddenly turned into an advantage due to the small Chinese virus. And that's where the paradox begins. Namely, cottages are not the only non-cool, repulsive and outdated aspect of Adriatic tourism that has become an advantage due to the virus. It is safe to say that with kovid - paradoxically - all the shortcomings of Croatian tourism have temporarily turned into advantages. Tourist consultants in Croatia have constantly pointed out that there are too many apartments on the Adriatic and too few hotels. Extreme seasonality, construction pressure on the coast, low added value, widespread tax evasion were attributed to this phenomenon (not without reason). In the summer of 2020, the situation is such that hotels are mostly half-empty, as tourists are afraid of air-conditioned tracts, corridors, halls and crowded beaches. Apartments, on the other hand, work like clockwork because people in the virus era like to have their own four walls and a separate entrance. Not without reason, in Croatia it was lamented that we are a car destination. The idea of ​​the Adriatic in the summer was too often coupled with hot tin cooking along the beach, with queues for the ferry and exhausting traffic jams. Tourist “think tanks” longed for more aviators, and environmentalists and old-fashioned statists (like me) longed for a country that might invest less in roads and more in the metonymy of the state: the railroad. The virus - paradoxically - brought the triumph of the most primitive "old normality" here as well. Airports are grappling with debts, counters are empty, planes are afraid of people like sinful souls. The trains are half empty. But that's why the car has turned into a sheet metal self-isolation tool, an antivirus capsule that allows you to fire yourself from Stuttgart or Wroclaw and after ten or fifteen hours be on a ferry on Brač. Well, now, paradoxically, you have a situation where tourists in central Dalmatia are 60 percent of last year, but the crowds in parking lots and in the port are higher than last year. This is how this tourist "new normal" works. From the 1990s onwards, we have constantly complained that the transition and monoculture of tourism have destroyed institutions that were modern, collectivist and essentially public, and that pre-modern, individualistic and essentially private ones have grown on their ruins. Instead of a hotel, roommate fry. Instead of production, smuggling commerce. Instead of a train, a car. Instead of a railroad, a road. Instead of shared traffic, driving on its own. Instead of collective tourism created by architects, planners and consortia, point tourism is booking.com. This defeat of the planned and the public has created in these thirty years a whole small subculture of modernist nostalgia. And now a bizarre turnaround has taken place. The virus has turned all these regressive, unplanned, premodern and long-term destructive aspects of Adriatic development into "kosher" and desirable in the short term. And while this is happening, dozens of weekend oases rest along the Adriatic coast, from Žaborić to Mimice and from Ugljan to Kacinovo Krk. In them are thousands of squares of plaster and cement built by socialist doctors, plumbers, drivers and clerks. For a moment they looked like a dying relic of a vanishing culture. And then the virus arrived, and - as the Kacin case shows - revived that culture for a moment