Farewell to the Hotel Jugoslavija

I’m having a deja vu.

Just a few days after writing an obituary for Motel Plitvice in Zagreb, I must bid farewell to another Yugoslav-era icon: Hotel Jugoslavija in Belgrade.

The 31st of August was the last day for the tenants of the building to vacate the premises, and on Monday crews commenced prep work for the demolition, which is slated for December.

The iconic hotel will be replaced by an upscale multi-purpose, residential-commercial complex featuring two high rises and a luxury hotel.

Now that Hotel Jugoslavija sits empty and facing its demise, in an architectural purgatory of sorts, let’s take a look at its glory (and not so glory) days past.

As Nikola Milikić from the Historical Museum of Serbia told the BBC, “it’s incredible how similar and intertwined are the fates of one country and one hotel, both bearing the name Yugoslavia.”

Welcome to the Hotel Jugoslavija

Yugoslavia emerged from the Second World War facing an unprecedented degree of destruction. The new nation’s rulers, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, set out to rebuild the country quickly on the Soviet model.

One of the ideas for the country’s capital, Belgrade, which itself had been destroyed more than 40 times throughout its history, was a representative hotel on the Danube.

A trio of Yugoslav architects in 1947 won the international tender for the design of “Hotel Belgrade.” But the 1948 split with Stalin halted the project for many years.

As Yugoslavia then took the lead in establishing the Non-Aligned Movement, it became clear the capital lacked an appropriate hotel that would both host important visitors and represent the country’s new direction.

The story goes that at the inaugural summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie told Tito Yugoslavia’s capital did not have a prestigious hotel.

Tito is said to have picked up a phone and order the construction of one.

When Yugoslavia’s biggest hotel, now called Jugoslavija, opened in 1969, with Tito himself cutting the ribbon, local press called it “superluxurious” and “one of the most comfortable” hotels in Yugoslavia that was also “among top five largest and most beautiful hotels in Europe.”

Built in international style to Lavoslav Horvat’s design, the seven-floor hotel boasted 1,100 beds in 200 single rooms, 400 double rooms, and 23 suites plus a 200-seat restaurant and 400 additional rooms.

The lobby chandelier, a 30 by 9-meter, 14-ton rectangle with 5,000 bulbs and 40,000 Swarowski crystals was until 2010 the biggest chandelier in the world.

Legend has it there is a secret tunnel connecting the hotel with the nearby government building, the former Palace of the Federation.

The hotel was part of the official protocol. Guests over the years included Queen Elizabeth II as well as Dutch and Belgian royals, US Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crew, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and a range of sports and pop culture celebrities.

The hotel was “designed…to show the success and strength of Yugoslav self-managing socialism,” Milikić said, and “that [non-alignment] works and we have money.”

In the 1970s, a quay was built next to the hotel, and in the 1990s a number of splavovi (barge bars) popped up along the Danube banks.

Things took a turn for Hotel Jugoslavija after the country’s dissolution.

In the 1990s, the hotel was partly owned by Željko Ražnatović AKA Arkan, a mobster, paramilitary warlord, and indicted war criminal; Arkan’s wife Svetlana AKA the turbo folk singer Ceca operated a boutique in the complex.

In 1999, NATO bombs destroyed an annex and badly damaged the west wing, as the hotel was considered a legitimate target on account of serving as Arkan’s headquarters.

The hotel was quickly, albeit only partly reconstructed, and reopened later that year.

In 2006, the hotel was privatized, for €31 million, and closed. Under the new owners, a casino opened in the hotel in 2007. Three floors with some 135 rooms in the eastern wing of the hotel were renovated and the hotel then reopened in 2013 as a downgraded three-star garni hotel.

Because of its damaged state and subsequent remodel that removed much of the original furnishings and other elements, state protection as a culturally significant property was also removed at that time.

In 2014, scenes in the thriller 3 Days to Kill, starring Kevin Costner and Amber Heard, were filmed at the hotel.

The same year, the hotel’s owner announced plans to renovate and redevelop the hotel into a Hotel Kempinski.

In 2017, the Swiss documentary filmmaker Nicolas Wagnieres made a melancholic, nostalgia-tinged movie about the hotel that made successful rounds at film festivals around Europe.

Staying Alive in Hotel Jugoslavija

I spent two nights at Hotel Jugoslavija on my very first trip for the Remembering Yugoslavia project, in December 2019. There were cheaper options available and more luxurious ones too, but I wanted to experience the iconic place.

The lobby and the stairways were spiffed up, the sleek white marble characteristic of heavy handed modernism.

Meanwhile, light fixtures were in various stages of (mal)function.

It felt more like a carpeted dormitory than a hotel.

And about that carpet…

In the room, the preserved, or rather never replaced, period details clashed with the new elements.

It all felt half-baked.

But everything worked…

…and the view was nice.

As a hotel experience, it was unremarkable. The value came from staying at a place with so much history. But I wanted to feel something more, a sense of elevation perhaps, or significance, but all that came through was melancholy and disappointment of things taking a wrong turn somewhere along the line.

On checkout day, I was walking down the stair with my backpack and chanced upon an unlocked door leading to the closed off western wing. Debris from the remodel years ago was piled in the hallways and rooms.

I was trespassing on the destruction of an era, fascinated but also worried about what I might find if I ventured too far.

Later I contacted hotel management for an interview for my then-planned podcast. I showed up for the meeting only to find a locked office. The communications person then emailed me with an apology for the no-show, claiming an unexpected scheduling conflict. I never heard from her again. Indeed, if they handled their marketing with such nonchalance, their business struggles came as no surprise.

Hotel Jugoslavija Checking Out

On April Fools’ Day 2023 I “reported” Hotel Jugoslavija had been sold and would be demolished to make way for a Chinese supermall. Most people took the jest in stride, especially once they realized what date it was (of course some people did get upset and unfollowed me. I don’t miss them).

Little did I know that the joke would presage the things to come.

The hotel was sold earlier this year for just over €27 million, half the original assessed value. The company that owned the hotel, Danube Riverside, went into bankruptcy and was sold along with its properties.

The whole process appears to have been legal. But, as critics have pointed out, it followed a familiar script of shifting publicly owned real estate to private entities for a fraction of the price: first the state sells off the property to one private company friendly to the ruling regime which then sells it to another for even less. By the time the property is vacated, everything is sealed and done.

The new owner of the building and the lot, a company called Millennium Team, says they will invest some half a billion euros to build a new and much smaller five-star Ritz-Carlton Hotel book-ended with high rises (the eastern tower will be residential and have 42 floors, the 34-floor western tower will host business offices).

The facades will be green and a small boat launch will be added to the quay.

The only item that is to be preserved from the original hotel is the chandelier.

Rage Against the Serbian Capitalist Machine

On the vacate day, the Borba za Zemun (Fight for Zemun) citizens initiative organized a protest on the quay outside the hotel and circulated a petition against the demolition. The group alleges that the city of Belgrade is in the service of private investors and capital and only acts in the interest of the rich.

“We believe Hotel Jugoslavija is an architectural, cultural, socialist heritage that needs to be restored and preserved, because it is the history [and symbol] of our city,” a Fight for Zemun member told N1.

Locals reminisce about attending graduations and weddings and parties here. And they claim the demolition process and the new tall buildings will negatively impact wildlife on the nearby Great War Island located on the Danube across from the hotel.

The group pledges to put their bodies before the excavators coming to demolish the place.

Meanwhile, the Union of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia warns that, “the demolition of the building would change the architectural ambience of the area because the hotel

• forms a whole with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Palace of Serbia [formerly Palace of Federation], and the [former] communist party central committee building (today Ušće Business Center); and
• represents a symbols of our nation’s resistance to the NATO aggression.”

The historian Branislav Dimitrijević told the BBC that the decline of “one of the most representative buildings” of the socialist period “is not a unique example of the collapse of the legacy from [that] period.” It’s part of ongoing historical revisionism, which attempts to “revise the memory of the socialist period.”

If Hotel Jugoslavija and buildings like it were created with a particular idea, about life and the future, their removal means “that social imagination is reduced to the idea of disaster.”

The Distant Future

When I’m in Belgrade, I spend quite a bit of time with my friends in their (and my) favorite splav, Savana, moored within a stone’s throw from Hotel Jugoslavija.

Coffee, snacks, rakija, chill—right on the river.

No more. My friends tell me Savana and many other barge bars will be gone when I return.

All we’ll have left is memories, and the Danube will flow on alongside as if nothing ever happened.

Sources: B92, BBC, Blic, Direktno, eKapija, Espreso, N1, Reddit, Telegraf, Spomenik Database, Vijesti, Wikipedia.