R.I.P. Motel Plitvice (1984-2024)

An earlier version of this photo essay appeared in the August 24, 2024 edition of Yugobulletin newsletter.

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Motel Plitvice was demolished this week.

The “cult motel” at the Lučko rest stop, on the western end of the Zagreb ring road, is no more.

Temple of Yugoslavian Design

When the “temple of [1980s] Yugoslavian design” was built in 1984, it was the first and only rest area on a Croatian freeway, then part of the Brotherhood and Unity Highway (Autoput bratstva i jedinstva).

The “magnificent work” of Zdravko Bregovac and Ivan Piteša was financed mostly by the Plitvice National Park, the oil company INA, and a now-defunct self-managing roads management company, and built by the Zagreb-based Industrogradnja in cooperation with some 30 subcontractors.

The Motel Plitvice complex comprised a 3-story, 56-room hotel, two gas stations, two cafes on each side of the freeway connected with the glass skybridge, the Plitvička kuća (Plitvice House) restaurant, and an autokamp (car campground).

The design infused modernist architecture with a regional style of the Lika region two hours south where the Plitvice Lakes are located. Steep roofs and white facades referenced mountain architecture, and the interiors were fashioned in rustic style, with exposed wooden beams and rafters, lattices, heavy wood furniture, bricks, even a stone fountain harkening to the lakes.

“It is a very beautiful complex that is not only architecturally valuable but also a testament to the period from the 1960s to the 1980s when mass mobility of Europe’s citizens was democratized,” Maroje Mrduljaš, architecture professor at the University of Zagreb, told the Index.hr news portal.

“The whole complex is witness to a fascination with highways, cars, and tourist movements from the north to the south and back. The skyway itself [built in a day] is unique in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia. Similar examples can be found in Italy. Skybridges over highways have also become a kind of sub-cultural phenomenon and the subject of serious architectural research.”

Aside from a rest stop, the motel and the restaurant became a popular wedding and celebration venue; the restaurant was famous for its lamb.

For Zagreb residents and others the skybridge spanning the highway was the symbol of the annual seaside vacation.

Many people still carry memories from the place.

One legendary story has it that in 1986 the players of the Zadar basketball team who beat the Zagreb team in the championship game stayed here on the way home and celebrated, among other things, by emptying all the fire extinguishers in the motel atrium.

Arriving from Slovenia, Lučko was the first place to get a coffee and beans, according to one instacommenter; according to another, in the other direction it served as a pit stop for bus drivers from Bosnia and Herzegovina en route to Germany.

Scenes in the nostalgic TV series Crno-bijeli svijet (Black-and-White World) were filmed here.

Highway to the Capitalism Zone

The company that owns the complex operated in the red since 1996. Staffing fell from over 300 employees at its peak in the 80s to just over 30 near-retirees a few years back.

As truck drivers increasingly shifted from sleeping at the motel to sleeping in their cabs and from eating at the restaurant to cooking their food on stoves in the parking lot, more and more revenue never materialized.

And as rent for the land where the complex is sited and which is owned by the Croatian state highway company (HAC) rose at the same time, to some €65,000 per month, Motel Plitvice fell into massive arrears.

The HAC sued and settled the dispute by taking over the facility. Now the HAC is re-developing (“modernizing and revitalizing”) the rest stop with new gas and charging stations, shop, restaurant, and parking lots.

I Stop, You Stop, We All Stop at the Rest Stop

I popped in here twice, in May 2022 and 2023, just as each summer tourist season was about to begin. It was like walking through the memory of the Yugoslav 80s if the era got abandoned and drafty—and shot at.

During the Covid pandemic, the facility had been turned into a quarantine facility for transiting truck drivers.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the motel served as a shelter for refugee women and children.

An elderly guard, smoking at a table outside with a few women, yelled at me to prevent me from entering.

Last year, the refugees were gone and the motel again a commercial accommodations. I walked in to look around. Within a few snapshots, a manager dashed out of his office to ask what I was doing. In my best but purposefully American-accented Croatian I said I was a tourist and wanted to take photos for Instagram of the place before it’s demolished. He just nodded and retreated back into his lair.

There were few buyers of the few things in the shop, and barely anyone was getting coffee in the two vacant cafes, one on each side of the highway. It felt exhilarating to walk through the skybridge that connects them. The toilets were the busiest rooms in the complex.

In one of the two sleepy cafes I ordered an espresso in an original Motel Plitvice cup.

I asked the server if I could keep the cup.

She said no and, walking back to the kitchen, added, “Just steal it.” (Collectors tell me you can find the cups at flea markets around the former country.)

In the other cafe, I asked another server about the impending demolition. She shrugged without a shred of sentimentality.

“But you’ll be out of the job,” I said.

“There’s work,” she replied. “If you want a job, you can get a job.”

The Demolition Commotion

If comments on my Instagram posts about the motel and its then-impending and now-completed demolition are any indication, melancholy and cynicism pervade the popular sentiment among people from the region.

• “The place was full of life once upon a time.”
• “It is only us Balkans who are idiotic enough not to see the cultural, historic, and aesthetic value in this.”
• “In ex-YU, we’re like, ‘It’s a historic site, let’s tear it down.'”
• “Most nations need occupiers to oppress them and destroy their heritage, we Southern Slavs are completely capable of doing it all ourselves.”
• “What a shame.”
• “It’s sad that us Yugoslav nations don’t appreciate more what we have.”

To be sure, the economic reality of capitalism did catch up with the place. The business just didn’t make sense anymore, and because of heavy use and poor maintenance over the decades the physical place was crumbling.

Nostalgia has to contend with utility, I told the Monocle magazine last year. The modern traveler might be left wanting and in reality there’s no practical reason to cross the skybridge.

But then the gas stations will be replaced by a gas station and the cafes with a cafe. Perhaps sometimes it does make more practical sense to start from scratch rather than update the old or fix what isn’t working.

But, as many Croats will argue, the demolition of this unique piece of architecture, without even attempting to consider preservation or somehow saving it, speaks to the larger issue of how their country values cultural heritage from the socialist era or honors sound environmental practices.

“It is sad to see beautifully designed and well-executed spaces of the past replaced by new ones,” Mrduljaš said, “just because of the belief that architecture, especially interiors, must resemble what is found on the Internet. The whole world becomes the same as a result: one-dimensional, inauthentic, and without history.”

What’s more, the architecture professor added, “in times of ecological crisis and the necessity of recycling, demolition instead of adaptation is completely inappropriate.”

Installing a “tasteless” gas station that’s typical today would be, Mrduljaš concluded, “an example of cultural regression.”

And so it goes. While the world and local elites express increasing appreciation for Yugoslav-era architecture, on the ground (and perhaps from the political and business above), the signs point in the opposite direction.

Of course, it’s not really about the architecture itself, but rather what it represents.

“Nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed,” wrote Charles de Gaulle.

It applies to memory as well; in the opposite direction, erasing the trigger of a memory helps erase the associated memory itself. If you stop remembering, you forget, and conversely, the object of memory is only alive as long as someone remembers it.

If summer vacations at the Adriatic during the Yugoslav times are some of the former Yugoslavs’ favorite memories, demolishing Motel Plitvice and places like it that evoke those memories helps to erase the time and the place they come from as well.

When wrecking balls do the job of forgetting, we’re all left standing in the dust. Then we fuel up at a shiny new gas station, and get back on our way.