RIJEKA, Croatia – In a Croatian port sits a boat built to carry bananas from Africa to Italy, that laid mines for Nazi Germany and was sunk by Allied planes before it was salvaged as the personal yacht of a globe-trotting communist leader.
Josip Broz Tito and the state he led — Yugoslavia — have long passed into history, and the boat, the Galeb (Seagull), was left to rust in a corner of Rijeka’s once mighty docks.
Now, with Rijeka readying to become European Capital of Culture in 2020, city authorities have secured EU money to restore the 117-metre (384-feet) boat as a museum, just as debate in Croatia rages over the life and deeds of the man who graced the pink mattress in the front port-side cabin.
If the Galeb was a symbol of Tito’s prestige on the world stage — a communist leader welcome in ports West as well as East — its restoration is part of Croatia’s own tortured process of reconciliation with its 20th century history.
To conservatives in Croatia, Tito — who was born in what is today Croatia to a Croat father and Slovene mother — was a totalitarian dictator: to look fondly on him means to be nostalgic for a shared federal state that denied Croats their own until they forged one in a 1991-95 war.
Liberals, however, recall his guerrilla fight against the Nazis and the relative freedom and prosperity of Yugoslavs compared to those who lived in the Soviet Union or in its shadow.
They see in the disdain of conservatives a thinly-veiled fondness for the WWII Croatian state that collaborated with the Nazis but was snuffed out with Tito’s Partisan victory, a sentiment that has gained a foothold in mainstream Croatian politics in recent years.
It is a tug-of-war over history and identity that was encapsulated this month in the renaming by Zagreb’s city council of the capital’s Marshal Tito Square to Republic of Croatia square.
“We live in a time when history is being reinvented retroactively,” said Ivan Sarar, who as head of culture at Rijeka’s city council is in charge of its 2020 makeover.
“It’s interesting that just by undertaking this (restoration) we have already been declared revisionists,” he told Reuters.
