![]() The King of Porn had found his “Xanadu”, somewhere he could build his own little empire that would bring about world peace through the pursuit of pleasure. And it would bring Cold War foes together to enjoy leisure activities in the same sensuous, Penthouse-branded paradise. It would draw wealthy foreign tourists (and their hard currency) to the unexpected luxury of socialist Yugoslavia. His formula was this: He would build the Haludovo Palace Hotel and Penthouse Adriatic Club Casino, a sprawling, decadent resort in the small island town of Malinska. All at once, Guccione realized he’d detected “a real formula in the struggle against the Cold War”. The paterfamilias of Penthouse magazine was wading into the Adriatic Sea when he suddenly felt an earth-shattering revelation coming on. Sometime during the late 1960s, American multi-millionaire and porno czar Bob Guccione came to the island of Krk in Yugoslavia and had an epiphany. Rumor has it this swimming pool was once filled with champagne. This moment of serenity was broken rather abruptly, however, when I felt a section of floor begin to buckle under my feet. All of the windows had been busted out, but this let in some asbestos-free air, and offered a perfect view of the impossibly blue Adriatic. When I entered the deluxe mahogany suite, an enormous bed frame, possibly a California king, dominated the room. So I carefully made my way down the dark, debris-strewn hall. I was on the hunt for what promised to be the pinnacle of socialist luxury: the master suite, the same room where Saddam Hussein had stayed years ago, possibly with a Penthouse model. When I visited the site a few weeks ago, I ran up the staircase with its missing steps, climbing all the way to the top floor. These days, it’s a deteriorating death trap. Part I of our series on Croatia’s beleaguered hotel industry details the rise and fall of the Haludovo resort, one of the most ambitious hotel projects of the 20th century. There are literally dozens of ruined and hazardous former hotels, casinos, and sprawling state-owned resorts that are in desperate need of investment (or some other form of intervention), but everyone in charge seems dead set on on doing absolutely nothing. While coastal tourism in the newest EU member state may appear to be humming along just fine, there is trouble in paradise.Īlong with a nice stretch of Adriatic shore, the union has inherited the rapidly decomposing remains of Yugoslavia’s abandoned tourism infrastructure. Though the Europhobes may sound as if they’ve done nothing all year but sit in a basement fretting over the inevitably Balkan source of the next European “disaster”, their fears do seem justified if you take a look at the disastrous state of Croatia’s hotel industry. Unfortunately, the gloomier predictions and death metaphors are fitting in at least one respect. Others (mostly concentrated in the northern eurozone) were downright macabre about it, writing morbidly catchy headlines like, “Croatia will be a new cemetery” and “Europe’s new threat: Slow decay”. When Croatia joined the EU earlier this summer, some people celebrated like it was New Year’s Eve.
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