Little street journal – Croatia
the other side of Zagreb / Croatia
What Detroit was to the USA and the car industry, Rijeka was to Yugoslavia and the shipbuilding industry. Rijeka has a rougher appearance. Parts of it look like an Austro-Hungarian crack house with palms and sea. It has a certain mess that usually comes with harbor cities. Unlike medieval and ancient streets of southern Adriatic, streets of Rijeka are more urban.
Meet Matija Gubec, Croatian Spartacus who led the Peasant revolution in the 16th century. Partisan army battalions in WW2 fought under his name, kids learn about him early in school, bands sing songs about him and his village still has a very special memory of him that I'll reveal to you at the end.
Yugoslav monuments, socialist architecture, brutalist buildings, or Spomeniks (Serbo-Croatian word for the monument) have made a comeback. More and more people want to see these out-of-the-world, UFO-like pieces of art created by vanguard artists of their time. Hidden in nature, forgotten by the state and often devastated, these grandiose storytellers still resist the time with a defiant attitude.
