Report - Titos Abandoned Villa, Croatia

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yo

Report and pics from a multi centre series of visits in central Europe and the Balkans- will start with Villa Izvor in Croatia

Soft state socialist Dictator for life Tito Brosz was a big fan of keeping a visible presence in each of the 6 constituent republics of the volatile Yugoslavia of yore . Vila Izvor was built by prisoners between 1947 and '53, on a prime bit of secluded real estate overlooking the Plitvice lakes. Tito only visited a handful of times but the villa was fully staffed and used by Party apparachiks for decades until... well, you know the rest. Abandoned since the first Balkans bloody scuffle, it has been left to rot in the silence of the forest that surrounds it.

Its not massively difficult to get to with google earth printouts as a guide. Not exactly signposted, we found ourselves minglining with the the coach tour masses as we approached the lakes- this is a massive tourist destination nowadays. The road to the villa winds its was upwards through the overgrown forest. Fallen tree trunks block the crumbling tarmaced single track road, requiring some deft off roading in a non off road wrecker of a car. You pass a couiple of abandoned farmhouses at the start of the track, which on closer inspection reveal their main use as guard blockhouses and have been built with some serious reinforced concrete that show that these are more than just farm buildings. its a few km up the track, over a bridge and skimming overgrown greenery - this road is not often used these days.

The road has one final climbing, sweeping curve and suddenly you have arrived, Izvor lies before you, and it is far far bigger than we expected

 

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The ragged sodden remenants of a red carpet invite you up the hewn steps and through the heavyweight 3 inch thick wooden doors. The building tooks to have been constructed soley of massive hewn rock, but a closer inspection reveals Yug era cast blocks to form the basic of the sttructure, the rough exterior merely a heavyweight veneer.

 

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This is a massive holiday gaff - everything is on a huge scale- the the right of the lobby, there is a sweeping organic curve of staicase, once shod with polished marble, now mostly stripped back to its concrete skeleton by looters. Ascending the staircase brings you another massive lobby area where visitors were welcomed into the guts of the complex. The whole interior was originally clad in brown varinshed wood, much of which is extant but in random states of decay. The state room lies behind anither set of doors and opens into a desolate series of rooms, some with 10 metre high ceilings.

Smaller staircases veer off to other levels, all stripped of their marble, some decidedly ropey, wiith the rotting steel reinforcement showing through the open wounds in the cast 'crete, bleeding brown rust streaks into crumbling grey flesh.

 

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As you ascend, you find further rooms and almost hidden self contained quarters, with their own secret access stairwells off the corridors. bathrooms have been pilfered, built in cupboards cleaned out and immovables usually trashed for good measure. Brown wood panels every bedroom, often ripped off where copper wire and pipework was stripped out by opportunists. YOu keep on finding more and more cubby hole bedrooms - apparently there were officially 20 or bedrooms - there may have been more for staff and security judging by the amount we came across. Inch thick carpet rucks up as the floors begin to collapse in upon themselves below rainwater dripping holes in the zinc roof