Veli Brijun, Croatia

There are places I have been repeatedly in the past three decades. After a first visit I learn my way around a city and feel at home. But when I am about to visit a new city or region, I maximize the element of surprise and discovery by not reading about where I am going. A friend told me “if you do not know where you are going, one day you will end up somewhere else”. In fact it has happened only once that I ended up on the wrong domestic flight and discovered it after take-off! But that was before the million checking points we now have at our airports…

I did not know what to expect when I started my trip to Zagreb, Croatia, then a small plane flight to the Brijuni Islands. When the ferry stopped at the port of Veli Brijun, the largest of the 14 islands in the Northern Adriatic Sea, it felt like a port in the Mediterranean- I was home!

The Brijuni Islands have a rich history left upon the rocky shores by many civilizations and countries. The most recent transition was from belonging to Italy to becoming part of Yugoslavia in 1945. Given their splendor, the President Marshal Josip Broz Tito made these islands his personal State Summer Residence. Today they are conference centers and the previously government-owned buildings have been transformed to hotels. But the island is also famous for its zoo (till 2010 there were even two elephants given to Tito as present by Indira Gandhi), ponies, deer roaming free on the islands and birds of all feather. Veli Brijun is also rich with WWI and WWII artifacts and constructions, one of them being the remnants of a fort built by Austria. It was full moon over those walls when I enjoyed a Malvazia wine at midnight.

While one gets an out-of-time feeling walking the shores of the island, there was little for me to photograph (a nature photographer would have saved a million pictures on his memory card!). However, I finally found a memorable frame in the museum of the island where Tito had the habit of immortalizing the dead zoo and islands animals through taxidermy. This pigeon, shown to be released for peace and celebration by Tito, was also soon after its short flight, delivered to the taxidermist!

October 15, 21013

©Vahé Kazandjian, 2013