A favourite resort of the
Austro-Hungarian great and good, and now one of
Croatia's major attractions on the
Istrian peninsula. Opatija doesn't quite look as if it's caught up with the twentieth century yet, much less the twenty-first, with all its buildings converted pastel
villas that look as if they should have housed a holidaymaking
archduke or two.
The coastal town owes its elevation from
fishing village status to
Iginia Scarpa, a businessman from nearby
Rijeka who built a park and villa named after his wife
Angiolina in the centre of Opatija in
1844. The flurry of elaborate late-nineteenth-century hotels, on the other hand, were mostly the work of
Friedrich Schueller and his
Southern Railways Company. Forty years after Scarpa moved in, Schueller began with the instantly recognisable
Hotel Kvarner, the
Adriatic's answer to the
Hotel Sacher although without, unfortunately, its own signature
torte.
The
facade of the Kvarner, which takes its name from the
gulf Opatija overlooks, is bedecked with
putti,
curlicues and such like, and bears more resemblance to an opera house than does Rijeka's opera house. The Kvarner, and its sister hotel the
Imperial, played host to most of Opatija's illustrious visitors, from the
Habsburg royals to
James Joyce by way of King
Carol I of Romania, who got himself lost out riding in the woods one day and promptly paid for them to be festooned with signposted
trails.
During the 1990s, the Kvarner's famous
Crystal Ballroom took on a new lease of life as the venue for the annual
Dora festival which selected Croatia's entry to the
Eurovision Song Contest.
There's not much of old Opatija to see; you'll have more luck with the
tranquil harbour experience at
Lovran, a few kilometres west along the
Franz Joseph Promenade, named after the
octogenarian emperor who presided over Opatija's heyday. Still,
St. Jacob's Abbey, which gave the town its name in both Croatian and Italian, sits in the middle of
Angiolina Park, just a grove away from the miniscule
Portic bay.
An outcrop of rocks to one side of Portic shows off Opatija's emblem, if by 'emblem' one means the location plastered across everything you can buy in the
souvenir shops. The statue of a
Maiden with a Seagull has been gazing out to sea with the
bird on her hand since
1956 (I'd like to see a
falconer who could manage that), when it unceremoniously replaced the
Madonna watching over the soul of a count who died in a boating accident in
1891.
Between the wars Opatija belonged, along with the rest of Istria, to
Italy, not that you'd be able to tell; the town's healthy attitude to nostalgia, which accounts for Franz Joseph Promenade as well as the main street named after
Marshal Tito, doesn't extend quite that far.
In total, Opatija's been under four sets of hands in the last century, as the hotels' various names testify: the poor old Imperial started life as the
Crown Princess Stephanie, was
Regina Elena to the Italians,
Moscow until
Tito and Stalin fell out,
Central until
Yugoslavia decentralised in the 1960s and Imperial after that. (Not that being named after Stephanie, whose husband
Rudolf notoriously killed himself and his
mistress in his
Mayerling hunting lodge, would have become that much of an advertisement.) It's now belonged to Croatia for eleven years, and there's no sign of any change yet; perhaps the proprietor ran out of fancy lettering.
Despite its
staid glories of the past, if Opatija isn't careful it runs the risk of turning into
Blackpool, or equally,
Atlantic City: whoever concreted over the town beach,
Slatina, must surely have had a brother with a
cement mixer and enough friends on the local
Central Committee for nobody to complain. Teenagers from Rijeka
painting the town red coexist with predominantly Croatian,
Austrian and
German tourists, whose average age would probably make them contemporaries of the Marshal, if not the old Emperor too.