Balkan Waters

Photographs: Rebecca Duras

The first time I visited my fiancé Robert in the southern Serbian city of Niš, the day started with a scene out of a Yugoslav comedy. His Yugo got towed due to unclear parking signs, so we spent the morning picking it up, and for the rest of the week I helped him push it downhill every time it needed to start.

By the time we picked up his car, it was too late for our original plans, so I asked him to take me to Niška Banja instead, a spa town just outside of the city. I knew nothing about the town except for the old song, Niška Banja, which I played on repeat for years before I even met Robert. When I got to the town, even though I’d never been to Serbia, let alone to Niška Banja, before, it felt surprisingly familiar. Niška Banja reminded me of all the spa towns in Croatia that my relatives always talked about—Lošinj, Istarske Toplice, and, most of all, Opatija. 

The vague sense of familiarity felt characteristic of my whole relationship with Robert as we navigated our relationship as a Croat and a Serb. (I’m deliberately boiling us down to our nationalities, even though the reality is, of course, more complicated.) Everything felt surprisingly familiar, like going on vacation in a foreign country as an adult and running into your best friend from elementary school. 

There are so many similarities between the spa towns in Croatia and Serbia. They serve the same function in the healthcare system. Even in the twenty-first century, people in the Balkans get prescriptions from their doctor to recuperate from a serious illness someplace nice, one of the remnants of the Yugoslav healthcare system. For people like my grandmother living in Croatia or Robert’s family in Serbia, a trip to the toplice or banje through the public healthcare system is the closest to vacation they will get in years, sometimes in their whole lives. 

These spa towns all have traces of the different empires that thundered through the region that at least had the decency to leave behind some nice pools. The Romans cleaned the dust off their sandals in Serbia’s hot springs, including Niška Banja. The Habsburgs and their health crazes turned water into a status symbol all over Croatia. They left behind wedding cake-like buildings and elitism. The Ottomans built their hammams in Serbia, but everyone seems to want to forget about them. Yugoslavia is the reason these spa towns exist today, thanks to the subsidized healthcare and socialist flavor of mass tourism, but few spa towns mention this in their promotional brochures. 

And almost all of these towns are struggling to adjust to changing times. The history and current fate of these towns, with their Art Nouveau villas, crumbling socialist hotels, and for the lucky or unlucky ones, glassy modern AirBnbs, are a microcosm for the region as a whole. 

Two of them are particularly close to my heart. 

I grew up in New York City, but spent every summer in Istria, Croatia. We spent most of the time on my grandmother’s farm (fine when I was a carsick-prone kid, not so fine when I was a bored teenager), so the few excursions to nearby towns and attractions were memorable. Opatija, with its fancy cafes, seaside promenade, and beautiful buildings that hinted at a far more glamorous past was always my favorite destination for a quick getaway. Then I grew old enough to spot some unpleasant truths beneath the sporadically renovated façade.

At the time of my first excursions to Opatija, I’d never heard of Niška Banja. Maybe it’s because the Yugoslav tourism industry never developed southern Serbia the way it did the coast. Maybe it’s because even in my not-so-nationalist Croatian family, talking about Serbia has been a bit taboo ever since 1991. After meeting Robert, though, Niška Banja is the town I visit more often than Opatija, the one that played the bigger role in my adult life. 

Opatija was not made for the people who live in Kvarner or the Istrian hinterlands, working class or children of the working class. It was built by us, but not made by us. The history of the town as a health resort offered cure for the wealthy from far away. 

I have no claim to this town. I am not even from there. I am not its target audience, several decades too young and poorer. But it has fascinated me for a long time anyway. I always loved pretty things. Whipped cream piled high on hot chocolate served in an elegant glass instead of watery instant cocoa I could get at home. Buildings with pale pink facades and white, almost filigree detailing that looked like seashells. I’m an aesthete. Opatija was like whipped cream to me. 

I’m not the only one who loves the aesthetics of Opatija, I’m just following in the footsteps of those who made the town what it is today. In the nineteenth century, Opatija was one of the windows through which the Habsburg Empire looked to the water. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s elite came to the seashore in the winter to take in the warm sea air, believed to have curative properties. They built villas and hotels, bandshells, and cafes. The town turned itself over to tourism over a century before the rest of the Croatian coast would follow suit. 

Today, the town bears this history proudly. Villa Angiolina, the first vacation villa in the town built by Iginio Scarpa in 1844, is now the Croatian Museum of Tourism. The Habsburg-era buildings have been scrubbed fresh. 

I’ve never seen a place that so seamlessly blends Habsburg elegance with remnants of Yugoslavia. Boxy brutalist hotels coexist by stately old villas on the stretch that is still named Obala Maršala Tita, even after most other towns in Croatia scrubbed similar references to Yugoslavia from their presents.

On the promenade, the modern era is represented by the “Croatian Walk of Fame,” a blatant rip-off of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, launched by a communications agency to honor famous Croatians. Most of the people (yes, whose names are in Hollywood-style stars) never set foot in Opatija, something I didn’t realize was ridiculous until Robert pointed it out when we visited together. Three eras, piling onto one street. Of course, the modern Croatian contribution is a slightly cringy tourism marketing campaign with questionable effects. 

From anywhere in Opatija, you’ll see the water, the glistening Bay of Kvarner. Yet, for a city that lives off of the water, Opatija seems distant from it, like a grand lady scared to dip her toe in the sea lest she ruin her dress. The beaches are weirdly sad in the town, either neglected or clogged with overpriced chaise lounge chairs. 

Then again, the water was never the point. The Austrians that turned Opatija from a small town into a destination didn’t come to swim at all. Doctors didn’t recommend Opatija’s water as a cure; they prescribed its air, warm, humid, and slightly salty. Swimming was popularized only when the plebians of Yugoslavia showed up. The sea wasn’t the point; the sea air (and being seen by the sea) was the point. The sea turned from a natural feature into a commodity. 

Today, the Habsburg past itself has become a commodity, and the tourism board uses imperial ties, as tenuous and kitsch as they sometimes are, to market the town. A great example is the Sissi industry. The Habsburg Empress Sissi, wife of Franz Joseph I, icon of all that was fashionable in her time, is still a very popular figure in German-speaking lands (or formerly Austrian-occupied lands) thanks to children’s books, movies, and more. Visit Opatija and you can pose with your face in a Sissi cut-out, find Sissi-themed souvenirs, and if you time your visit properly, take photos with a live Sissi reenactor. Given her postmortem omnipresence, you’d think Sissi was a regular patron, but she only visited once, and local historians and the tourism board only unearthed proof of that visit a few years ago, long after the Sissi images had (re)colonized the town. Some historians suspect she deliberately avoided Opatija, likely due to her avoidance of all Slavic lands in support of her beloved Hungarians. Still, her image is popular across former Austro-Hungarian countries, and historical truth matters less than what sells.

Sissi plays another role. It reminds the Austrian and German visitors that we were part of the same empire. We are Central European, nothing of the dreaded South, or even worse, the East. It doesn’t matter that Croatia’s relationship with Austria-Hungary was that of a subordinate colony; what matters is that we were part of it, not part of the Balkans, thank you very much.

I find it undignified to try to sell Opatija through a connection to a woman that barely even visited here, who, according to most accounts, did not even like the town. Look at the sea. Shouldn’t that be enough? 

I no longer look at Opatija with the eyes of an aesthete. That’s not entirely true—the town is still pretty, with the nice buildings and the glittering sea and the hulking Učka massif jutting right up behind it. And I do still love the hot chocolate in Café Wagner. But I’m a bit more critical now.

It’s Opatija’s own fault, honestly. My fascination with this unique town led me to add a history minor to my political science undergraduate degree and eventually to contemplate graduate studies in history. During that process, I realized that once you learn too much about how spa towns work, it’s a little hard to relax in their beauty. I wrote a term paper about Habsburg spa towns and researching how much spa towns like Opatija relied on politicking and often-exploited labor, made all the beautiful buildings seem a bit bloodier. It’s hard to look at beautiful villas and not think about the power games needed to erect them. Or, taking a closer present-day view, how this stretch of coast is now mostly owned by Russians whose wealth is of dubious provenance, adding a political aspect to the gentrification plaguing the entire Croatian coast. 

I’m not that interested in the big buildings and empire that built Opatija anymore. Now, I’m more interested in the personal story of Opatija, the history made up of memories from local families. For many families from Istria and Kvarner, Opatija was the prime destination for special outings. People like my mother, who had her first pizza there. 

Or for people like myself. When my family visited Croatia for the summer, my mother would always organize at least one outing to Opatija. We’d go in the evening and walk along the promenade. It would be packed with tourists, but we almost always saw someone we knew, someone else who wanted to enjoy the beauty of the town. As a special treat, we would stop at Café Wagner. Toast for me, hot chocolate for mom (and a sip for me), ice cream for my aunt and brother, that was the usual order. My aunt would grumble about the cost, but my mother didn’t mind. It was one day a year we got to feel fancy. 

I visited Opatija again recently, after several years away. It was my first time visiting in winter, but there were still tourists, mostly elderly Austrians and Germans. It was also my first time taking my fiancé there. We went on a day trip after spending a few days in my grandmother’s Istrian village. I took him to all my favorite spots—the promenade, the statue of the lady with the seagull, and of course, Café Wagner. 

Robert marveled at Yugoslavia being such a big country; it managed to contain Opatija and his hometown near Niš. In comparison to southern Serbia, Opatija feels as if it’s dripping with money (just don’t look too closely). 

But the town also feels wrong. Someone is trying to sell you something at every step. Restaurant terraces jut into the promenade, forcing you to slalom around tables. Cafes are much more expensive than elsewhere because you’re in Opatija, after all. We went during Advent, when there was a tacky photo backdrop at every scenic location, hashtag and branding helpfully included.

I was on edge the whole time I was there, even though nobody was anything but polite to us. In the back of my head, I kept thinking that they were only nice to us because it’s winter and the slow season. In Croatian tourist destinations, hospitality businesses often discriminate against people from Croatia because we tend to have less money than foreign visitors. Just like in the days of the Habsburgs, when wealthy ladies complained about market sellers accidentally splashing their expensive dresses, locals are not welcome. We interfere with the town’s story about itself.

I was worried about writing about Opatija, worried that I’d get something wrong as someone who never lived there and was only ever a sporadic visitor. But I realized that I didn’t need to worry about accidentally not telling the truth about Opatija. The town doesn’t always tell the truth about itself.

Niška Banja’s history is arguably more storied than Opatija. The thermo-mineral springs enriched with radon gas go back to ancient Rome. 

Opatija uses one day of Sissi as its claim to fame. Niška Banja hosted Suleiman the Magnificent, although that is rarely used in the town’s marketing. Ottoman history is not always the most desirable in our regions. 

Instead, when the city of Niš decided to rebrand as a tourist destination, it used its status as the birthplace of Constantine the Great to attract people. The city has Constantine the Great murals, a giant Constantine the Great church, and a monument to Constantine that I think looks like a melted phallus. The Constantine marketing intensified just before 2013, when the town fathers hoped the pope would come to commemorate the anniversary of the Edict of Milan, attracting more tourists. The promised papal visit never manifested. The banner at the entrance to town advertising Niš as the city of Constantine was taken down. 

The strategy of Balkan tourist boards seems to involve grabbing a famous figure in the West and playing up that connection, no matter how far-fetched it may be. Robert often complains that Niš used to be a city that looked to the future and now looks to the past. Back in the day, in the same location where the city hung up the “city of Constantine” banner, there used to be a banner that said “welcome to Niš, city of the electronic industry.”

When I first visited Niška Banja, I was shocked by how similar it is to Opatija. Both are surrounded by mountains. Both are oriented toward water—Opatija faces the sea, while Niška Banja circles around the hot mineral springs in the center. Both are integrated into the neighboring big cities that they are part of the municipal bus system—Opatija with Rijeka, Niška Banja with Niš. Both are perched on mountainous slopes. Niška Banja has a hiking path leading up Koritnjak Mountain called “staza zdravlja,” or the path of health, while Opatija has its own “staza zdravlja” following the sea. 

But Opatija has the sea, Niška Banja does not. Opatija has money (even though most of it may be concentrated in just a few hands), Niška Banja does not. Although their nineteenth- and twentieth-century history is similar—royal visits, socialist investment, health tourism—their fates diverge in the twenty-first century. Opatija is on the coast, where the Croatian tourism industry invested most of its money, while Niška Banja is in southern Serbia, a region neglected by the central government in Belgrade. 

Niška Banja feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of Opatija. Although the buildings are the same architectural style, they are in very different shape. The elegant Art Nouveau mansion facades are peeling, the socialist hotels are crumbling. Some hotels even burned down. 

Today, it’s safe to speculate that in Niška Banja the government is following the standard post-communist fire sale playbook: run a state enterprise into the ground so you have an excuse to privatize it for “efficiency.” In 2019, after years of putting pressure on the PIO (Pensioner and Invalid Insurance) fund to allow the government to privatize Serbia’s banje, President Vučić got what he wanted. Niška Banja was one of the first on the list for future privatization. The government claimed that banje were losing money and would only be profitable after private investment. Not included in this calculation: the many people who depend on Serbia’s banje for their health and for affordable vacations that will be priced out by “profitable” hotels; the lack of government investment that led to the banje losing business in the first place due to outdated technology, crumbling facilities, and a lack of staff. In his text on the privatization of banje for the leftist magazine Mašina, Predrag Momčilović links the privatization efforts of Serbia’s banje to longing for a historical past when they were exclusive. That reminds me of Opatija’s current branding as a Habsburg vacation spot and a current destination of upscale health tourism.

I don’t know what will happen to Niška Banja once this privatization begins in earnest, but for now the town ticks on. Niška Banja’s facades may be peeling, some of the hotels may have burned down, but the town feels alive. The first time we went there, Robert and I took off our shoes to wash off the dust of Niš Parking Service in the warm spring that flows through the park. Around us, patients from the hospitals and rehabilitation centers strolled or chatted on benches. A young couple brought their dog, who jumped into the water and paddled across to beg from the family eating sandwiches on the other bank (he did not return when called, still hoping for a slice of ham). The occasional fat stray dog wandered through. Families from Niš and further afield were there to spend a relaxing Sunday. Children played in the water and rode rented funhouse mini-jeeps perilously close to swollen elderly ankles. Robert bought me a toast the size of my head. It felt like a place of the people, one they still belonged to. 

I was struck by how comfortable I felt in Niška Banja, even though it was only my first time visiting the town. On recent visits to Opatija, I hadn’t felt at home, conscious that I didn’t fit the profile of what guests the town wanted. In Niška Banja, I felt at ease among working- and middle-class families, families that reminded me of my own even though they did not share the same national identities. 

Sometimes Robert and I look at maps of the former Yugoslavia, marveling at how far the places that shaped us are from each other, yet we wound up so similar. You could say the same for Opatija and Niška Banja. 

The first time Robert met my family in Istria, it took everyone a while to get used to each other’s dialects. Then, my aunt remarked, “we’re still Yugoslavia, but we only kept the bad parts.” Looking at the current state of Balkan water cures, it’s easy to think she’s right. Many banje in Serbia are privatizing and losing their natural beauty to massive hotels, developments, and tourism, like Opatija. The intentional state neglect plaguing Niška Banja haunts many places in Croatia as well, such as the once-storied Krvavica children’s health resort near Makarska. The healthcare system in both countries is in shambles, calling into question how much longer places like Opatija will be even slightly accessible to regular people for healing.

I can’t help but think it doesn’t have to be that way. Despite all the problems plaguing the Croatian coast, the Habsburg spa towns and Serbia’s banje are still important parts of people’s lives. People take pride in what they or their families helped build. Families go there for outings; young couples go there to sit by the water and gaze into each other’s eyes. Healing still happens.

But before I go on railing against the current system as if it’s fueled by some grand ideological principles, I should be transparent. A lot of my hatred of the current system is selfish as well. The same countries privatizing healthcare and running spa towns into the ground left and right are responsible for the difficulties in my relationship. We take ten-hour bus rides to visit each other, count days in our passports so we don’t overstep the ninety-day limit, gather paperwork, calculate if this country or that country will work. I like to complain that our lives would be easier had we been born thirty-five years earlier, when being together would be as simple as packing up and picking a city, no visas needed.

Of course, had we been born thirty-five years earlier we probably never would have met. The possibility of an Istrian woman one generation removed from the farm and a man from a working-class Roma family in southern Serbia crossing paths only seems possible at this fragile moment in time. I take what I can get, including the opportunity to dunk my feet in the springs at Niška Banja and report to my relatives that the water is warm and the streets are pretty, and they eat toast just like we do, except the ones there are bigger and cheaper. 

There is one feeling I know my family in Croatia understands. My father-in-law just got a prescription to go to Niška Banja. He’s thrilled.