War torn hotels in Croatia, June 2003, by Lindsay Jones

From MemoryArchive

Who: Lindsay Jones
What: Damage at the Delphin Hotel left by Serbian/Yugoslavian war
When: June 2003
Where: Pula, Croatia

I walked down a dirt path surrounded by honeysuckle and butterflies to an abandoned hotel. It truly must have been a beautiful resort at one time, complete with creepy busted out windows with silk curtains blowing in the breeze and remnants of low 50s style furniture in the lobby and ballroom area amidst all of the broken ceiling tiles and glass.

I guess someone, most likely the youth of the city of Pula, took over the pool area of this abandoned resort hotel and kept it in working order. They had even built a makeshift cafe in the pool area. It was the strangest and most surreal place I had ever been, like something out of a post-apocolyptic movie.

The hotel perched on the cliffs off the coast on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia. I could see dolphins in the water from the deck of the Delphin Hotel and eventually joined a group of young Croatians who were swimming in the sea and drying off on a big white rocks along the beach.