Site / Croatian Archipelago Prison Island History

Space of Goli otok ( “barren island”) is burdened by the historical memory which goes beyond the area of the island – it is a territory that in a dreadful way marked the lives of innocent people who were considered the enemies of Yugoslavia state in the early 50s, not only form Croatia but from the whole region, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Monte Negro, Macedonia, Slovenia… it is a territory that in the early 50’s (1949-1956), after the Inform biro resolution, served as a labor camp-prison for the enemies of Yugoslav state. ///used to incarcerate political prisoners. The prison was shut down in 1988, and completely abandoned in 1989.

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History
After the Informbiro Resolution of 1949, under the pretense of great danger threatening the country from the USSR and its satellites, the immense apparatus of political police (UDBA and KOS) started arresting everyone they considered politically undesirable in order to permanently cement the Yugoslavian totalitarianism.

The camp system was a mix of repressive methods of the basest, most inhumane kind, using the experiences of ohrana – secret Russian tsarist police (the “beating machine”, the network of convicted agents provocateurs), Gestapo concentration camps (room capos, starvation, epidemics), Stalinist gulags (arbitrarily prolonged sentence during imprisonment, forbidden visits, hard physical work), the concept of “prolonged investigation” – the investigator (a converted convict) would continue the investigation procedure against the convicts during the entire imprisonment, the concept of fictional convict self-government that was entirely governed by the Management in order to bring about the self-destruction of convicts through everyday tortures of body and soul.

Goli Otok - unique ecosystem with endemic species and dramatic nature-contrasts with atmospheric inversions and turbulent airflows, represented a perfect symbiosis of incidental human cruelty and severe nature. In 1949 to 1956 it housed 3,000 inmates who were forced to do hard-stone-works, almost manually. The island is barren and uninhabited. Its northern shore is almost completely bare, while the southern one has small amounts of vegetation as well as a number of coves.The submarine environment of the Goli Island archipelago consisting of the islands of Goli, Sveti Grgur and Prvić, was turned into a special natural reserve.