Neglect in the post-communist era forced a Bosnian architectural gem to close years ago. But it continues to live in urban memory and contemporary culture.
On 23 September last year, Sabiha Bajramovic entered Zenica’s Hotel Internacional for the first time after more than two decades. As one of the extras in the new film Bosnian director Dino Mustafic was shooting in the city, she climbed to change her costume on the fourth floor of the once glamorous building with extravagant chandeliers and wide halls, now without electricity.
“I felt disappointment as soon as I came to the entrance,” she says.
The shabby interior of the building, to which Sabiha, a 76-year-old pensioner, owns many beautiful memories from her past, left a strong impression on her:
“The hotel, that has been in my heart ever since my youth days, is left to decay.”
Hotel Internacional turned 46 years old this year. It’s not much, but – unlike Sabiha – the extravagant modernist building hasn’t aged well.
Built as part of the planned urbanization of Zenica during socialist Yugoslavia, the hotel experienced many ups in the years before the Bosnian war and many downs in the post-communist era. The downs led to its closure several years ago. Nevertheless, it is still part of the cultural identity of the city.
Architect Slobodan Jovandic designed it during the socialist regime when Zenica was transformed into a modern industrial center of Yugoslavia. The hotel is characterized by overhangs extending from its central tower, which gives the visual effect of a concrete construction that defies gravity. It has seven floors, with underground parking, a garden, a terrace, various types of rooms and suites, a restaurant, and two conference rooms.
Zenica’s Zeljezara Zenica steel mill was an important business enterprise in the former Yugoslavia. The Hotel Internacional – Zeljezara’s oasis of luxury – hosted high-class international clientele, as its name suggests. Even Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito had a master suite in the hotel.
The hotel saw many official business lunches and dinners, but decadent late-night outings as well. For Sabiha and many other residents of Zenica, who affectionately call it “Inter,” it was a favorite party place: from graduation and retirement parties to weddings and New Year celebrations.
But the Hotel Internacional’s glory days, which Sabiha remembers with nostalgia, are long gone.
After the war, the hotel management tried to continue its activities. However, without any investment in its maintenance, and after new hotels opened in the city, it lost its competitiveness.
It was slowly dying until it was closed in 2017. Zeljezara Zenica, the hotel’s owner, has been trying to sell it ever since. “My little masterpiece – I can’t believe that it doesn’t work and that nothing is being done about it,” Jovandic, the architect who designed the hotel, said at a recent public event in Zenica.
Snezana Vidovic, 44, one of the stars in Mustafic’s film in which Sabiha was an extra, spent much time in the hotel during her childhood. Snezana’s mother was employed at the hotel for years, so for her, the hotel was a “second home” where she would do her homework, study and play. “I saw the hotel as a huge playground,” she says, recalling how she made gymnastics mats out of armchairs in the hotel’s TV room or helped the lady who worked in the laundry room, where she was fascinated by a large roller iron.
Thirty years had passed since Snezana’s last visit to the hotel until last year’s filming. “At the moment, the hotel is just a distant memory of better times,” she adds, explaining that the hotel’s interior is the same as she remembers it but has been eroded by the ravages of time and is poorly maintained.
“Walking through the once crowded, now empty corridors and rooms was eerie. Many beautiful memories came back to me, but, in essence, I was very sad because there was no indication that life would return to the hotel.”
Apart from Mustafic’s film, where it served as the backdrop of an imaginary home for the elderly, the hotel also finds its place in other cultural projects.
The hotel building was used as a model for the video game Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, a city-building simulation developed and released by the Slovak game studio 3Division which allows players to engage in urban and industrial planning in an imaginary communist state.
The acclaimed Croatian documentary series on Yugoslavia’s socialist architecture, Slumbering Concrete, visited Zenica for one episode. The documentary shed new light on the city’s valuable and often overlooked architectural heritage.
In the film, the TV crew visits Hotel Internacional accompanied by Zenica-born architect Vedad Islambegovic. “Modern rococo” is what the reporter calls the hotel’s unusual interior, with its elongated interior terraces, socialist art on the walls, and huge shiny ball chandeliers: “There’s a bit too much of everything,” he says.
Ironically, seeing that the city of Zenica awarded a prize this year to the creators of Slumbering Concrete for affirming Zenica’s reputation in the country and the world, the documentary noted the role of the local government in the decay of Hotel Internacional and other modernist wonders in the city.
In contrast to the negligence of the authorities, the efforts of Bosnians and Herzegovinians to celebrate the value of the city’s architecture are commendable.
Recent artistic projects such as Zenica Trilogy by Danica Dakic, Modernist Utopia by Selver Ucanbarlic and Dino Jozic, or Urban Herstories by the Nas most Zenica Association have explored Zenica’s architectural heritage and brought it to an international audience.
There’s also Afan Abazovic, a tour guide who leads walking tours through Zenica’s socialist modernist architecture for fans of modernist architecture from countries worldwide.
As a lover of his city’s architecture, Afan uses social networks to promote his city’s architectural wonders, posting photos and facts about modernist buildings. British writer and researcher Richard Fawcus, who visited Zenica several times, took part in Afan’s tours and visited the Hotel Internacional with him.
Richard has been photographing socialist architecture in Southeastern Europe for years and bringing travelers from the West to the Balkans, which is how he met Afan.
“Afan’s work is incredible, and I believe he is a credit to his city. But I also feel that there is a lot more that could be done to promote architectural tourism to Zenica,” he says, noting that sites like TripAdvisor don’t mention the city’s modernist architecture.
As an important part of the city’s tourism potential, Hotel Internacional and other concrete jewels of Zenica deserve more systematic attention and investment.
Richard concludes, “I think more broadly from a tourism perspective, if Zenica hopes to attract more visitors away from world-famous cities such as Mostar or Sarajevo, the most effective way of doing that would be by offering something completely different and unique … by telling them stories that they could only hear in Zenica.”
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Lidija Pisker is a journalist and researcher living between Italy and the Balkans. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, openDemocracy, Euronews, Equal Times, the BBC, and elsewhere.
This story is part of the “One Building, One Million Stories” project by Lidija Pisker and Albanian activist Xhenson Cela.
The production of this story was supported by the Thomson Foundation as part of the Culture and Creativity for the Western Balkans project (CC4WBs). This story was created and maintained with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
