Tito's Museum

Tito’s Museum is a small museum on Veli Brijun, the main island of the Brijuni archipelago, off the Istrian coast of Croatia, within Brijuni National Park, in the Brijuni Islands. It is devoted to Josip Broz Tito, the leader of socialist Yugoslavia, who made the islands his official summer residence and used them as a stage for receiving world leaders, and it tells part of the story of how a group of islands became a political showplace.

The islands’ history in the twentieth century is closely tied to Tito. After the Second World War, the new Yugoslav government took over Brijuni, and from 1947 the islands became the president’s retreat, where he spent a large part of each year until the late 1970s. He entertained heads of state, film stars and diplomats here, and the islands hosted important meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement, the group of countries that sought a path between the two great Cold War blocs. A private zoo and a safari park grew up from gifts of animals from foreign leaders, and the islands were closed to the public during this period. They became a national park in the 1980s and opened to visitors afterwards.

The museum’s main exhibit is a collection of photographs, with the title Josip Broz Tito na Brionima, that documents his time on the islands, from his first visit in 1947 to his last in 1979. The images are grouped into themes that show his private life, his official duties and his encounters with visiting dignitaries, and they provide a view of the politics and style of the time. Alongside the photographs there are gifts, ethnographic objects, decorative items and personal memorabilia connected to Tito and to the history of Brijuni. The displays are compact, and a visit takes under an hour, but they give a clear sense of the era.

It is a subject on which opinions differ. For some visitors, Tito is a symbol of a period of stability, independence and a rare international prestige for a small country, while for others he is the leader of a one-party state whose legacy is complicated and controversial. The museum presents its material in a straightforward way, and visitors are free to draw their own conclusions.

Brijuni is reached by boat from Fažana, and the museum is one of many sights on Veli Brijun, along with the Safari Park, the Byzantine Castrum, the dinosaur footprints, Hotel Neptun, Verige Bay and the ancient olive tree. Check the opening days and times in advance, since they are limited, with some weekend and Mondays slots, and change with the season. The museum suits those interested in twentieth-century history and in the culture of the Yugoslav period.