By Andrea Matošević
It is the end of August 2018. The weather in the City of Pula, well known shipbuilding centre in the Northern Adriatic is hot and dry as summers usually are in that part of the Mediterranean, but the atmosphere in town is far more heated than any other summer in recent history. Several thousand shipbuilders from Uljanik Shipyard, a more than 160 years old “factory” founded during Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856 in Pula’s tame bay, are marching in the streets due to unpaid wage for July. Blue collars are supported by many citizens who join them in protest procession, but the agony of their precarious situation will continue for many more months. Numerous tourists make a stop and gaze with wonder in this strange “blue river of workers” who hold banners saying “We Will not Give Uljanik, We Will not Give Pula”. And although tourists probably had the feeling that all this is none of their business, that was not quite truth.
If shipbuilding was major economic vertebra for more than a few Adriatic communities, e.g. Pula, Rijeka, Kraljevica, Trogir, Split etc. with many developed specialized technological subbranches since the fifties,[1] the era of predominant tourist and tertiary service economy had begun by the end of twentieth century. That switch has a huge impact on local communities, and is not only a question of economy, but a political decision that influences understanding of space (coast is only a resource), time (Fordist and post-Fordist understanding of workday), politics (post-socialist set of values) and knowledge in those communities. I would like to dedicate next few lines to that knowledge in the rest of this text with an accent on the period of Socialist Yugoslavia when this knowledge was created, organized, set in motion, and translated in operative economic branch.
Imagination… and a bit more
It was Michel Foucault who – in his famous short text Of Other Spaces – concluded that the “boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development […], but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination”.[2] However, economic development and imagination in order to be actuated and articulated needed a shipbuilding knowledge, a very complex and layered system that in modern times included contracting, projecting and designing the ship, procurement of materials, its production depending on the vessel classification, type, function as well as the size of the ship, and which must have met a number of international safety and environmental standards.[3] Most of these steps in socialist Yugoslavia had a developed institutional support, in shipyards themselves, or within a Jadranbrod networked institution.[4] But it was a close cooperation between shipyards and Ship Research Institute in Zagreb, a specialized institution that brought research, theory and practice together.
Built and constructed in Zagreb from 1948 to 1958 Ship Research Institute was architectonically also significant, projected by modernist architect Marjan Haberle and visually famous for its 30-meter round pool in a dome-covered hall designed by Krunoslav Tonković,[5] Institute disposed of 276 meters large, and 302-meter-long pool for tests of resistance, free running, self-propulsion, movement on waves, drop speeds, pressure determination, bending moments in vessels etc.[6] In other words, Ship Research Institute developed hydrodynamic, acoustic and hydroacoustic, marine engineering and marine electrical engineering, marine electronics and telecommunications research among others. It is in close cooperation of that institution with shipyards such as Uljanik, 3. maj in Rijeka or Brodosplit in Split that socialist Yugoslavia managed to construct submarines, colossally big ships longer than 300 meters welded from two parts (stern and bow), or series of several tens of cargo-liners for Soviet company Sudoimport starting from the ‘60’s.
This is also why we can claim Zagreb to be a “shipbuilding city”, although Croatia’s capital is not placed anywhere near the Adriatic coast. It is exactly this cooperative network that brought results for which shipbuilding in this socialist and self-managing country became such a global trademark. From the mid-fifties ships were constructed for Switzerland, United Kingdom, Liberia, Norway, Sudan, Romania, Poland, Argentina, Panama, USSR, Sweden, Brazil, India, Finland – just to mention few countries with which cooperation was established. Shipbuilding was stratified and continuously improved knowledge that opened maritime cities towards the world. This was not only a matter of economy, but of sedimented knowledge and imagination too. French thinker Foucault was right, although he came to the answer from a slightly different direction.
Rejection of tradition
After the II World War all shipyards on Yugoslav side of the Adriatic were completely ruined in Allied Forces air raids. It took a lot of effort, attempts and mistakes, but above all imagination to construct and set again in motion such a technologically advanced network of cooperation and vessel construction. And together with today’s Croatian shipyards, Ship Research Institute is going through hard time and, due to government decision, liquidation.[7] But nobody protested such a decision, no one stepped out in the public space and objected this significant political choice.
Thus, the question arises – what was shipbuilding knowledge to Croatia amid STEM revolution? What was shipbuilding to those in power who did not understand or did not want to understand the contradictory nature of simultaneous praising of applicability of natural sciences and destruction of a branch in which they are embedded? It tells a lot of their knowledge about this specific traditional and complex knowledge, but it also reveals something about capacities, and limits of their economic imagination in a country that disposes more than 31,000 km2 of the Adriatic Sea along with the length of the island and mainland coast of 5,835.5 km. Protesting workers in 2018 in Pula, one of former shipbuilding centres, knew and imagined better than those in power.
[1] Yugoslav Shipbuilding Industry. 1955. Rijeka: Društvo inženjera i tehničara brodogradnje – Rijeka.
[2] Foucault, Michel, & Miskowiec, Jay. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 27.
[3] Dokkum, Klaas van. 2003. Ship Knowledge. A Modern Encyclopedia. Enkhuizen: Dokmar, 106-112.
[4] “‘Jadranbrod’ na amandmanskim osnovama”. Brodograditelj, 7. prosinca 1972.
[5] Galjer, Jasna. 2023. Prolegomena za modernu: društveno angažirana arhitektura Marijana Haberlea između vizije i realnosti. Zagreb: Galerija Modulor – za arhitekturu i dizajn, Centar za kulturu Trešnjevka.
[6] Milat, Petar, ed. 1978. Brodarski institut 1948 – 1978. Zagreb: Brodarski institut.
[7] Prijedlog odluke o stvaranju prethodno potrebnih uvjeta za provođenje postupka likvidacije društva Brodarski institut d.o.o., Zagreb. https://vlada.gov.hr/ (accessed: 4 april 2025).
Andrea Matošević is a professor in Ethnology and Anthropology at Faculty of Humanities at Juraj Dobrila University of Pula. He has published several monographs, edited three books, and published fifty papers. He was a visiting research fellow at University of Padua, University College in London, University of Graz and IOS Leibniz Institute in Regensburg.
Globalising Southeastern Europe 
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