The first monument to Croatian guest workers was recently unveiled in Imotski. Stories from a legendary little town that loves German cars.
Imotski, Croatia, June 8: The first monument to the “gastarbajteri” in Croatia was inaugurated Photo: Antonio Bronic/Reuters
IMOTSKI cupEvery Saturday at four in the afternoon for 40 years, Ante Kukavica drove a bus full of guest workers from Imotski, Croatia, to Frankfurt. This first Saturday in June, the retired driver (75 years old) is in front of a Mercedes O 302 bus from 1965 in his hometown. “The first few years I led the tour in one of these,” he says. “The buses changed, at some point the steering wheels stopped being white Bakelite, but they always remained Mercedes.”
Imotski is the city of “Merđos”, as Croatians affectionately call the status symbol of guest workers. With 10,000 inhabitants and 8,000 registered Mercedes, Imotski is considered the city with the highest concentration of Mercedes in the world.
The Biokovo massif is located between the town, which has been inhabited since ancient times, and the Adriatic coast, 30 km away. It separates the Dalmatian hinterland from the sea like a barrier. Situated in the middle of the karst, Imotski is surrounded by bare rock, voluminous maquis and two huge rock craters.
This Saturday the sun heats up the rock in Imotski and its surroundings in a short time. At 11 in the morning it is already 32 degrees. Normally, Ante Kukavica and the bus would not be here, but they would have remained in the shadows for a long time. But it is a historic day.
In Imotski, the first monument to the “gastarbajteri” in Croatia is inaugurated: a Mercedes 115, built between 1968 and 1976, excavated in the rock of the city. Visitors are expected from Stuttgart and all over the world. The day before, it had been revealed who would be the person who had been announced as a “surprise guest” for weeks: former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
There is no other city in Croatia where so many jokes are made
It's not just the close connection between Imotski and Mercedes that provokes jokes about Imotski's people. No other city in Croatia is the butt of so many jokes and no other city has so many prejudices and legends about it. To this day it is said that the inhabitants of Imotski are the masters of illicit trade and smuggling, which is not surprising, since the external border with Bosnia, and therefore with the current EU, is only seven kilometers of distance.
Imotski is considered synonymous with emigration.
The inhabitants of Imotski are considered clever tricksters and swindlers and politically influential businessmen at the highest levels. The tunnel, which for years was drilled through the Biokovo at great expense, was supposedly built only under the influence of the inhabitants of Imotski: in order to bridge a 20 km detour on the way to the sea.
Imotski is also used in Croatia as a synonym for emigration (to Germany). In the 1970s, almost 20 percent of residents were registered as “temporary overseas workers,” making Imotski the municipality in Yugoslavia from which most people emigrated. “Sometimes we left here on Saturdays at four in the afternoon with 10 buses at a time,” says driver Kukavica. “If the tour only went to Munich, we called it a local connection.”
Autopoduzeće Imotski, the bus company Kukavica worked for, was once the largest in Croatia, but today it no longer plays an important role. Imotski is currently at the center of a new wave of emigration. Nowadays, people use their own Mercedes or plane to emigrate.
The square on which the monument to the guest workers is located was renamed by the mayor as “Imotski Emigrant Square.” It is centrally located, directly on the city street. Among the hundreds of classic Mercedes cars driving around the square this Saturday in June are also the latest models of the A and E classes and a Mercedes Sprinter with the registration of a catering company from Dreieich-Sprendlingen.
A crane towers over the monument with the Croatian and German flags flying. A man runs across the square waving a huge flag, the German one on one side and the Croatian one on the other.
The idea for the monument to guest workers came from Ivan Topić Nota, now retired and head of the Imotski vintage car club. “The monument is also a sign of gratitude. We are grateful to Germany for giving us a better life,” says Nota, a corpulent and tanned man with impressively large hands.
“I come from a very poor family,” he says. “Like many others, I then went to Germany to earn money and maybe bring home a dairy cow and a black and white television. “Instead, we came back with a Mercedes.”
Two donkeys stand between the vintage Mercedes and the visitors. Čedomir Lizatović, an older man with a beard and long white hair, leads them on a rope. “The donkeys used to carry the guest workers' suitcases to the bus. The donkey was discarded and replaced by the Mercedes,” says Lizatović. “Today people want donkeys again. But just to snuggle.”
Tribute to cunning and assertiveness
Lizatović looks like one of the characters from “Beggar and Sons”, the cult Croatian series from the 70s set in the Imotski area. The television success contributed not a little to solidifying prejudices about the people of Imotski.
It begins at the end of World War I and tells of the poor residents of the area who developed the craft of begging into the highest art form. The grandmaster of the beggars is old Kikaš, whose grandson goes from being a poor street vendor to being a rich businessman over the course of the series and decades.
Instead of counting the pennies he asked for, Matan finally counts the Mercedes in his garage. The series is a tribute to the wit, cunning, assertiveness and resourcefulness of the Imotski people, without leaving aside their slightly exaggerated love of money, boasting and patriarchy.
The depiction is not entirely fictional. Historically, the inhabitants of Imotski were famous grocery sellers. As such, they had already made a name for themselves during the Second World War, and not only in this field. They travelled to Zagreb, Vienna, Prague and New York to sell shoelaces and matches. The football fan club of Imotskis still bears their name today: Galantari.
Going abroad to work has a long tradition in this arid region. That the current wave of emigration of young Croatians is being exploited in a populist way by the Church and politics as a betrayal of the homeland is absolutely absurd in the case of Imotski. Especially since most of them, also typical of Imotski, always returned and used the money earned abroad to provide their relatives and friends with something other than Mercedes cars.
A few meters from the monument to Mercedes, a separate monument for new emigrants is already being erected: since 2018, a hard-working citizen of the city has written on an old sign the names of those who leave the city for abroad. Brick wall at the bus station, which is called the “Wailing Wall.”
Bastion of the political right
2018, exactly 50 years after the signing of Germany's only worker contract agreement with a communist-ruled country, Yugoslavia, to which Croatia belonged between 1945 and 1991. Even then, guest workers were suspected of being anti-communists and even supporters of the Croatian fascists who had lost the war against the Yugoslav partisans.
Imotski in particular is not only considered a bastion of Mercedes and emigrants, but also a bastion of the political right. In the 2000s, there was still the Café Adolf in the city centre; the acclaimed performances of the right-wing rock singer Thompson are legendary there.
The Croatians in “exile” abroad were the basis of Croatian rights during the Yugoslav era. But especially in the case of Imotski, historians point out that Tito himself contributed to strengthening this right: instead of investing in infrastructure and urbanisation in this karst area, the communist state was happy to get rid of unreliable provincials and thus move one a little closer to the promise of full employment.
Because the inhabitants of Imotski were excluded from the modernization and industrialization of their own country, their rejection of Yugoslavia and their nationalist hope for an independent Croatia were so great in the 90s – says journalist Jurica Pavičić. The inhabitants of Imotski owe nothing to Yugoslavia and Germany, everything.
This first Saturday in June, German flags fly around the Guest Workers Memorial. However, neither the announced Angela Merkel nor any other representative of the German government came to Imotski. “These people built Germany with their own hands and broke their backs. “No pig is interested in them anymore,” says a passerby. “It is a pity.”
By the way, no one from the Croatian government was there either. One might assume that no one wanted to expose themselves to the inhabitants of Imotski, whose hopes for prosperity were dashed even in independent Croatia and who are now heading abroad again.
Before a priest consecrates the inaugurated monument to Mercedes on the Imotski Emigrant Square this June Saturday, the Imotski mandolin orchestra plays the theme song from the old television series “Beggar and Sons.”
The beggar-climber Matan, the main character of the series, has long had a stone monument in Imotski. It stands opposite the Park Shop, a modern shopping centre in the city, the successor to the legendary beggars and convenience store sellers.