Home of Croatian Veterans

When the Austro-Hungarian Navy’s evening lectures and dances outgrew their 1872 casino, the solution was not renovation. It was demolition. In 1910, officers pulled down the original building, designed by Munich architect Friedrich Adam, and commissioned something on a different scale entirely. Viennese architect Ludwig Baumann delivered it in 1913: a 15,000-square-meter complex with a glass-roofed winter garden, terraces, gardens, and a grand corridor leading to concert and ballrooms fit for an empire that clearly expected to stick around.

It had five years left. The building outlasted it easily, along with the three regimes that followed. After the war it became the seat of the Italian civil government, then a hall for the Yugoslav People’s Army, then, according to at least one account, a cinema showing old films to soldiers who had never waltzed under that skylight. Franz Lehár performed here. So, at various points, did Emperor Franz Joseph, Charles I, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, though presumably not all on the same bill.

Today it’s the Home of Croatian Veterans, hosting the same concerts and dances it was built for, along with Sanjam knjige u Istri, the region’s largest book fair. The coffered ceiling and iron-framed skylight remain. The flags above it have not.