engleski

Grand Hotels around the Kvarner bay: Hotel Architecture between Politics and Leisure in the Austria-Hungary

The bay of Kvarner on the north-eastern Adriatic in the second half of the 19th century saw completely new political reassessment after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, followed by Hungarian-Croatian Compromise a year later. The Hungarian rule of the portal town of Rijeka resulted in its fast development of after the construction of the railway line connecting it to Zagreb and Budapest. In the area between the new railway station and the port the first grand hotels were built and soon the neighbourhood became very fashionable, counterbalanced by a special hotel to host the emigrants waiting for the liners to America on the opposite side of the train station. On the western part of the bay, under direct Viennese rule, a brunch of Southern railways reached the coast, followed by the company's investment in the first grand hotels, Kvarner and Princess Stephanie, vehicles of transformation of the ex fishermen village of Opatija into a fashionable seaside resort. Within few years, Hungarians responded by building the grand hotels on the southern side of Kvarner, in Crikvenica. The issues that the paper proposes to address concern the role of the hotel architecture in Rijeka as newly created business port city versus the grand hotels of Opatija and Crikvenica, vehicles of the complete change from fishing villages to leisure towns. These structures seem to have been of great social and political importance, given the presence of the both men and women of the aristocratic and bourgeois circles from different European metropolis. Moreover, the choices taken by the Austrian and Hungarian architects in adapting their big-city idiom to the Mediterranean ambient, setting the standard for later development of hotel architecture on the Adriatic will also be explored.

Hotels; Opatija; Rijeka; Crikvenica

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