Matija Brumen : Galeb

Published by The Angry Bat

2021
32 pages

“The Galeb was, and I say this with complete confidence, a prop – a stage effect. A mobile film set. Tito used it for film scenes – for Hollywood moments such as his meeting with Winston Churchill or Queen Elizabeth. In Colombo, he hosted a plenary meeting of 150 statesmen and their retinues – as if were filming his own version of the Great Gatsby. It is hardly surprising that he also hosted actual Hollywood stars on the Galeb – Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Kirk Douglas to name a few.

Everyone in Yugoslavia did everything in their power to make Yugoslavia look like a film, but a country that is turned into a film falls apart when the film ends. When Yugoslavs decided that they would no longer be “characters” in a film, the war began, a war that reduced to ruins the famous room where Tito watched all those movies. The Galeb, one of the many focal pointers of Tito’s illusionism, was also reduced to ruins.”

– excerpt from the accompanying text by Marcel Štefančič Jr.