My father is one among the most famous architects from former Yugoslavia. Every few years, I get a letter, an electronic-mail message, or a phone call about him. Most of these come from Belgrade, but a few come from Zagreb, as well. Architects or historians of architecture are interested in documents and photographs in connection with one of his many buildings, which are now strewn over an enviable number of countries. And I am faced with the same story each and every time. Namely, I do not have anything they may be looking for. If they are surprised by my answer, I have to go on and on about history. For my father’s life was not exactly an easy one, as one would imagine for an architect of renown.

He was born in 1912 on the island of Krk or Veglia in Italian. World War I started when he was a toddler. Although there was no fighting in the area, the end of the war brought great commotion. Italian proto-fascists took Rijeka or Fiume in 1918, and my father’s parents decided to flee to Slovenia. They were afraid the invasion would hit Krk, as well. Although of Venetian origin, my grandfather was far from fond of the Italian rabble. Given that their island was spared, they returned after a year or so, but then my grandfather decided to move to Zagreb. As a land surveyor trained in Vienna and Prague, he went to work for the land-surveying office in the capital of Croatia.

My father learned a lot from my grandfather. Back then, land surveyors often designed simple buildings, such as warehouses and even schools. He had barely finished his architectural studies and gotten married to my mother when he got the first prize at a Yugoslav competition for Palace Albania in Belgrade together with a colleague of his. This was in 1936, when World War II was already in the air. For this reason, my parents waited for ten full years for their first and only child. Albania was a big victory for my father, but a building supervisor from Belgrade soon started calling himself the architect of the building. At the time, my father was advised not to make a fuss about this appropriation because it was known that he was close to the communists in Zagreb. He kept mum on threat of jail.

The war came soon enough, and my parents joined the resistance movement in Zagreb. My father was employed by the ministry of finance of the quisling Croatian regime with full knowledge of his communist friends. My parents’ apartment became a place for the top brass to meet and print incendiary leaflets calling everyone to the partisan movement. Wounded comrades found a refuge in the apartment, as well. My parents ended up in a concentration camp for all this, but they managed to survive. When the war was over, my father became one of the leading architects of the new regime. Under tight supervision by the secret police, he designed many an important building, including some for Tito himself. Having won the competition for a major building in Belgrade, he moved together with his family to the Yugoslav capital in 1948. I was a toddler at the time.

Much of what my father had worked on in the post-war period was very close to Tito and the top brass. All of it was top secret, though. When he started working on the design of a nuclear reactor close to Belgrade some years later, everything was top secret one more time. The reactor came with a whole settlement attached. There were offices, apartment buildings, schools, and so forth. It took my father quite a number of years to extricate himself from the clutches of communist leadership and secret police, but most of his major buildings were already behind him by then. As the director of an architectural atelier, he now designed mostly hotels, which were needed in the wake of the tourist boom in the mid-Sixties.

In short, my father had but a few documents and photographs of his many buildings. Having become quite secretive about his work in the late Forties and early Fifties, when Yugoslavia split from the Soviet bloc, he rarely told my mother and me about his work even when he got out of the clutches of the secret police. The little bit that he had on him by the early Nineties, when Yugoslavia fell apart, was left in Belgrade when I pulled my parents to Reading, Berkshire, where I lived at the time. They sold their apartment, and they had their paintings and some of the furniture moved to England, but the cabinet my father had in his room was left behind. There must have been some documents and photographs in that cabinet, but not too many. At any rate, both of my parents died in Reading in 2001, and I moved to Motovun in 2003.

Now, how do you explain all this to someone interested in your father’s work? I often wish that I had paid more attention to all the documents and photographs in the Seventies and Eighties, when I was visiting with my parents every summer, but I must admit that it never even crossed my mind back then. I was sure that Yugoslavia would fall apart sooner or later, but I never thought of saving anything from the pyre. Now it is up to the most intrepid among architects and historians of architecture to find what they are looking for. I have next to nothing to give to them. Except my magnum opus, of course. My father is all over my writings, and I am most happy about it. In fact, he is still alive and well in my mind. I can only hope that this belated praise of mine will help explain the dearth of information about the great Yugoslav architect.