Goli Otok also called Barren or naked Island, as former inmate Josip Zoretic describes it in his book Hell in the Adriatic, was a prison camp, a Yugoslav gulag and few people knew about it.
Tito turned the island into a high-security prison in 1949 one year after Yugoslavia broke away from the Stalinist Soviet sphere and declared itself “neutral” under its own system of “market socialism”, informally called “Titoism”.
It is not clear how many people were forced into hard labor, how many lost their lives out of dread, humiliation and the torments in this prison. Word-of-mouth indications range between 12,000 and 60,000 inmates who were held on Goli Otok, while serious sources proceed on the assumption that 16,000 political prisoners have been incarcerated on the island and 400 died.
The prison was shut down on 30 December 1988 and completely abandoned in 1989. Since then it has been left to ruin and became a tourist attraction. Scroll down and take a closer look at it!
