Hotel Jadran

Located in Adem Jashari Square. It is currently a cultural monument that was built in 1928 and one of the symbols of today’s divided city.

The one-storey corner hotel has dominating dome in its corner. Even though the building was built in the 1920s, it was created with striking Art Nouveau elements. With the exception of the ground floor, where there was a redevelopment of the space that now serves as a shop, the hotel was no longer seriously modified. A model for the construction of this building was Union Hotel, which grew up in the center of Pristina in 1927.

The building of the hotel was built by the wealthy family of Žarković in the times of the Kingdom of SHS. After World War II, it was taken over by the state and served as the administrative seat of NT LUX, then also as the Latif Berisha City Library. At present, it is in private ownership and its ground floor is filled with shops and restaurants.

The History of Lazar Žarković

You may have once noticed that while walking through the streets of the northern part of Mitrovica, most of the buildings are of a more recent date, but perhaps, while walking through the pedestrian zone in the main street, you caught the eye of the buildings in this text.

She’s older than everyone else you’ve seen. Inquiring from person to person, we came to a real encyclopedia of the life of old Mitrovica citizens – our fellow citizen Neško Ilić, without whom this story probably would not exist, and this is the story of the greatest Mitrovica endowment holder and his home.

Neško’s first reaction was “How come you never heard of Lazar Žarković? He was convinced that many of you also did not have the opportunity to hear and learn more about Thessaloniki, a humanist, a man who owed many generations of this city with his carelessness and humanism, and after everything we learned, we tell you the story of life and deeds of one of our most famous fellow citizens – Lazar Žarković.

He was born back in 1884 in Gornje Hrasno, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Since he lost his father early, from the earliest childhood, together with his brothers, he started working to help his mother feed the family. With less than sixteen years, three grades of elementary school and a sign on his neck that said where he was going, Lazar went to America. On the way out, they gave him a hat to make him look older, so that no one would touch him.

His brother George was already in America, with whom he quickly mastered the language. His diligence was noticed, so they entrusted him to manage the plant across the pond.

During the fighting on Kajmakcalan, his brother Nikola died. Somewhat later, Lazar also suffered from the shrapnel of a cannon grenade. Wounded in the arm and chest, he lay unconscious in a ditch. A soldier who happened to be passing by noticed a ring with a ruby on Lazar’s hand, so thinking that he was dead, he tried to cut off his finger and reach the ring. As he felt great pain, Lazar woke up from unconsciousness, and the soldier, realising that he was alive, fled.

“I told Nusic about my wounding. I showed him a ring bought in America, which is still on my hand. I said that I was convinced that the ring saved my life, because they would surely forget me, thinking that I had died. One of the officers asked me if I would recognise the perpetrator? I replied that even if I recognised him, I would just thank him, he saved my life, because they would forget me thinking I was dead. ”

Lazar was among the 7,000 wounded who were treated in military hospitals on Bair Hill in Mitrovica. It was then that he met Mitrovica for the first time, which he immediately liked. Especially its position and surroundings. As he himself admitted, then he fell in love with Mitrovica and decided to live there with his family one day.

In agreement with his brother George, Lazar decided to settle in Mitrovica for good and decided to invest the capital acquired in America.

They built a power plant that supplied the city and the surrounding area with electricity and enabled the operation of new industrial and commercial plants, a four-storey high-capacity automatic electric mill, a tile factory that accelerated the construction of many residential and state buildings, Hotel Jadran – a representative catering and hotel facility and residential settlements in Zvecan and Stan Terg.

The Jadran Hotel stood out from everything that the brothers built together. In the very heart of the bazaar, it dominated with its size and beauty. The entire cultural and artistic life of Mitrovica took place in that hotel. There was also a concert hall, a theater and a cinema –  Lazar Žarković was the one of first to bring film screening equipment to Mitrovica.

The English writer Rebecca West, who wrote about it in her book “Black Lamb and the Gray Falcon”, Branislav Nusic, during a visit to the choir named after him, and Zanka Stokic, the champion of the National Theater in Belgrade, stayed at the “Jadran” hotel.

On one occasion, Lazar’s friend, lawyer Silja Mihajlovic, a comrade-in-arms from the Thessaloniki front, asked him in front of Rebecca West, why did he build a bakery as part of the hotel and in some way make a living monument to bread? “I told her that anyone who saw what I saw, that thousands of young people were dying of hunger, that many were dying holding a piece of bread under their heads, would make thousands of bakeries as living monuments,” was Žarković’s answer.

It was strange to Rebecca West that in one hotel in the middle of the oriental bazaar, one could see a lot to see in Europe. She was especially delighted when she received a Sacher cake for dessert, however, the real delight was the knowledge that only for desserts in the hotel, Lazar brought an extraordinary master from Budapest.

During the beginning of Second World War period, while his house was occupied by the Germans, Lazar hid the famous pre-war communist Branko Šotra for a while, who after a while moved to Rudnica, and continued the fight with Trepca’s miners on Kopaonik and carried out the first sabotage actions.

In a proclamation in 1942, the Germans informed the people that they had arrested 30 Serbs, in retaliation for the growing sabotage taking place in the city. Among those arrested was Lazarus. The prison authorities wanted to use his presence in the prison in order to get as much ransom as possible from him.

The warden of the prison, Husein Grdovci, through Husni Pir, then a prison guard, and once a worker in Žarković’s mill, demands a certain amount of money from him in order to release him. Realising the manager’s intention, Lazar agreed, on the condition that he pay her double, but that everyone be released from prison. The next day, after depositing the money, everyone was released.

“Don’t blame me, I will never get involved in politics”
After his release, Lazar Žarković spent his summers in Mitrovica, and most often in Belgrade, in Đure Jakšića Street.

With the change in the social order, came nationalisation. Lazar Žarković was deprived of everything he built, both for himself and for the good of all the inhabitants of Mitrovica – the power plant, the mill, the turner, the tile factory and the hotel Jadran.

“At the time of nationalisation, I was constantly thinking of one thought of Maxim Gorky, which reads: ‘Don’t make a balance of life. You will kill yourself if you do that! ‘ If I hadn’t stuck to that, wouldn’t I have killed myself, that after twenty years of hard work in America, participation, wounding and getting sick with Spanish fever in the First World War and the work I invested in the fertilising capital I gained in America, building industry in Mitrovica , I experience that with one act of the state – nationalisation, I am left without anything anywhere. Without making a balance, I said to myself: Lazarus, you had nothing and again you have nothing. It is important to me that my children and family from the war we left alive survived. ”

At one point, at the city level, a decision was made to include older famous people in the Popular Front. One afternoon, Milija Kovacevic, the secretary of the City Committee, and Hodja Effendi Ahmet Mustafa came to Lazar’s house to inform him about it.
“You must know that I have never been involved in politics. Don’t blame me, I will never be involved in politics “, was Lazar’s answer.
I never divided my friends into left and right
As he himself admitted, during the war, he helped many families in Mitrovica, without asking if they were communists or Chetniks. And when he received war compensation from the Germans, he distributed it to the people.

After some time, the municipality “kindly” offered him the position of director of the tile factory. They offered him a car and a driver, and he would regulate the working hours according to the needs of the brickyard.

“Now the situation has changed, so we have more freedom to hire you,” says Branko. How lucky they are that they didn’t nationalise anything for you. If you continued to start a business, Mitrovica would benefit much more. We have no benefit from everything they took from you, only real debts. I remember seeing you going to the brickyard at five o’clock in the morning. I was a boy then, so I went fishing with my friends, “Lazar recounted the offer he received.

I divide people into honest and dishonest, not at all, as you say, capitalists and communists
“Neither am I the one from the time you saw me, nor are you the same one who saw me. I’m an old man, and you’re not that upbeat boy, you’re a mature young man. Everything in its time “, that is how another persuasion of Lazar ended.

On June 17, 1962, Lazar Žarković passed away in Mitrovica, a man who, with his life and work, indebted many in Mitrovica, he left a legacy of many things which citizens are proud of when they say the are from Mitrovica.

The house located in North Mitrovica, is the house where Lazar Žarković originally lived. It has changed many purposes since then.

During the Second World War, it was the headquarters of the occupation police, after that, as they say, a pharmacy, and today a residential building.

 

Although, as you can see for yourself, it has lost its former luster over time, the skeleton of the building still makes some careful observers wonder whose building it is.