Goli Otok

The name means Barren Island, and it is not a metaphor.

Goli Otok lies off the Dalmatian coast of Croatia in the northern Adriatic, just off Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, about 4.5 square kilometres of rock. Strong bora winds scour it, hardest in winter, and its surface is almost completely without vegetation. Local shepherds grazed flocks here, but the island was apparently never permanently settled by anyone except its prisoners.

It was used as a place of confinement more than once. Austria-Hungary sent Russian prisoners of war here from the Eastern Front throughout the First World War. Then in 1949 the authorities of the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia turned the entire island into a high-security, top secret prison and labour camp, with a matching camp for women on the nearby island of Sveti Grgur.

Until 1956, following the Tito-Stalin split and through the Informbiro period, it held political prisoners: known and alleged Stalinists, but also other members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and citizens with no party affiliation at all who were accused of sympathies in that direction. The prison operated from 1949 until 1989, and the island is sometimes called the Croatian Alcatraz because of it.

What is missing from a summary like that is any individual. One account that supplies it has been translated into English by Konrad Eisenbichler and published in 2023: Claudia Sonia Colussi Corte's piece on Cherubino Colussi Corte, an Italian worker in Mali Losinj who was imprisoned on the island.

Check access and sailings locally before planning a crossing: this is an uninhabited island with no settlement on it, and the bora that strips it of vegetation also decides when boats move.