Sherlock Holmes of the SFRY

My friend Jason recently sent me a postcard unearthed at a garage sale, representing the only part of his haul that eluded identification. Here is the card itself, which was accompanied by a request to find the subject:

Both card stock and architecture immediately suggested the late 1960s or 70s, as did the architecture and Brady Bunch stylings of the card's layout. At first sight, the alphabet appeared to be a subtype of Cyrillic that I couldn't identify any more specifically. Whatever it was, it featured an odd idiosyncrasy:

Compared to the typeset word on the back of the card, the handwriting-style text on the face featured lower case letters familiar to me from general Cyrillic script; all, that is, except for the "T", which resembled an "m" rotated 180° and crossed with a bar. Though I figured this would prove a good guess verifier, it didn't help me to get going. My first and most important clue came at the bottom of the card:

Having been produced by what reason dictated - and Google confirmed - had to have been the Zagreb Chamber of Commerce sometime in the aforementioned time period, the card must have been made to promote tourism in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Unfortunately, this meant I would be looking in an area that today comprises six countries (Serbia, Croatia. Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia). The good news was that I had the language: either Serbo-Croatian or Macedonian, both of which share a (virtually) identical alphabet. Examining the Wikipedia article on the Macedonian alphabet, I found an explanation for the anomalous letter, which proved to be a cursive Te.

The word reads Jastrebac, which happens to be the name of at least 4 landmarks in Serbia. Three are small villages in the southeast, with respective populations of 221, 423, and 19 (!) residents. The last is a more centrally-located mountain, noteworthy for its wooded scenery and for appearing impressively tall despite a modest elevation of 4895 ft., thanks to surrounding valleys. The mountain is studded with small towns and vacation spots, and lamentably I was unable to positively identify most of the pictures on the face of the card. It struck me, however, that the building on the top right was not only too large to be a private home, but distinctive enough that were it still around, any renovations would have been unlikely to have rendered it unrecognizable - even in the wake of four decades elapsed and two governments crumbled. With some digging, I did indeed find what I was looking for:

The building pictured is the Hotel Trayal, located near the terminus of Class II State Highway 223 (referred to as Jastrebački Road). The hotel - along with the adjacent Hotel Merima, for which the Trayal is apparently often mistaken online - overlooks Jastrepcu Lake, an aqueous speck only 0.257mi in circumference. The lake and hotels are found in the geographic ballpark of 43°25'58.7"N 21°22'11.1"E. A higher resolution shot of the Trayal can be seen below, courtesy of a man with a screen name that Google Translates to "Uncle of the Danube":

The Hotel Trayal of 2009 has ostensibly said goodbye to the ZAZ-965A Zaporozhets once parked out front, and it appears that at some point the management made the wise decision to update the balcony railings. Close inspection, though, shows that impressively little seems generally to have changed. The stone facade is still standing; the same trees dot the skyline; and though the patio umbrellas have been replaced, the classic color scheme is largely intact. Unfortunately, barring an unforeseen Serbian vacation, the rest of Jastrebac will seemingly have to go unexplored and unidentified. But for now, thanks to Jason and the expansive possibilities of the internet, I've seen a wonderful little sliver I never would have otherwise.

* * *

Update (April 3, 2014): My friend Stephen did some digging of his own with remarkable results, turning up photos accounting for the remaining 3 buildings on the card - top middle, bottom left, and bottom right. I subsequently was able to flesh out each of the three. It turns out they were all within hundreds of yards of one another, in a manner unclear from the map for reasons I'll explain. The first is probably the most interesting:

Apparently a victim of the dual collapse of communism and Soviet tourism (closure having occurred "more than 20 years" prior), the Hotel Ravnište was reopened in Summer 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the only time it housed Marshal Tito. The inaugural guests were representatives of the Ministry of Defense, who were treated to 10 days of testing demonstrations of Morava, the Serbian military's new self-propelled rocket launcher. The hotel itself appears to have lost the twin pines in front, but kept the wood paneling and white supports visible on the postcard. (Evidence suggests that one tree may have survived the other.) The hotel is no longer visible on standard Google Maps: a recent update requires you to revert to Classic View to access the satellite picture, and since the hotel was so long defunct, it's no longer marked on the road map at all. Time will tell if this resuscitated, military-friendly iteration stays open long enough to merit being once more added to the map.

The second is variously identified as the Hotel Šator and - herein lies the confusion - the Hotel Ravnište. The first name would appear to be the most appropriate, translating as it does to "tent." The two properties appear to be separated by 0.2 miles. It's possible that the Šator, which has never gone out of business, decided somewhere along the line to ditch its more cutesy name and appropriate the moniker of its fallen neighbor. Šator may also have been a nickname, or one incorrectly listed on the archival photo Stephen found. In any event, it's the "Šator" that occupies the spot on the map labeled by Google as the Hotel Ravnište. Make of all that what you will.

The third (and most frustrating) case of missed identification ostensibly has to do with one of those worries I had in my initial post, which led me at first to focus on what turned out to be the Trayal: radical renovation. The final building is, in fact, the aforementioned Hotel Merima, a building adjacent to and often mistaken for the Trayal. The photograph on the postcard showed the Merima from the southwest, taken from the unnamed road that connects both hotels to Class II State Highway 223. Here it is compared with a roughly contemporary photograph taken from the lakeside:

Both show a transept in the building design and the high-arching eaves that defined the building. At one time, the Merima featured what appeared from the back to be an extremely unsafe balcony. Perhaps aware of some lack of structural integrity, ownership appears, at some point, to have radically redesigned the hotel. Here's what it looks like today:

The Merima has a promotional video on YouTube which, in addition to advertising personal bathrooms "equipped with high quality ceramics," notes that the hotel was renovated to a "capacity of 60 beds in 17 rooms and 2 apartments." Though the renovations have clearly eliminated the transept, the deck and eaves are still evident, and the location appears consistent relative to Jastrepcu Lake. I can therefore feel assured that my eyes didn't miss anything they ought to have caught by themselves, but confident that this is the Hotel Merima. I'd say that qualifies as a happy ending.