The ruins across from Zagreb’s Main Train Station or the coffee machine are certainly not what you would first recommend to foreigners to see when they visit the Croatian capital. However, this is exactly what the recently launched (anti)tour Invisible Zagreb is ‘becoming’, where former and current homeless people reveal the second, secret side of our capital city to all interested parties.
This is a project initiated by the Agency for Socially Responsible Business and Marketing Brodoto in collaboration with the humanitarian organization Fajter, and the first walks started last month.
– The idea was born at the beginning of the year, after which we sought someone who would fit into our project. It was not difficult to find Mr. Mile Mrvalj since he had already been quite present in the media. I attended one of his lectures, where I heard his story and realized that he is a very eloquent and intelligent person. Together we started ‘shaping’ the whole idea, thinking about how it should look in practice. The goal of his organization Fajter is to raise societal awareness of the problems faced by homeless people, so we decided to take such lectures out of the classroom to authentic locations – says Branimir Radaković from the Brodoto agency.
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The Invisible Zagreb project, Radaković continues, besides the mentioned public sensitization, also helps homeless people financially through donations collected during the free tours. These tours also provide them with an opportunity for resocialization as they come into contact with people and create some competencies that can psychologically pull many of them out of the state of lethargy they find themselves in.
Initially, they planned for the walks to start from the cathedral through Opatovina, where a soup kitchen is located, then through Zrinjevac to the Main Train Station. It turned out that such tours took a bit too long and that the necessary cohesion was not being created, which is why they decided to make them more compact, currently starting at the statue of King Tomislav, continuing at the coffee machine at the Main Train Station, which means much more to homeless people on cold days than we can imagine. The tour ends at the ruins mentioned at the beginning of the text, where people can also see the benches where homeless people used to stay. They have five tours a week lasting an hour and a half, every day except Tuesday and Thursday at 6 PM. Initially, more foreigners, specifically ‘backpackers’, attended since they advertised in hostels and similar places, but they were pleasantly surprised by the response from locals.
Invisible Zagreb is a non-profit project based on volunteer work. They praised the Zagreb Tourist Board from which they received very good feedback in the form of promotion at their info points and websites, while in the Ministry of Tourism they secured confirmations that homeless people do not need a license to conduct tourist tours.
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Mile Mrvalj, a humanitarian who is also a former homeless person, presented alarming data obtained from the Ministry of Demography, according to which one million poor people live in Croatia, of which 200,000 live in extreme poverty or are at risk of entering extreme poverty, meaning they cannot meet basic needs such as utility bills with their income.
– The problem of homelessness has been ‘swept under the rug’ for decades. This anti-tour is a logical continuation of all my activities and attempts to raise public awareness of this problem through the organization. It is sad that in ministries the problems of homeless people are not addressed adequately. I was also homeless for three and a half years, but I did not represent a problem for the state since I did not exist in the system. When you do not have an ID and a place of residence, you do not exist, you do not even have the right to vote – emphasized Mrvalj and acquainted us with the biggest prejudices faced by homeless people.
– The biggest prejudices are that they are lazy people who are to blame for what happened to them. In Croatia, unfortunately, ninety percent of homeless people are individuals who found themselves in this situation due to various loans, guarantees, or job loss. Hundreds of companies that once employed thousands of people went bankrupt overnight, and many who had been barely surviving lost their jobs and income. Then debts that seemed small due to late fees become astronomical. After that, their families fall apart, friends abandon them, leading them into severe depression. Such conditions lead many homeless people to alcoholism as a form of escape from reality. People do not understand that alcoholism among homeless people is not the cause, but rather the consequence.
