From wartime stronghold to a very different island

Factories, Workers and a Changing Island

When the Second World War ended, Vis entered one of the most transformative periods in its modern history.

The island had played an extraordinary strategic role during the war. Following the Italian surrender in 1943, Vis became a major Partisan and Allied base, and for part of 1944 it served as the headquarters of Josip Broz Tito and the Yugoslav Partisan leadership. Peace did not, however, bring a simple return to fishing, vineyards and village life.

Its position in the central Adriatic remained important to the new Yugoslav state. Over the following decades, barracks, coastal batteries, tunnels, underground shelters and other military installations spread across the island. Foreign visitors were restricted for decades, with Vis remaining closed to foreigners until 1989. The Yugoslav military withdrew in 1992.

Yet the military presence is only part of the post-war story. At the same time, another transformation was taking place: industrialisation.

For generations, much of island life had been organised around fishing, wine, agriculture and the sea. During socialist Yugoslavia, factory employment became an increasingly important part of that economy. Two names in particular help explain the change: Neptun in Komiža and Jugoplastika on Vis.

Komiža already had an industrial tradition

Factory work did not begin on Vis after 1945. Komiža already had one of the oldest fish-processing traditions on the eastern Adriatic.

The Mardešić family established what is regarded as the first fish-processing and canning factory on the eastern Adriatic there in 1875, although some historical sources give a later date. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the company employed around 200 people and produced roughly 20,000 cases of fish annually.

Fish processing created a bridge between Komiža’s long fishing tradition and industrial production. The catch still came from the sea, but preserving, packing and distributing it required an organised workforce on land.

Many of those workers were women. In Komiža they became known as tobakine, a term that, according to the Komiža Tourist Board, came to describe women working in the fish factories. Some arrived from other parts of Dalmatia and the Dalmatian hinterland, so the industry affected not only employment but also migration and the social life of the town.

That human dimension is central to the story of industrial Vis. The factories mattered not simply because of what they produced, but because of the lives organised around them.

Neptun and the industrial economy of Komiža

After the Second World War, the surviving fish-processing operations in Komiža were reorganised. Several businesses were brought together in 1946 to form Neptun, headquartered in the town.

The company processed salted fish as well as fresh fish preserved in oil and brine. During the 1950s, production expanded to include fishmeal and fish oil, while Neptun also manufactured wooden and metal packaging and produced cans for other Dalmatian factories.

At first, the factory remained highly dependent on fish landed by local fishermen, leaving production vulnerable to fluctuations in the catch. Modernisation between 1951 and 1956 introduced equipment for cooking fish in tins, producing fishmeal and making flake ice. A more fundamental shift followed when Neptun began organising fishing itself and acquired purse-seine vessels.

By the 1960s, annual canned-fish production had reached around 800 tonnes. A new line for small pelagic fish was added in 1969, and by the late 1970s the factory was producing approximately 1,700 tonnes of canned fish a year, with fishmeal production reaching as much as 150 tonnes.

Neptun employed around 270 people at this stage — a substantial workforce for a town the size of Komiža.

Its importance extended well beyond the factory gates. Fishing vessels, crews, processing workers, transport, maintenance, packaging and the households dependent on those jobs were all tied into the same system. Komiža remained a fishing town, but its fishing economy had become closely integrated with industrial production.

Jugoplastika brings another kind of factory work to Vis

A different form of industry reached the island during the 1960s.

Jugoplastika, founded in Split in 1952, grew into one of Yugoslavia’s largest manufacturers of plastics, footwear, clothing, household goods and industrial components. As the company expanded, it established production facilities in less industrialised areas of Dalmatia rather than concentrating everything in Split.

During the 1960s, this regional network included clothing production in Sinj and Vis, metal accessories in Muć and polyester processing in Komiža.

Both of Vis’s main towns were therefore connected to the Jugoplastika system. Komiža combined its long-established fish-processing industry with polyester production, while Vis town became home to a clothing factory.

Together with Neptun, these operations reveal a side of twentieth-century Vis that is easy to overlook today: for several decades, industrial employment was a significant part of the island economy.

The yellow building in Vis town

One of the clearest surviving traces of this period still stands close to the waterfront in Vis: the large yellow building beside the Church of Our Lady of Spilice.

Its history began well before Jugoplastika. Until 1901, teaching in Vis had largely taken place in private houses. That year, a new Narodna škola — People’s School was built in a neoclassical style. The historical account of the local secondary school records that the building was later taken over by the Jugoplastika factory.

An oral-history interview with a retired Jugoplastika worker adds another layer to the story. In research published through the University of Split, she recalled that the factory had first operated in another building approximately 50–100 metres away before moving into the former school.

She estimated that the Vis plant employed around 120 people, the overwhelming majority of them women.

The building is therefore more than an architectural reminder of an earlier period. For years it was a workplace to which more than a hundred people regularly made their way, many of them spending much of their working lives inside it.

A workforce largely made up of women

The predominance of women at the Vis factory reflected the wider Jugoplastika organisation. Academic research estimates that women accounted for as much as 80 percent of the company’s workforce, giving large numbers of women access to regular paid employment.

The retired Vis worker interviewed in 2021 remembered very few men working at the island plant. She started there during the 1970s and remained until 1996, providing a rare first-hand account of what was actually produced inside the factory.

The women sewed a wide range of garments. Early production included clothing intended for markets in France, Germany and Italy, as well as garments associated with sailing clubs. In later years, according to her testimony, the factory also produced clothing for the military and police.

A relatively small factory on Vis was therefore part of a much larger production and distribution network. Goods made on the island travelled far beyond the Adriatic through a company that eventually manufactured thousands of different products and exported a substantial share of its production.

When the working day started at 4:30

Production figures show the scale of the factories, but small details from working life often tell us more about what industrialisation actually meant for people on the island.

Transport was one such part of the routine. Employees who lived outside Vis town travelled to the factory by bus, and the former Jugoplastika worker recalled getting up at around 4:30 in the morning so that workers could be collected in time for the 06:00 shift.

It is a revealing glimpse of an island with a daily rhythm quite different from the one most visitors encounter today. Before the waterfront cafés began their day, buses were already crossing Vis with workers on their way to an industrial shift.

Factories changed more than the kinds of jobs people did. They influenced when people woke, how they travelled across the island and how households organised everyday life.

Jobs grew, but the population continued to fall

Industrialisation provided employment, yet it did not reverse one of the island’s long-term problems: population decline.

Academic demographic research shows that depopulation had begun much earlier but intensified after the Second World War. Increasing numbers of people left Vis for Split and other urban centres on the Croatian mainland, while natural population decline became an important factor from the early 1960s onwards. This reflected decades of emigration, losses during the world wars and declining birth rates.

The factories therefore existed within a wider contradiction. They created regular local employment and allowed many islanders, particularly women, to earn industrial wages without leaving Vis. At the same time, the island as a whole continued to lose population.

Military restrictions further distinguished Vis from parts of the Croatian coast where international tourism began expanding much earlier. Instead, fishing, agriculture, the military, public-sector employment and industries such as Neptun and Jugoplastika remained unusually important to the local economy.

An island shaped by military restrictions

The scale of that difference can be difficult to appreciate today.

Because of its strategic position facing the open Adriatic, Vis became one of Yugoslavia’s most heavily militarised islands. Tunnels, command centres, coastal batteries, radar facilities, barracks and naval infrastructure became part of its landscape, while restrictions on foreign visitors limited the development of international tourism.

This gave the island a very different economic trajectory from many other Adriatic destinations during the same period.

Tourism existed, but it did not transform Vis in the same way or at the same pace as places elsewhere on the coast. For much of the socialist period, the livelihoods of island families remained tied more closely to fishing, agriculture, public employment, military activity and industrial production.

The tourism-led economy that shapes contemporary perceptions of Vis developed later.

The industrial system begins to unravel

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political and economic system supporting much of this industrial activity was itself entering crisis.

Jugoplastika had become an enormous organisation. At its peak in the late 1980s, the group employed around 13,000 people, most of them women, and produced thousands of different goods. Approximately a fifth of production was exported.

The breakup of Yugoslavia and the accompanying economic disruption changed those conditions fundamentally. Jugoplastika was reorganised and renamed Diokom in 1993, but the decline continued. Bankruptcy proceedings eventually began in 2000.

On Vis, however, production did not end immediately. The testimony of the former worker indicates that the island factory continued operating until 1996.

By then, several generations of women had passed through its workshops. When production ceased, what disappeared was not simply a branch of a large Yugoslav company, but a workplace that had been part of everyday life in Vis town for decades.

Neptun’s long decline

Neptun survived into the new century, although the problems facing the company were already severe by the early 1990s.

Fish processing declined sharply. The factory processed 1,822 tonnes in 1990, but only 765 tonnes of small pelagic fish in 1992. From 1993, production almost stopped as poor catches and high market prices made continued operation increasingly difficult.

Several attempts were made to keep the business alive. State-supported restructuring allowed production to restart temporarily in late 1995, but the financial problems remained.

The workforce illustrates the scale of the decline. Neptun still employed around 175 people in 1993; between 1997 and 2003, only around 70 remained. The company’s fishing division closed in 1996 and its vessels were sold.

Bankruptcy followed in late 2003. The production facilities were sold in 2005, and after the bankruptcy proceedings were completed, Neptun was formally liquidated in 2007.

A fish-processing industry with roots reaching back into the nineteenth century had effectively come to an end.

What disappeared with the factories

On a small island, the closure of a large workplace cannot be understood only through employment statistics.

Factories such as Neptun and Jugoplastika structured daily routines across communities. Shift times determined when people got up. Buses connected villages with workplaces. Fishing crews supplied processing lines. Mechanics, drivers and packaging workers formed part of the same production chain, while household economies depended on regular salaries.

For many women, factory work also meant access to paid employment outside agriculture and domestic work. Skills were learned on the production floor, friendships formed there, and particular buildings became part of the personal geography of generations of island families.

This is why industrial history belongs alongside the better-known military, maritime and ancient history of Vis. The factories may have produced sardine tins, clothing and industrial materials rather than monuments, but they shaped ordinary life for decades.

From industrial employment to a tourism-led economy

The contrast with Vis today is considerable.

The military has gone. Jugoplastika has disappeared. Neptun has closed. International travel is unrestricted, and accommodation, restaurants, sailing and excursions have become far more visible elements of the island economy.

The transition was neither immediate nor complete. Fishing continues, vineyards are still cultivated and agriculture remains part of island life. Nor did Vis simply change from an industrial island into a tourism resort.

What changed was the balance.

Walking through Vis town today, it is easy to pass the former Jugoplastika building without knowing that around a hundred people once worked there making clothes. In Komiža, the remains associated with Neptun belong to a landscape in which hundreds of workers and fishermen once depended directly or indirectly on the factory.

The buildings that survive are therefore useful historical evidence, but the memories of the people who worked inside them are just as important.

An overlooked chapter in the history of Vis

Ancient Issa, Venetian architecture, the Battle of Vis and the island’s twentieth-century military history understandably attract considerable attention. The decades after 1945 deserve a place in that story as well.

Industrialisation changed how people on Vis worked, travelled and earned a living. Neptun connected Komiža’s fishermen to large-scale processing and distribution. Jugoplastika linked workers in Vis and Komiža to a production network stretching across Yugoslavia and into foreign markets. For many women, factory employment became an important part of economic and social life.

At the same time, military restrictions kept the island apart from the tourism expansion taking place elsewhere on the Adriatic, while emigration and demographic decline continued despite the jobs created locally.

When the factories and military structures that had supported much of this economy disappeared during the 1990s and early 2000s, Vis had to adapt again.

The surviving industrial buildings are reminders of that relatively recent past: an island of early buses, fishing fleets, sewing machines, sardine tins and factory shifts, where the rhythms of everyday life were very different from those that shape Vis today.

Sources & further reading

Croatian Technical Encyclopedia – Jugoplastika Detailed history of Jugoplastika, including its expansion during the 1960s, clothing production on Vis, polyester processing in Komiža, employment and the company’s later decline.

Croatian Technical Encyclopedia – Neptun, Komiža Excellent source on the history of fish processing in Komiža, the establishment of Neptun, production, fishing fleet, employment and the factory’s eventual closure.

University of Split – Oral history research including a former Jugoplastika worker from Vis Particularly valuable first-hand testimony about working at Jugoplastika on Vis, the predominantly female workforce, products, transport to work and the former school building used as the factory.

Komiža Tourist Board – Neptun Sardine Factory Local historical background on Komiža’s fish-processing industry and the tobakine – women who worked in the fish factories.

Antun Matijašević Karamaneo Secondary School, Vis – History of the School Useful local source documenting the 1901 school building in Vis and its later use by Jugoplastika.

Geoadria – Population Development of Vis Academic demographic research useful for the wider context of depopulation, migration and demographic change on Vis during the twentieth century.

Museum of the City of Vis – About the City of Vis  Background on the island’s twentieth-century history, including its strategic and military importance.