Anyone stumbling upon the Garden of Eden on Ugljan, a touristy island off the Dalmatian coast, wouldn’t be entirely wrong if they thought they had somehow walked into a strange dream. The lush sculpture park and the villa at its heart are a startling anomaly among the crystal-blue waters, pebbled coves and quaint villages: a Gesamtkunstwerk dreamed up by Emil Milan Grgurić, a Croatian outsider artist who dedicated his life to making it real.
Emilan, as he called himself, was born in 1919 in Januševac, near Zagreb. He was an economist by trade and a creative at heart, though growing up poor with a strict father didn’t allow him to nurture his artistic talent. One summer in the late 1950s, looking to escape the oppressive heat in the capital, he and his wife, Melita, and their young daughters, Dunja and Jasminka, visited Kukljica, a small fishing village on the island. They were smitten and returned the next year, and the next, lodging in the old school. Then, in the early 1960s, Emilan found an untouched plot of land nearby, which could only be reached by boat. This, he thought, would make the perfect sanctuary, an isolated paradise for his family and the many stray animals they adopted, as well as a place where he would finally be able to create art.
The first thing he tackled was the house itself. Villa Katarina, named after the artist’s mother, has a strange organic quality to it. From the ground plan in the shape of a four-leaf clover, it rises like a mound of concrete and stone, evoking a massive beehive. Its highest gable is topped by a concrete bust of Katarina, watching over it like a patron saint. Her face is young, serious and idealised: this is the most gentle of Emilan’s concrete portraits. Dunja explains that the whole project stemmed from her father’s grief over losing his mother at the age of 12. That sense of loss never left him: Emilan hid a lock of her hair in the concrete head, as if it were a holy relic. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that some locals think the house is haunted.
The real wonders, however, are hidden inside, where colourful chaos awaits the visitor. The walls – and sometimes ceilings – are covered in concrete reliefs on monochromatic red, green or blue backgrounds. This visual turmoil is hard to comprehend at first: Brutalist in execution, but Medieval in composition, with hierarchical proportions and an all-too-evident horror vacui. The iconography is just as varied. At a glance, one can make out Noah’s Ark, Moses with his tablets, the Last Supper and scenes from the Apocalypse. However, Dunja explains that her father wasn’t even particularly religious: it was his vision of God, incorporated in a larger philosophy of life, its beginning and its end.
Emilan claimed that the main theme of his art was the exploitation of the common people through time. Most of the non-biblical scenes depict either the glorious past of the Croatian people or historical injustices they felt. On two walls we find a line-up of princes and kings as mythical Medieval figures with crowns and swords, standing on roots inscribed with their names. On another, we find the 16th-century national hero Nikola Subić Zrinski, who died fighting the Ottomans. He is depicted standing inside a fortress, holding a chequer shield, surrounded by severed heads. But perhaps the most imaginative is ‘the wall of Old Slavic spirits’, as Dunja calls it. On the right side of the composition, we see Christ on the cross and a bishop with a sword and an aspergillum, while on the left a chaotic tangle of human and animal bodies represents the pagan, Slavic deities and monsters.
Emilan’s wife often participated in the execution of his ideas. Dunja remembers her helping build the house: there was no-one else around to lend a hand. Together they worked ‘without electricity or running water, with nothing but lime, sand, cement, water and a sifter’. But Melita’s greatest contribution to her husband’s magnum opus was the landscape: it was she who planted all the trees and shrubs that surround his statues. The park – the so-called Garden of Eden – amplifies the ideas of past glories and injustices that Emilan depicted in the house. There are 35 sculptures in all, each one cast in reinforced concrete and hand-finished by chisel. The earliest work is the group Return of the Islanders from the Field depicting a man, a woman and a donkey, inscribed with Aleksa Santić’s poem ‘Stay Here’. Dunja recalls that her father empathised with the local fishermen and peasants, who endured real hardship before the arrival of mass tourism and would often emigrate to America. ‘He loved Kukljica and its inhabitants, and he felt sorry for them.’
The sculptures outside are monumental, larger than life and heroic in their Brutalist simplicity. The Medieval kings Tomislav and Petar Krešimir IV share the garden with the Croatian writers Marija Jurić-Zagorka, August Senoa and Miroslav Krleža, as well as Saint Thomas Aquinas and the ‘Apostles to the Slavs’, Cyril and Methodius. This illustrious gathering also comprises sculptural groups such as The Well of Life, featuring a couple with two children standing atop a high pedestal adorned with signs of the zodiac, dancing animals and the solar system. ‘He believed that everything stems from love,’ Dunja explains, ‘the whole world, the universe.’
Despite dedicating half his life to it, working in the summer and researching and planning while in Zagreb, Emilan likened his ‘sculpting of ideas’ to straw, echoing the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was aware of its transience, though he didn’t know that the lifespan of reinforced concrete is further curtailed by exposure to rain and salty winds. The house and the garden are closed to visitors. Dunja, who admits that she was too busy leading her own life to pay much attention to her father’s art when she was younger, is now trying to preserve his legacy and repair the damage, though she is in her seventies and lives far away. This strange project of total art in the wilderness, the testimony of one man’s 30-year-long artistic dream, is slowly returning to nature.
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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