In Istria, Roman Ruins, Unique Wines and Prized Truffles Await | Travel

Marshal Tito’s ghost was ready for his interview. Like any egotistical dictator, he had kept me waiting as he languidly made his way around his private refuge on Veliki Brijun, an idyllic, sun-soaked island off the coast of Istria in the Adriatic Sea. Finally, he looked me square in the eye and croaked: Ciao!, then Kaksi?, Croatian for “How are you?” This was followed by an expletive and an ear-piercing screech. “Koki likes you,” beamed the attendant, Lydia. “He usually only talks to women. If men go near his cage, he gets jealous and tries to bite them.”

The most celebrated resident of this dreamy outpost is, in fact, a parrot named Koki—and like almost everything in Istria, a spectacular, heart-shaped peninsula on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, he has an eccentric history. The yellow-crested cockatoo was raised as an unlikely witness to world events, when in the early 1970s he became the beloved pet of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the charismatic strongman of former Communist Yugoslavia, and began to mimic his master’s colorful peasant vocabulary. Today, Koki gives the eerie sense that he is channeling the Cold War dictator, who was renowned for his brash independence. Like a character in an adventure novel, Tito rose from poor goatherd to become a revolutionary firebrand, heroic partisan leader against the Nazis (“Tito” was his nom de guerre), and authoritarian president of the postwar Balkan nation Yugoslavia (“land of the southern Slavs”), who strutted the international stage as leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization of mostly developing countries that offered an independent path between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Beginning in 1949, Istria’s 14 Brijuni Islands became Tito’s official residence for six months every year, and until his death in 1980, he invited a parade of world leaders to visit. The guest list included Fidel Castro, Yassir Arafat, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Queen…