July 7, 2017
We spent the day exploring the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik. After a nice lie-in, we had a chat with Gabrijel, our host. He is a native of Dubrovnik, and loves to cozy up by the fire in his small house in the winter time.
We circumnavigated the city on the city walls. About halfway through the walk, there was a room built into the walls in which we watched a short promotional movie about Dubrovnik, then a video of scenes of the bombardment of Dubrovnik during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. There was no narration, so the context (e.g., who was bombing whom, etc.) was difficult to discern. In general, the city wears its war scars much more lightly than in Sarajevo or Mostar, where the war was longer and more intense.
Dubrovnik is a geographically compact city that dates from at least the 700s. The city was controlled by the Venetian Republic from the early 1200s to 1358 during which time, the city largely assumed its current physical form and the Venatian influence is evident in the architecture, street design, etc. After 1358, the city became an independent republic (the city was called Ragusa at the time). The Ragusa Republic lasted until 1806, when Napoleon arrived.
The city (and the whole Dalmatian coast) was ruled by Austro-Hungary or Italy throughout most of the 1800s. After the first World War in 1918, the architects of the post-war period decided to cobble together a country comprised of the southern Slavs, mainly Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. This Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes eventually became Yugoslavia (1).
After lunch, we went to the beach to cool off (it was a hot day and the city walls are made of stone). A beach in Dubrovnik consists of a rocky outcropping into which concrete steps have been built and/or metal ladders attached; you cannot tip-toe into the sea, you are either in all the way or you are out of the water. We people-watched for a while enjoying hearing people chatting with each other in variously-accented English (e.g., a Croat doctor who happened to be on the beach asking a French girl who had fallen and hit her back if she could bend a certain way). A cat was sitting patiently on a rock by the sea. I petted the cat and asked if he got any fresh fish today; the local fisherwoman responded disappointedly: "no fish today."
Our final visit for the day was up the cable car to the mountain overlooking Dubrovnik. The sunset was something special. As the sky darkened, a nearby group of people sent Chinese lanterns floating into the night sky and they drifted toward the rising gibbous moon.
(1) While this may have made sense to the negotiators in Paris, given the commonality of language (a) among the southern slavs (Yugo Slavs), there were importantly cultural differences among the southern slavs. For example, Croats were mainly Roman Catholic and (at least on the Dalmatian coast) had remained independent of the Ottomans, who controlled Serbia, where most of the people care Orthodix Christians.
I once had a chat with a young woman from Ljubljana, Slovenia who had an interesting way of phrasing the challenge of putting together Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (even leaving aside the Bosniaks (Muslim slavs) and Macedonians who were also in Yugoslavia): "Brothers in blood, cousins in language, strangers in culture." I did notice that Mostar (an Ottoman city) had a very different feel than Dubrovnik, even though they are geographically not that far apart.
(a) Serbo-Croatian was considered to be one language until the 1990s when Yugislavia disintegrated, although the Croats wrote in the latin alphabet, while the Serbs wrote in Cyrillic.
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