Fourth Leg: Dalmatian Coast

This morning I’m drinking Turkish coffee in Kotor, Montenegro. It has become clear that one can either try to cover the ground that I’ve been covering, or one can get productive work done while travelling, but it is difficult to do both. The last five days I stayed in Split (Croatia), Mostar (Bosnia i Herzegovina), and Kotor (Montenegro). I also took day trips to Stari Grad on Hvar Island (Croatia) and Dubrovnik (Croatia), the latter on the way in between Mostar and Kotor. These towns share a rich and complicated history. They end up on different sides of different wars and cultures in constantly shifting combinations. This is the essential theme of my entire trip. Hopping the borders between religious, linguistic, economic, and imperial boundaries.

I’m itching to make a big chart of all those variables, but at this moment that would disturb the flow of my writing and my coffee. Perhaps I’ll attempt a loose breakdown:

Split: Catholic

Illyrian > Greek > Roman > Byzantine > Venetian > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Croatian
Mostar: Muslim

Byzantine > Bulgarian > Ottoman > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Bosnian
Dubrovnik: Catholic

Illyrian > Greek > Roman > Byzantine > Independent > Ottoman vassal > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Croatian
Kotor: Orthodox
Roman > Byzantine > Venetian > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Montenegrin

Each of these towns has a small historic center of tightly packed stone buildings with narrow streets (or passageways rather). With the exception of Mostar each of these towns is surrounded by stone walls built (most recently) in the 15th-16th centuries. The walls enclose a surprisingly small area. I don’t know the historic numbers, but the population of Dubrovnik today is only 70,000, and the city encompasses an area much larger than the old walled segment.

Split is particularly interesting from morphological standpoint because it is a city that grew out of the ruins of a single Roman palace. In the 8th century the residents of Salona, the old capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia were driven out of their city by barbarian invaders. They took refuge on the nearby islands and in the ruins of the Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace, constructed near the city around 300 AD. Over the past 1300 years the city of Split has grown up within and around the old palace, the stone and walls of which have been used and reused to construct the dense, complex core of housing, shops, squares, and fortifications. It’s now the second largest city in Croatia, and so the old palatial core is quite a small part, mostly dominated by tourists, but it seems to retain some indigenous life, and forms part of a central area that seems to attract shoppers and strollers from all over the city. The hostel I stayed in, within the footprint of the palace, was an affordable family-run operation and was a refreshing break from the huge hostels I’ve been staying in in the capital cities to the north.

I visited the ruins of the city of Salona, then on a lark took a bus up towards a rocky outcrop that looked intriguing from down below. It turned out to be the fortress of Klis, a defensive post used since before Roman times. It has been developed over the centuries into a wonderful complex of walls, gates, turrets, which winds its way towards the summit, with an incredible view of Split and the surrounding land. It was just before sunset when I got there and the guard sold me my ticket about 20 minutes after the place was supposed to be closed. I was the only one there. The guard and his friend went home but left the front door (a massive wood and iron gate :) open for me. I ran around as a giddy boy in the most perfect lego-pirate fortress I could imagine. I even climbed across a tile roof to get to the highest observation point, the main access to which had already been closed.

The next day I took the ferry to Stari Grad (“Old City” in any Slavic toungue) on Hvar Island. I learned this is an old settlement, the town officially founded by greek colonists after they had displaced the native Delmatae. Unlike Split the town has not grown much since then so it feels more connected to those times. The fields behind the town are a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site (as are some part of all of these towns) because they essentially preserve the land division and agricultural methods of the ancient Greeks intact. I didn’t know that when I climbed up the hill next to the town to enjoy my lunch of pumpkin-seed bread, smoked sausage, hard cheese, walnuts, apples and mandarins, but they did look pretty, and unspoiled by the suburban sprawl that I have spent most of my life looking at. The island was predictably delightful otherwise, if somewhat empty at this time of year, despite the pleasant weather.

Mostar is in Herzegovina, the southern region of the country called Bosnia i Herzegovina, which is internally divided into three ethnic “republics”, one each for Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. (For what it’s worth these seem to be religious identities as much as anything: roughly: Serbs are Orthodox, Croats are Catholic, and Bosniaks are Muslim. The three languages are basically the same.) This arrangement is a result of the Dayton accords, worked through by the Clinton administration. It ended the war between these three groups, but created an incredibly complicated system in its place.

Mostar is a small city that was fairly prosperous and industrialized in Yugoslavia, but which was heavily damaged during the war, mostly during the phase of fighting during 1992 and 1993 between Croats and Bosniaks. There are still many buildings with visible damage from the war, though much money and effort has gone into rebuilding, particularly in the old town. The town formed around an impressive stone bridge commissioned by Suleiman the Great, the Ottoman emperor from 1520 to 1566. The bridge spans the Neretva river which is not wide but which is deep and swift flowing. The bridge is called Stari Most (“old bridge”) which gave the town its name.

The only tour I could find late in the day was called “The Death of Yugoslavia”. On it we visited an old underground fighter-jet hangar, one of more than a hundred across the former Yugoslavia, the former town square, once surrounded by banks, and grand buildings, which became the front line in the fighting in 1993, and a large monument to Yugoslav unity, which is now overgrown and abandoned.

While walking the streets I head the noon call to prayer. It was the first time I have ever heard that in my life. It came in stereo, at slightly different intervals from minarets in different directions. I was not expecting to be so moved to hear this. I’d stepped, just barely, into a part of the world which has been an enormous abstraction my entire adult life. It’s been the ultimate exotic foreign place, and perhaps the “Orient” is not the wrong thing to call it; the focus of angst and money and lives and fear and the proximate excuse for me having to take off my belt at the airport and the mass surveillance of my country by our government and the eviction of people from airplanes because they look or sound like a “terrorist”.

Mostar is a place where you hardly have to do anything, you can practically just sit and feel the waves of human history moving over you. Centuries of lives lived in prosperity and crisis leaving thier marks. On a sunny, cool Friday morning the main street was thronged with folks sitting outside drinking coffee at the numerous cafes. It feels to have all worked out well enough, for now. Right now, the painful feeling of the breakdown of trust among Americans is all over my body. That is a part of the roll of human history. To travel is to see how it has played out in other places. It is more pleasant to feel it play back while visiting than to be in the midst of it, I think.