No Cities for Old Men: Michael and Dan Tour Croatia
Daniel Emberley, May 2024
Actually, just the cities of Dubrovnik and Split, with a ferry on the Adriatic between. Our friends Brett and Ira rented apartments in both cities, planned an extensive trip there and north through national parks and ending in Zagreb, and invited us. We’d considered combining the city part with northern Italy, taking the ferry across from Ancona. When Michael’s Mom got sick, we realized we could not risk a long trip in Europe, so cut our journey down to just the Dalmatian cities.
The Croatian coast is gorgeous. Like the coast around Seattle or north of San Francisco, mountains descend steeply into the water. Cities have done a little landfill to create flats, but mainly climb the hills. Many streets are just paths between buildings, with steep stone steps continuing a lane uphill. Original settlement predates the Roman Empire, but most of what you see is Roman ruins, medieval fortifications, Baroque churches, and Socialist concrete flats. The dining is sensational, especially the seafood. Europe treats Croatia like we treat Florida; a convenient place for sunny beaches with blender drinks, nightclubs, and inclusive resorts. Many cruise ships dock and disgorge crowds that need to be managed around.
We had a blast, and enjoyed the places, our friends, and the travel. Details follow if you want more.
Monday, May 13
The Silver Line got us to Dulles, and Lufthansa to Munich. Franz Josef Strauss Airport is much easier to use than Frankfurt. The land around Munich is flatter and more agricultural than we expected, with a dramatic transition to the Alps. An efficient change of plane, and we arrived on
Tuesday, May 14
In Dubrovnik. The airport there is small and functional, we met the AirBnB’s friendly driver and arrived easily in a hilltop parking lot surrounded by cemeteries. Many streets in Dubrovnik are too narrow and steep for cars; the lot is the neighborhood’s pickup/drop off place. A short walk past a church and several walled burial plots took us to the front door of our temporary home. We entered on the top floor, with several flights of stairs down through our private terraces to a collection of small houses. Our unit had a view of the Adriatic and our own bath and kitchen. Brett, Ira, and Eleanor had arrived before us, and Eleanor had happy hour wine and snacks on the terrace so we could debrief.
For dinner we walked north and west, away from town and toward the commercial ferry port, to the restaurant Marangun. This was the first of many fantastic Croatian seafood places we dined at, most of them al fresco: monkfish stew, seafood risotto, pork belly with black sauce and celeriac puree, black squid risotto. And the first of many posips we drank. Posip is a grape grown on the Croatian island of Korcula; it makes an amazing white wine. Croatian wines are famous and fantastic; unfortunately, they are all locally consumed: you have to drink them on their home turf. Soon after our friend Claudia, who had flown Turkish and enjoyed several days in Istanbul before and after our trip, arrived, completing our band of six.
Wednesday, May 15
The most popular thing to do in Dubrovnik is walk the walls. Every cruise ship passenger makes the trek, so it’s frequently crowded, hot, and exhausting. Taking advantage of the fact that we were all jet lagged anyway, we got up early and hit the walls before cruise tenders arrived for the day.
The Dubrovnik Pass is a card/app that gives you free or reduced admission to the major sites of the city, including the walls, and a lot of minor ones we would have passed by if we hadn’t already paid. We got the three-day pass, and found it well worth it. Buy this before you leave the States, and print the QR code you’ll get. It’s confusing enough negotiating a new city, culture, and language; you don’t want to be figuring out how to bring the code up on your phone. Stone walls are not conducive to good wi-fi signals. The Pass also covers free transport in Dubrovnik, which we never used. Buses are available, but confusing, and the walks enjoyable even when our feet wept.
The walls are everything you want from a storybook European city: magical,
gorgeous, historic, transcendent. You start with maybe four flights of
steep, stone stairs from the Pile (western) Gate up to the walk level, where
they bless you with some benches to catch your breath. You proceed in
mandatory counter-clockwise direction (the path too narrow for
bi-directional traffic with crowds), overlooking red tile roofs, the port,
church steeples, the Adriatic, hidden gardens, folks’ back yards, and two
municipal basketball courts squeezed into the little available space. We
watched cruise ships send passengers ashore, grateful that we had gotten a
step ahead of them. Later we found even the city streets too crowded to be
comfortable, but at opening hour on the wall this was not a problem. We got
chummy with the folks before and after us, traveling in an informal pod.
There are a couple of “cafes” on the walls, but they’re more like a cooler
with three tables; bring your own drinks and snacks. Which we totally
needed, because the walls are not level, but go up and down flights of steps
as they negotiate changes in elevation between the port and the slopes of
Mount Srd. Dubrovnik itself is the medieval union of two towns, inland
Dubrovnik (Slavs) and Ragusa (Romans and Greeks) on an island separated from
the mainland by a small canal. So small that it was filled in, and is now
the main shopping stretch, the Stradun. Gorgeous vistas from forts at the
corners, up mountains behind which is Bosnia, and into gardens in the
foundations of homes that collapsed in a 1667 earthquake and were never
rebuilt.
We split up for breakfast, some folks discovering boreks (cheese or meat fillings wrapped in a tube of pastry) from a local bakery, and us at an unremarkable café. If you see “toast” on a menu, it is a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. They also served peach juice, which was delightful.
St. Ignatius Church was the Jesuit’s center in Ragusa. Like all good followers of Ignatius Loyola’s Counter-Reformation, they filled it with chapels of tromp l’oeil painting and carving. This reinforced that we were in a backwater of the Hapsburg Empire; we had seen much better in Vienna. The church has a commanding site on a hilltop plaza, accessed by the stairs Cersei Lannister took in her “Game of Thrones” walk of shame. GOT filmed all over Dubrovnik; it offered a perfect combination of stone fortresses, generic European feel, and unfurnished rooms to be used any way the set decorator needed.
The Dominican Monastery is a sweet complex of buildings with a good collection of Croatian art. Lots of Old Master paintings by artists you’ve never heard of, because Dubrovnik was not on the circuit of Brits and Americans building museum collections in the 1800’s. A lovely cloister space, with gardens just coming into bloom. A quick duck into the Synagogue Museum, one of the oldest Jewish temples in continuous use in Europe. Not exceptional, or worth the 10 euros for a small tabernacle and balcony with no outstanding architectural features, and not covered by the Dubrovnik Pass. It started to drizzle, so we escaped into the Cathedral of the Assumption. An unexceptional Baroque replacement, after the 1667 earthquake, of a cathedral whose earlier re-build was financed by Richard the Lionheart. The nearby Rectors’ Palace preserves a nice courtyard with the same purpose as Venice’s Doges’ Palace, but for a city with a lot less cash (all those bribes to the Ottomans). They do a good job relating the history of the city. A collection of glass and ceramic pharmacy jars on an upper level is worth the stairs.
Broke for lunch (yes, the city is that small, and the sites that easily conquered) at Konoba Carpaccio. We found it was worth going uphill a couple blocks from the Stradun for restaurants and bars; they increase in quality, drop in price, and improve in service with distance from the main drag. “Konoba” means café or bistro, “carpaccio” is the word to focus on here. Great meal of raw octopus, zucchini, grilled veg, washed down with a posip and served in an atmospheric street setting. Lots of decent-looking restaurants along this street, the Prijeko, if you’re trying to escape crowds. Too many options, not enough meals!
The Franciscan Monastery & Museum has a nicer courtyard than the Dominicans, but lesser collection of relics and art. Their star is the pharmacy, still actively dispensing after centuries. It was a bit jarring visiting the semi-Walgreen’s part and looking up to see wooden shelves of Renaissance urns of powders and lotions. Eleanor picked up hand cream, Dan picked up history, St. Francis would be pleased.
A quick stop for gelato, because of course. The Croatian word for this is sladoled, but you won’t need it; there are stands wherever there are tourists, and pointing totally works. Flavor choices are similar to those in Italy (hazelnut, green apple, stracciatella, melon), but the taste less perfect. Always a good idea, though. War Photo Limited was founded by a news photographer after the Yugoslavian Civil War/Croatian War of Independence. It is a good space with a permanent exhibit on that war upstairs, and rotating exhibits of contemporary conflicts below. The current show was of the fight happening in West Papua, New Guinea, where Indonesians with U.S. help are the aggressors against native groups. The wall text was a revelation, but the photos don’t tell the story the photographers think they are.
The Ethnographic Museum is high up and off the main tourist track; it presents an astounding collection of clothing, fabric, ceramics, and the tools used by farmers and craftsmen that make Croatia unique. I was going to skip it, but our friends wanted to go, and we’re glad we did. The hike up to the entry steals your breath, but the building is worth it. It was built as the city’s main granary. Dubrovnik/Ragusa survived as an entity independent of both Venice and Constantinople by playing them off against each other, by having decent walls, a protected water supply, and this grain store, allowing them to survive most sieges. A video by the entrance shows how the granary worked, and displays are in the domed “cells” where grain was stored. The engineering makes the museum. Next door is a mom-and-pop shop that sells six locally made items: instead of a sign, they have samples on a chair outside. Brett chatted the owners up and got us all in, where we bought salt and dried oranges. The olive oils were tempting, but concerns about schlepping them home unbroken kept us from investing.
We had an interesting interaction in this museum. A common report of Croatians is that they are welcoming, until they are not. We frequently ran into this, where someone in a service role just couldn’t care less. Claudia had intelligent questions about the collections, but when she tried to engage folks wearing museum credentials was totally blown off. Because she is a woman? Because they did not have enough English to engage? Because they were at the end of their shift, and could not put out the energy to educate one more tourist in the stream they had seen that day? Who knows, but similar behavior happened more than once. I usually found my meagre Croatian, a “thank you” or attempt at numbers, could overcome this (vocabulary list at the end of this report), but not always.
We shared happy hour back at the AirBnB, catching up and trading stories and recommendations from our day. Michael and I went out to Otto’s Street Food to pick up the least satisfying meal of our trip; burgers, don’t bother.
Thursday, May 16
This morning we headed into town by a street uphill, but still undistinguished. I had expected the major east-west entries into the old city to have vibrant retail, but they were mainly apartment buildings with a few small markets. Once we got to the walls, however, things picked up. Amazing views of the old moat, which is now a road circumventing the historic center. We hit the sea at the Old Port. Up the coast a block is the Lazzaretti, where Ragusa invented the quarantine: people who arrived by ship were forced to stay in this quarter for forty days, proving they did not bring illness, before entering town. The complex is now used as a performing and arts center, with a nice shop of Croatian-made crafts.
Our destination was the Museum of Modern Art, housed in a fabulous shipping magnate’s 1938 mansion. The show, of contemporary Croatian women artists, was as good as a show of local D.C. contemporary art. That is not a compliment. The top floor had a decent collection of 20th Century Croatian painting, a good chance to see artists we’d heard of, like Bukovic, whose work we had not seen. Like American Impressionism, this was decent, but clearly derivative of Impressionist and early Modern artists they were seeing in Paris. The building itself was the best object, designed in a mishmash of Italian and Modern styles, accented with ironwork by a female Croatian artisan. North of the museum is Life According to Kawa (coffee), an excellent and fun design store. Lots of cool stuff that we decided we didn’t have room for in our luggage.
Into the old city by the eastern Ploce Gate, and back uphill south to the plaza in front of the Jesuits, for the restaurant Kopun. Kopun = capon, a fat chicken, and that was what Michael ordered, in a fruit gravy with beet barley. I got the fish soup and linguine with shrimp and truffles, posip and a rose, with a cream roll for dessert. It’s hard to imagine getting tired of eating Croatian food al fresco in Renaissance plazas. We walked north through their third gate, the Buza, for the cable car to Mount Srd. Ira had hiked up to the summit yesterday, since the cable car was not running; it still was not, the winds were too strong for safe operation. We went back to the western edge of the city to Fort St. Lawrence. This is another GOT site. On top of a steep hill, accessed by multiple flights of stone steps, but this time through a park setting, which made it slightly more comfortable. No greenery within, it is a massive stone bastion, with dramatic vistas of cruise ships sailing, the surrounding mountains, and the old city at its base. Well worth the hike.
We walked back though Pile Gate to shop, pick up boreks, and chill at a quiet bar in an alley, over a strawberry chia smoothie and a Hugo, elderflower liqueur and prosecco over ice and mint. Then back to the AirBnB via the high road, stopping at a market for groceries to supplement our boreks for dinner. The rest of our crew, Brett, Ira, Claudia, and Eleanor, had returned from a day-trip to the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro. A sensational site, but we were glad we’d taken more time to explore Dubrovnik. They regaled us with tales of Dennis, their proudly-Croatian-to-the-point-of-comedy driver, and the Kotor Cat Museum.
Somewhere downtown is the Sponza Palace, a municipal building with a Memorial Room of the Defenders of Dubrovnik. We missed it, but are happy with the nooks and crannies that we discovered.
Friday, May 17
We packed up from our lovely villas and caught an Uber with Eleanor to Port Gruz, the main ferry terminal. Some cruise ships dock at the old city and send their passengers in on tenders, but most use Port Gruz, as well as Jadrolinija, the national ferry company, and other companies that serve the Croatian coast. When you look at ferry options, companies assume you are traveling in high season, June-September, and throw a dizzying array of arrivals, departures, packages, and prices at you. There are passenger only ferries (catamarans), and auto ferries that also take pedestrians.
Or you can travel in May. When there is one ferry a day from Dubrovnik to Split, leaving at 3:30PM, on the company Kapetan Luka, which also goes by the name Krilo. From an unmarked dock chain link fenced off, so it looks like a construction site. Say what? Our Uber driver dropped us off at the green and fish market, which seemed to be where the action was. There is a ferry building, but it is hard to distinguish, only serves Jadrolinija, and doesn’t have a window to take checked baggage anyway, so completely useless to us. After about twenty minutes of Googling and wandering we found a company that would check our bags for a few hours, a ten-minute walk from where any ferry company would dock, even if they were running. Not Croatia’s finest hour, reminding us that they had been an Eastern Bloc nation for many decades.
That task done, we backtracked west up the coast to the Red History Museum. This is a fascinating look at the Yugoslavia that played the U.S. and U.S.S.R. against each other and won, becoming the Communist world’s window on the West. Cool exhibits on the history of the united country, its evolution after WWII, Tito’s control, and the Western-market-oriented, but Communist-based, economy they created. Croatia, as part of Yugoslavia, was where Moscow, Warsaw, and Sofia would turn for Crock Pots, miniskirts, and VCR’s. The curators give lots of opportunities to open drawers, watch “Dynasty” reruns, and pose with a Yugo. The setups of middle-class rooms were brilliant, and helped place us in that world. Tito did many horrible things to his people, but they succeeded materially in a way they now reminisce about. Also a good temporary show of Cuban posters from the 1960s.
Caught lunch at the al fresco Provo on the waterfront. Seafood pizza (yes, it’s delicious), octopus salad, bruschetta with prsut. Prsut, sound it out, it’s prosciutto, but they don’t slice it thinly enough in Croatia, so it lacks the flavor you expect. Brett met us at Provo, and we walked over to the Krilo dock where Ira and Claudia caught up with us.
The ferry was a disappointment. The route is one of the most beautiful in the world, north along the Adriatic among islands and beach ports. The islands of Brac, Korchula, Hvar, and Mljet National Park all look worth a return. The ship itself, however, is rundown, and staff rude. They separated day trippers to intermediate ports from people who were sailing to Split, took our bags hostage, and sent us back from the windowed front of the ship to steerage. There were plenty of seats, so we could not figure it out, but made the best of views around/through the mooring equipment that blocked our windows. Staff shut down all but one bathroom, and did not allow us to move forward on the run. TV monitors hung above the seats, maybe to show the location and progress of the ship, or at least ads for places to see and stay, but displayed static the entire run. We could buy canned drinks and coffee, but the snack selection was bags of chips and off-brand cookies. You could see that there were once tray tables on the back of seats, but these had been removed. Bizarre, and unwelcoming.
Our arrival in Split was pleasant. We walked west down the Riva, passing Diocletian’s former palace and the medieval port, and uphill to our next apartment. The street was a gradual ramp up, easy compared to Dubrovnik’s steps. When I asked Michael “What is Dubrovnik without stairs?”, he curtly replied, “Venice”. Our place was clearly designed to be leased to two different groups at once, with a courtyard between. The main door opened directly into a full-size bed, but once we figured out the keys we relaxed as we discovered additional bedrooms, baths, kitchenettes, and a separate rear entrance from a different street. Nothing like the views/patio space we had in Dubrovnik, but a great space nonetheless. Brett did a brilliant job picking out accommodations, thanks!
On Croatian accommodations: we saw lots of shutters outside of casement windows, but the only screens were at our final hotel. You can use the AC, or you can have breezes with bugs.
Michael and I had purchased sandwiches from Mlnar, a Croatian bakery chain, that we’d eaten on the ferry. Our friends walked down to our local piazza, Trg Sperun, for dinner at Feel Greens restaurant, while we picked up groceries for breakfast.
Saturday, May 18
Dubrovnik is a precious jewel of a medieval city that preserved its independence from Venice, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire. Split is a city whose history layers on everything that came before. While also being an industrial powerhouse, and the second largest city in Croatia after the capital, Zagreb. It’s the center of ferries taking tourists to beach islands ranging from isolated villas to party-zone extravaganzas. Being further north, it was rarely independent, and went from Greek roots to Roman palace to refugee city to the Venetians and Habsburgs, then an industrial center under Tito. Suburban Solana, a Roman settlement four miles north, was the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia. Emperor Diocletian was born there, and after he implemented his plan for succession (the Catholic Church’s diocese? They are descendants of Diocletian’s plan), built a massive palace on the coast. For 250 years emperors came and went, but after Avar barbarians burned Solana the third time, the residents moved into the palace and turned it into a city. The overflow west, when the Slavs had settled down, created a new medieval city just as large. There are 19th century additions beyond that, and a whole modern metropolis forming a wide ring around. As a tourist, you’re there for the palace and first medieval addition, but all around are neighborhoods of folks who used to proudly work at the best factories in the Communist world but now subsist as restaurant staff and airport drivers.
You’ve seen Split, even if you’ve never been there. In the 1700’s, when architects were trying to figure out what Greek and Roman architecture really looked like, they didn’t have a lot of options. There were the Pantheon and Colosseum standing proudly in Rome proper, but archaeology hadn’t developed yet, much less excavated the Forum, or Pompeii, or other original sources. But there was Split, sitting grandly in the Palace, with Diocletian’s tomb half-heartedly adapted into a cathedral and the Temple of Jupiter into a baptistery. You needed to peer under 1,000 years of accretions, but there was original Roman architecture. Robert Adam, our favorite British countryhouse designer, famously published his drawings from Split. Reading it before we left, I felt like I was looking at Federal Triangle; D.C.’s government buildings are echoes of what Adam recorded.
Our apartments were in Veli Varos, a funky neighborhood west of the medieval city. On a street called Krizeva, which translates to Holy Cross. Across the street from St. Holy Cross, headquarters for a cult branch of Catholicism all about the sanctity of the wood that Jesus died on (not the school in Worcester). We walked over to see it; it’s a sweet jewel box of a church, with a well-preserved Habsburg ceiling.
Roman army camps, and so the palace, were built on a grid with an east-west and north-south street, the walls pierced by gates where the streets met the walls. The walls of the palace were so thick that even today you can easily enter only through one of those gates. We walked through a portico in the Habsburg Plaza Republike, then the medieval fish market (still selling fish), to the western, Iron Gate. OMG, I thought I was going to plotz. The stores are selling tourist tat, t-shirts, olive oil, and rubber ducks, but in centuries-old buildings. Looking up from the sidewalks are structures built one over another, a Renaissance balcony on a medieval three-floor addition on an original Roman two-floor tavern that is now a Zara below a guest house. There’s a distinctive Split entrance to medieval commercial structures, a letter P shape where the door was the tall part and the curve bump out for display of a merchant’s wares. All made in stone solid enough that they don’t bother trying to cut it out, but just mount ATM machines in the bump-outs, so you have to reach up to use them. We wandered with a purpose, heading for the center of the old palace, the Peristyle. This was the columned great hall running north-south through the emperor’s quarters, and now the central piazza of Split. Don’t sit on the purple cushions unless you want to buy a drink, they are owned by the bar Luxor, which jealously guards their real estate.
East of the Peristyle is the Cathedral of St. Domnius. The cathedral was originally Diocletian’s mausoleum, and St. Domnius one of the Salonans he had massacred for being Christian. Fun times. You can’t walk into the Cathedral without a ticket, which you purchase from a building in the southwest corner of the Peristyle. Split has nothing like the Dubrovnik Pass, but doesn’t need it: most of what you want to see and experience is just being there, and when you do have to pay it’s usually a modest amount. Croatia joined the euro a few years back, so everything is easy. There are a variety of tickets, you want one that includes the cathedral, baptistery, and treasury. Skip the crypt, it is only open on the hour, for limited numbers, and is an empty basement (as reported by Eleanor, I lost patience waiting when there was octopus to be eaten). The Treasury is a new museum with well-curated and displayed bits and bobs: Roman sculpture, Renaissance painting, relics and reliquaries, building artifacts. The cathedral proper is small, and a mish-mash; Diocletian’s body is long gone, and Catholics have no respect for his design style – smile. But, well overhead, beyond the Baroque golden altar and frescoes, is an ancient sculptural frieze of cupids hunting. It’s like seeing the Elgin Marbles still on the Parthenon. We walked down the street to the baptistry, Diocletian’s original temple to his “father”, Jupiter. Like a miniature Virginia State Capital, with a wonderful Celtic plaited-work carved stone font inside below a looming Ivan Mestrovich (see below) sculpture of John the Baptist.
The southern half of the palace is two floors; Diocletian needed a basement to level-up the hillside. I’m calling the lower level the undercroft, for want of a better word. In the emperor’s day it was used for commercial access, grain and weapon storage, and entry to the port outside the Silver Gate. Affluent households in the Middle Ages dug holes in their floors to dump trash and waste into those chambers. Where they fossilized, until post-WWII archaeologists uncovered millennia of life preserved for study. The undercroft is now the main entrance for most people to historic Split; a grid of brick chambers that lead to a staircase that takes folks almost directly from their cruise ship to the Peristyle. Tour books talk about stands of cheap souvenir stalls in the undercroft, but now it is a clear line of sight from the Riva (where we landed last night) to the Peristyle. You can buy a ticket to explore the galleries to east and west. This morning was one of the few times all six of us toured together, and here we broke up again. Brett wanted to do these galleries, Ira, Claudia, and Eleanor to see art museums, and Michael and me to shop the medieval city.
Michael and I ended at the bar Gentile on the Riva, where we all met up again (there’s a handy model of the original palace that makes a good rendezvous spot in front of the last café on the strip). Lunch at Maco, a seafood restaurant on Trg Republike: grilled squid on blitva (Swiss chard and potato, the national vegetable), prosecco, shrimp salad, mussels.
After lunch Michael and I took a walk on the Riva, west of the old city, along the harbor and then the seafront south of Marjan, a park filling the peninsula to the west. Big Modernist homes along the Marina, ending at the Mestrovic Gallery. Ivan Mestrovic is Croatia’s most important artist, and you’ve never heard of him. A sculptor who studied under Rodin, most of his work is in Croatia. He fled Tito’s Yugoslavia, teaching at Syracuse and Notre Dame, where he died. The giant statues of Native Americans in Chicago’s’ Grant Park? St. Jerome studying the Bible in front of the Croatian Embassy on Mass Ave in D.C.? Those are his. In the 1920’s he built a fabulous Deco mansion/studio/entertainment palace facing the Adriatic. Formal gardens that reminded us of Mussolini’s contemporaneous architecture in Rome, and also Paul Cret’s here at the Folger and Federal Reserve. The home is now run as a museum, the best collection of Mestrovic in the world, and well displayed.
We were too tired from the walk over to explore Marjan Park, so got an Uber back to Trg Republike and walked to the apartment. Like in Dubrovnik, it would not be possible for a cab to negotiate the streets near where we stayed, and Trg Republike became the logical pickup/drop off point. We chilled on Krizeva, shared happy hour with the group, then wandered out to find dinner. Aspalathos is a neighborhood bar that served excellent cevapi, with fish spread and a sesame chicken salad. Cevapi are like a cross between meatballs and sausages, best served grilled, as here, with French fries and ajvar, roasted pepper relish. Fish spread is something we had seen on several menus; it’s local trout or dried cod pulverized into a paste and served on pillowy pita. Delicious. Most supermarkets here sell it in a tube, but I’ve since made it in my Cuisinart. We wandered around the Old City by night to settle our dinner.
Sunday, May 19
Our Lady of Health Church was built in 1937 in splendid Fascist-Moderne style, with a 1959 Ivo Dulcic fresco of Christ and the evangelists. They were holding services when we walked over, so we just ducked our heads in and continued east, through the park north of Diocletian’s Palace. There are lots of Roman soldier impersonators in Split, several were performing at the Golden Gate. Brett chatted some of them up, they belong to an official guild that coordinates where they perform, how they interact with the public, and hours. A more organized, and public-facing, version of our Civil War re-enactors.
The Gallery of Fine Arts was built as a Victorian-era hospital, converted to a museum of socialism, then the art museum in 1991. Amazing space, light and open, with a clean-lined garden and galleries. Ground floor had a dreadful show of contemporary art from the Czech Republic on the theme “slow”. Upstairs, the permanent collection is organized chronologically from Venetian Gothic to Paris- and London-trained artists of the 20th Century. Some good and unknown-to-us Salon-trained and Impressionist artists, and social criticism inspired by Georg Grosz on Croat guestworkers in Germany. Big gallery of photographers of their civil war, but we did not see what they saw: they were no Robert Capas.
Entered the Old City via the Golden Gate. The northern half of the palace had been for Diocletian’s workers: troops, servants, slaves, administrators. So, no grand buildings, but we were able to wander the alleys in a rough oval path. Some of the medieval/later buildings have been removed for archaeological research, leaving garden-overgrown ruins. It’s tricky, the city is like if only one canvas had been passed through the hands of Western artists for 1000 years: which level do you reveal? Gothic? Leonardo’s? Paul Cezanne’s? Out the eastern gate to the Green Market, with farmers in the middle and tourist tat surrounding. Picked up a nifty t-shirt bearing a map of Croatia. For lunch stopped at a restaurant we’d seen by the Golden Gate, Mediterraneo: posip, seafood pasta, octopus salad, grilled veg. The portions everywhere are huge, the food delicious: if all you do on a trip to Croatia is eat and drink wine, you will be a happy camper.
We returned to see the undercroft of the Palace. This is the best place to experience the ancient building; massive vaulted brick galleries with a few displays, and excellent placards explaining the engineering, history, and archaeology. Walked back to the apartment exploring the more northern parts of the Veli Varos neighborhood. Don’t bother: as they climb the hill, streets branch in a tree pattern, like in the Hollywood Hills, where each street leads to a small district unconnected to anything else, full of similar homes converted to tourist rental. Any retail action/interest is on the lower slopes that we’d already experienced. Rested up, then back to the Pjaca (pronounce it “piazza”, the j is always a y, and c usually ts) for a gelato and tour of the medieval Town Hall. Latter had a show of a mediocre contemporary Italian painter, but views from the windows made it worth exploring. Checked out the Atrium, where Plaka singers sometimes congregate, but not this afternoon, then an alley wander around Diocletian’s living quarters in the southern half of the Palace. My sugars were still low, so we got a chocolate pastry at Bobis, a chain of bakery/ice cream parlors, then back to the apartment.
Enjoyed happy hour with the gang. Brett, Ira, and Eleanor had taken a ferry to the island of Brac to visit a friend; Claudia a bus tour of Krka National Park for the waterfall and Trogir for the castle. We all got dinner together at Salatina on Trg Republike. This restaurant specializes in package tours, but kindly made space for us in their arcade out of the drizzle. Even the prix fixe package meal was good: octopus, chicken with the most pillowy gnocchi I’ve ever eaten, fish over blitva, with semifreddo and a baked pear with mascarpone for dessert.
Monday, May 20
Our last group breakfast, then we and Eleanor headed back to Our Lady of Health to see the interior. Walked north to the Archaeological Museum, which has the best of the finds from Roman Salona. The community had recently run a highway through a cemetery at the site, and the temporary show was about Roman burial practices and recent finds during that construction. Fantastic collections in the museum’s gardens of architectural fragments and sculpture. Eleanor was trying to negotiate the bus up to Salona with museum staff when …
Our apartment disappeared.
I had been in communication with our landlady about a driver to the airport the next morning. She WhatsApp’ed me, asking where we would be staying that night, so she would know where to send the car. I replied at the apartment on Krizeva, she replied that no, she had other tenants coming in that afternoon, and weren’t we packed? I got her in touch with Brett, and she was right, we had misread our dates. We rushed back to the apartment, where I booked a hotel near Split Airport for the evening while Michael hurriedly packed us a few minutes ahead of the cleaning lady. Brett and Ira got another AirBnB up the street from Krizeva, and Eleanor and Claudia were able to extend their lodgings for the final night.
We all left our bags in the women’s apartment and got a final Croatian lunch together at Tinel on our local Trg Sperun: prsut, fish stew, salad, posip. Said goodbye to our friends, and took a last walk around the old city. This time there were Plaka singers in the Atrium; the round shape of the space makes the folk singers sound amazing, even if we didn’t know what we were listening to. We got our bags and a cab and were off through the tunnel under Marjan Park to Hotel Adria in Kastela. Traffic was tortuous; be aware that your cab driver is not cheating you, but fares are based upon both time and distance in Split. The hotel is nothing special, maybe twelve rooms, but inexpensive, near, and with a free shuttle to the airport next morning. We rested up and went on a quest for dinner. Kastela had once been a place of retreat for Split’s affluent, then became a beach resort (probably under Tito, when all citizens were entitled to an annual vacation). We think our hotel dates to then. No restaurants were open in the neighborhood, but we found several grocery stores and a bakery where we pulled together components for an unsatisfying dinner. We took a final post-prandial walk on the highway, past olive groves and lots of new construction for young families.
Tuesday, May 21
Our driver was ready for us at 5:45, and Split Airport was decent. We had read several poor reviews of it, but suspect it was recently rebuilt. They had a nice café/bar upstairs for breakfast, then we checked our bags through to Dulles and caught our Croatian Airlines flight out. A six-hour layover in Munich gave us time to check out this great airport, and a nice pretzel-und-weisswurst lunch. Michael made the mistake of getting the “farmers’ plate”, their curried veg option; it’s mediocre, don’t. Lufthansa had us back to D.C., and we were in Boston House after having stayed awake for 27 hours. Can’t recommend that, but can definitely recommend Croatia.
Eleanor flew back a day later, after catching a three-hour bus from Split to Dubrovnik. Stayed her last night at a Sheraton on the coast, close-ish to Dubrovnik’s airport. Caught a public bus into the old city her last night, reports that was a little adventure. Claudia returned to Istanbul before D.C. Brett and Ira rented a car and drove up to Plitvice Lakes National Park, also famous for its waterfalls, then Zagreb.
Final thoughts on the country:
If you see a Bobis or Mlinar, get something. Their baked goods are brilliant, even just a hot dog cooked in dough. Boreks are a great snack-on-the-run. Their pita is fluffier than we are used to, more like a foccacia, and so good. Drink the wines, order the ajvar. Most of all, order the seafood: Croatians know how to cook it brilliantly.
Catholicism is a stand-in for patriotism. Probably this was accentuated by the civil war, when the main difference between antagonists was the presence or shape of the crucifix around your neck, and the resulting cruelty inhumane. Churches are fuller than we’ve seen in most European countries.
Hajduk, the local football/soccer team, runs a close second. People are proud to relay how the entire team enlisted during the war, and their successes during. I suspect it makes the crowds on game days seem more like participants at a Trump rally, in similar settings. I would not want to be around for a Split-Belgrade soccer match.
Croatia has the tiniest trash cans we’ve ever seen, exceeding those (or lack of them) in Tokyo. If you can’t see one on the street, try looking up at chest level, where one could be screwed into the wall.
Their screw-top soda and water bottles are designed so the cap stays attached to the bottle. Great in terms of preventing street trash, but it takes a bit to learn how to drink without dribbling.
Croatian vocabulary
Most residents of Yugoslavia once spoke Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language with lots of Romance language overlap. The successor nations are investing much energy in separating their tongues, although they can still easily understand each other. Croats use the Latin alphabet, for example, and Serbs Cyrillic. The consonant combinations can be near unpronounceable. On the plus side, like Spanish, it is pronounced the way it’s spelled, very regularly. J is always a Y, and where we use th, sh, and ch, they have created letters with tails or bars through them that connote those same sounds. Once you learn them everything is easier. Feel free to not pronounce a leading h, you’ll never get it, and will sound silly.
Or, just stick with English. There are only four million Croatians, not enough for them to bother dubbing foreign shows, just subtitling. Croatians have grown up learning Seinfeld/Grey’s Anatomy/Dr. Who English on their TV’s. Not enough to be fluent, but a lot more than they expect any tourist to learn Croatian. Still, it is a kindness to at least be able to say please, thank you, and excuse me in the words they’re used to, hence this list. The phrase “I’m sorry, I’m a stupid American”, can buy a lot of goodwill when you want a ferry ticket and know you’re holding up the line behind you.
