Rambling with Rolf

Higgledy-piggledy Dalmatia on The Adriatic

Dalmatia is one of those places that changes its name at the drop of a hat.  

In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night it was Illyria.   More recently, we knew it as Yugoslavia.   Now it has fragmented into Montenegro, Croatia, and tiny snippets of Bosnia Herzegovina and Slovenia.   As an approximation, let's just say that Dalmatia is that stretch of the eastern Adriatic between Albania and Italy.

    At the bottom, there's Montenegro, a name we can now safely use after the referendum of May 21st 2006, when Montenegro just managed the 55% necessary to split from Serbia, thus killing off the last remnant of what had once been Yugoslavia.

    Montenegro may be small, but geographically it's very distinctive.  Whereas much of the Dalmatian coast runs fairly straight and is protected by long splinter-like islands, Montenegro's short coastline is punctured by a spectacular, Norwegian-type fjord, known as Kotor Bay, approached by an old multi-hairpin road, built by the Austrians in the 1890's.   Down at sea level, there's the town of Perast, much battered down the ages, but especially so by the big earthquake of 1979.

    Montenegro's other claim to fame is Sveti Stefan, a tiny off-shore island, which by the late 1950's had become semi-derelict.   However, spotting the chance for some much-needed hard currency, Tito's communists kicked out Sveti Stefan's last 20 inhabitants and then converted the island into a resort for the super-rich.   One suite was rumored to sell for $1500 a night – a truly astronomical figure in the 1960s.  

    The Balkan wars of the 1990's dispersed the jet-set to safer spots, since when Sveti Stefan has made erratic progress.   By the early 2000's, it was back in business pretending to be a swanky resort again, but succeeding only on garnering terrible comments for food and service.   Recently a consortium has announced plans for a complete re-vamp, but this will need plenty of cash and an infusion of staff prepared to smile at guests.  

    Montenegro is only a short appetizer on the long Dalmatian coast, most of which is controlled by Croatia, a country which in the local lingo starts with the letter H and is spelled HRVATSKA.   This is not just a useless bit of information, because Croatia's international code, for both vehicles and internet domain, is HR.   The country is a very odd crescent shape -  down at the bottom reducing to just a mile or two in depth, and then interrupted by a tiny sliver of Bosnia, to give that country a few yards of access to the sea.

     Just about the first place we come to on the Croatian coast is Dubrovnik on right.   When I first drove this way, back in the mid 1980's, everything was Yugoslavia and no one gave a thought to the fact that the main road, which gives a wonderful aerial view of the old city, was not part of the Yugoslav republic of Croatia.   The rude awakening came in October 1991, when Yugoslavia fell apart and the Serbs used their control of the high ground to lob shells onto Dubrovnik.

     The siege lasted seven months and although this battered the old town, the ammunition used was mostly smallish grenades, which scattered roof tiles to the four winds, but left the basic city structure more or less intact.   When things had simmered down and people could consider a return to normality, they discovered that they had one priceless asset;   Dubrovnik was a world heritage site and famous:  it had celebrity status, so soon money started pouring in for all the repair work.  

     Today you'll find that Dubrovnik is not only back to normal, but in fact BETTER than it was before, because the panorama from the battlement walk shows a vista of new roof tiles, most of the ancient ones having been victims of Serb shells.

    Considering that everyone speaks similar versions of the same language, one of the strangest aspects of driving the Dalmatian coast road in the 1980's was the bewildering change between Roman and Cyrillic letters.   Coming from the north you'd be nicely in the comfort zone of familiar signs, only to suddenly find yourself in foreign territory:  a few miles further on and Roman letters would be back, only for them to disappear again round the next bend.

Welcome to this ethnic whirlpool

    This was the classic fault line of the Balkans, Vienna and Constantinople clashing in an ethnic whirlpool  - to the north  Europe, but pulsing up from Asia to the south, the Ottoman Turks. 

    As the British found when they had to partition India in 1947, different ethnic groups don't separate into nice tidy divisions, but mix higgledy-piggledy, so that if it comes to blows, it's almost impossible to disentangle the combatants.
   
     The historian Niall Ferguson has the ominous theory that  ethnic warfare tends to occur in precisely those areas where you would least expect it - where communities appear to have integrated well and even intermarried.   This was certainly so in the former Yugoslavia, where for years strongman Tito - himself the product of a Croatian father and Slovenian mother - kept a firm lid on any nonsense and where, as a result,  Muslims and Christians, Serbs, Slovenes and Croats lived in reasonable harmony, and to some extent intermarried.   

    All to no avail, when central authority finally broke down - a cautionary tale for any country with a diverse racial mix.   Disasters often come out of a clear blue sky, revolutions when you least expect them.   Lenin's Bolshevik revolution of 1917 came when Russia was experiencing the fastest economic growth and urbanization of any country in Europe.

    And in Iran, where I spent a lot of time in the 1970's, the Shah seemed to be doing a pretty good job of dragging his country out of the dark ages.   Again, all to no avail.      Ever since, the Mullahs have been driving Iran furiously backward.

Is the current affection for the nation state a bad idea?

    So here's an absurd and politically INcorrect thought:   Is our current affection for the nation state really all its cracked up to be?      If we can distance ourselves from current fashions and  look at history quite clinically, a good case can be made for rehabilitating that despised word, the Empire.   At their peaks, both the Roman and British empires worked extraordinarily well, enabling all races and creeds within them to earn their crusts without the fear of being put to the sword.   Even when past their prime, Empires could continue to offer good service.   The latter-day Austrian Hapsburgs and Turkish Ottomans were widely derided, but tottered along without too much friction until pretty near the end.   Is it a coincidence that the 20th. century, surely the bloodiest in the history of mankind,  also saw the triumph of the nation state?

     But back to Dalmatia, which after Dubrovnik increasingly comes to mean the long, splinter-like off-shore islands I mentioned earlier, first Korcula on right, with its tiny but lovely old walled town, then the more wide-open attractions of Hvar, where we were entertained for over two hours by a local dance group.

    Croatia is very much an up-and-coming tourist destination and for that reason is not particularly cheap:  having said that, we had our most reasonable meal in Hvar, probably because here there's real competition.    On one of the smaller, less popular islands, I disgraced myself with the involuntary exclamation “outrageous”, when presented with the bill.  One modest scorpion fish - admittedly shared between three people – had set us back over one hundred dollars.   The Med is coming close to being fished-out, with prices reflecting this, so I should have known better.

    Although the food can be excellent, it's not only the prices you have to watch.   Most countries have plenty of opportunities for “fast food”.  In Croatia I snapped a restaurant sign advertising “slow food”, and they weren't kidding.   Our record slow from entering a restaurant to delivery of main course was one and a half hours.  

The Croatians must have upset the gods

    Next island along from Hvar is called Brac, which is the proud possessor of Croatia's most famous beach, at Bol.  It looks lovely from a distance, but don't be deceived:  the Adriatic is a curious sea, mostly sandy beaches on the Italian side, but close on 100% rock and pebbles across in Croatia.   The Croatians must have upset the gods somehow, because no sooner do you move south to Montenegro - and even more to Albania – than the sand miraculously reappears also on the Adriatic's eastern shore.  

    Bol beach runs true to form in being composed of large shingle – very hard on the bum.   It is also a wandering beach, changing its shape according to the winds, of which there are two main varieties;  the Bora, which howls in from the north and the southerly Scirocco, known locally as the Yugo – By the way, Yugo simply means south, so Yugoslavia was the country of the south Slavs.   Too much Yugo wind is said to drive you mad, so if a wife murders her husband while it's blowing, the courts will immediately find her innocent.   But ladies - Please don't quote me on this, and test it out.

    An island which is only beginning the long trek toward tourist glory is the one stuck furthest out in the Adriatic, Vis, a military no-go zone until 1989, but now fully open to foreigners.   I mention Vis, because it was here, in 1944, that Tito, the Yugoslav partisan leader, had to go into hiding to escape the  Germans.  

Tito, once saved by his faithful dog

     The beginning of world war two saw Yugoslavia in a state of typically Balkan chaos.  There were the home-grown fascists, called the Ustase, and, after the German invasion, two rival guerrilla groups – the Chetniks and Tito's communists.  Tito found himself fighting the Ustase and Chetniks almost as much as the Germans.  

    At first Britain and America supported the right-wing Chetniks, but when Tito was seen to be doing the business against the Germans much more effectively, the west changed its support to the communists.   This brought down on Tito's head the full wrath of the Nazis, who nearly caught him on three occasions – once he was only saved by his faithful dog.   The last and closest Nazi attempt to catch him came in May 1944, when Tito managed to escape to a cave on Vis.   It was such a well-kept secret, that even the locals had no idea he was there.

    The Dalmatian splinter-islands are only part of the story.   Behind them, on the mainland, are all sorts of urban treasures, architectural clones of Venice, which for centuries controlled a string of trading cities, not only in Dalmatia, but also down into Greece and round the corner into the Aegean.   There is the old walled city of Trogir, very similar to Dubrovnik, but not nearly so famous and therefore much less crowded:  and the big port of Split, home of the Roman emperor Diocletian, whose palace you can still inspect.  

    After that, it's not far to the Istrian peninsula, and the second of the tiny coastal enclaves that interrupt the Croatian hegemony.   This time it's the turn of Slovenia to be granted its minuscule access to the sea, most notably in the lovely old town of Piran, another very Venetian place.   

    Of all the old Yugoslav republics, Slovenia seems the most out of place, as if it fell into Tito's lap by accident.   Slovenia is classic Mittel-Europa, Austro-Hungarian and Hapsburg to the core.   Bled could easily be Austria – indeed the border is only a few miles away.   And Ljubljana is one of the coziest and least pretentious of European capitals.

A confusing 5-way tug-of war where they ration their vowels

    Over the centuries, this top right-hand corner of the Adriatic has been the subject of a desperately confusing five-way tug-of war..... Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Hungary and Austria all competing for access to the sea or simply desirable land.    Even if I could master the complex politics, this would probably take several hours to explain, so let's just pick on a couple of places to illustrate the point.

    First Trieste, which if you're in Slovenia you'll see signposted as TRST - in this part of the world, they ration their vowels.   Having been the premier port of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, Trieste then became Italian, but when, at the end of world war two Tito occupied the city, intending to incorporate it into his new communist Yugoslavia, Trieste became a cold war flashpoint.   In an effort to defuse the situation, it was made a free territory in 1947, part of Italy again in 1954, but only finally sorted out in 1975, with the treaty of Osima.

The man who would be king

    Even more bizarre, has been the fortunes of the town formerly known as Fiume, once the main port for Hungary.   To learn more we need to travel to the southern foothills of the Alps, to lake Garda, and the monument to a name once on everyone's lips, but now totally forgotten – Gabriele d'Annunzio on right.  At Lake Garda's pilgrimage site to Italian nationalism, you'll find not only d'Annunzio's monster mausoleum, but also, halfway up a hill, the stranded remains of  Puglia, the boat used  in his Istrian revolt.

    The year was 1919, when politicians were trying to decide what to do with the various bits of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.   d'Annunzio, who was a poet and high-profile maverick, reckoned that the Italians were about to give away what he regarded as his family home, so he simply got together a private army and invaded Fiume.   There he set up his own little country, complete with its own postage stamps, and then declared war on his homeland, Italy.

    Much embarrassed, the Italian government had little option but to respond, which they did by bombing Fiume and ejecting d'Annunzio.   In the short term d'Annunzio had the last laugh, because in 1922 Mussolini came to power and confirmed Fiume as Italian, but it all ended in tears after the second world war, when Tito marched in, executed all prominent fascists, renamed the place Rijeka – which is how we know it today - and incorporated it into the Yugoslav republic of Croatia.   Although Tito's break with Moscow made him the west's favorite communist, he did not mess about when it came to dealing with his rivals:  in the immediate aftermath of the war, Tito was up there with the best in liquidating the opposition.

    From Istria it's only a quick hop-step-and-jump to Dalmatia's one-time master, Venice – but that's another story.

By Rolf Richardson,  11 Wootton road,  Henley. Oxon.  RG9 1QD, UK. Rolfrich@aol.com

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Editor's Note: If you want to know a little more about this same area, read this story about an 11 day voyage on a Croatian ship here.