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I’m befuddled and disappointed when people I meet still ask the question, “is it safe to travel in Croatia?” These people haven’t realized that the war in Croatia ended more than ten years ago, and they’re worried about being ethnically cleansed or something. Sure, there are a few out-of-the-way minefields that have yet to be cleared, but tourists to Croatia obviously need to drop this idea, way past its sell-by date, that Croatia is a war zone.

However… there’s something that poses a much greater danger to tourists in Croatia than armies fighting. Yes, I’m talking about vampires. Your odds of being attacked by a vampire are at least as high as your odds of being attacked by Slobodan Milosevic’s soldiers (though I have wondered whether bloodthirsty Slobo, the “Butcher of the Balkans,” himself might be a vampire). The fact is, Croatia has a very long, and very scary tradition of vampire legends.

Inland regions, like Lika in Dalmatia, are rich in peasant traditions about supernatural creatures. The Italian Enlightenment writer Alberto Fortis, who documented Dalmatian peasant customs extensively in the 1770s, reported that beliefs in witches, fairies, and vampires were very widespread. People in particular were worried about a creature known as the vukodlak, which is a human corpse animated by the breath of the devil and swollen with the blood of victims it has feasted upon. Hence the peasants undertook a regular precaution against any recently deceased person who, it was feared, might become a vampire or vukodlak: they cut the person’s hamstrings to make sure that he or she could not walk around after death!

In Istria, too, people had to take measures to protect themselves from vampires. The Slovene writer J.V. Valvasor described some of the customs in a 1689 book:

“The people of the Istrian countryside are firmly convinced that sorcerers suck the blood of children. This sucker of blood they call ’strigon’ or ‘vedavec.’ They believe that after his death a ’strigon’ wanders about the village around midnight, knocking at, or striking, doors and that someone will die within days in the house whose doors he has struck. And if someone dies during this period, the peasants insist that the ’strigon’ has eaten him. Even worse is the belief of these gullible peasants that the wandering ’strigoni’ furtively creep into their beds and sleep with their wives without ever letting out a single word. I am particularly concerned about the belief that flesh-and-blood ghosts somehow sneak into the houses and sleep with widows, particularly if they are still young and beautiful. They are so convinced of the truth of all this, that fear will not leave them till they can impale the ’strigon’ with a pole from an ash-tree. With this in mind the bravest, determined to do it, wait until after midnight because before then the ’strigon’ is not in the grave but wanders about. Then they go to the cemetery, open the grave and drive the pole, thick as a fist or a hand, through his belly, disfiguring him horribly. The blood now starts to flow and the body thrashes about as though it were alive and felt the pain. Then they close the coffin , bury it once again and go home.

This practice, of opening a coffin and piercing the corpse with a pole, is not unusual amongst the Istrians of the countryside, that is to say amongst the peasants. Although the authorities impose very severe penalties if they discover it, since it is against religious beliefs, nevertheless it takes place very frequently…”

Croatia’s most famous vampire, however, is undoubtedly Jure Grando, who terrorized the Istrian village of Kringa in the 1670s. Grando in many ways is the archetypal vampire, and though his legend is certainly lesser known than that of Dracula, it has nonetheless managed to capture imaginations for hundreds of years. Here’s an excerpt from an 1856 newspaper article about Grando:

“In 1672 there dwelt in the market town of Kring, in the Archduchy of Krain, a man named George Grando, who died, and was buried by Father George, a monk of St. Paul, who, on returning to the widow’s house, saw Grando sitting behind the door. The monk and the neighbours fled. Soon stories began to circulate of a dark figure being seen to go about the streets by night, stopping now and then to tap at the door of a house, but never to wait for an answer. In a little while people began to die mysteriously in Kring, and it was noticed that the deaths occurred in the houses at which the spectred figure had tapped its signal. The widow Grando also complained that she was tormented by the spirit of her husband, who night after night threw her into a deep sleep with the object of sucking her blood. The Supan, or chief magistrate, of Kring decided to take the usual steps to ascertain whether Grando was a vampire. He called together some of the neighbours, fortified them with a plentyful supply of spirituous liquor, and they sallied off with torches and a crucifix.

Grando’s grave was opened, and the body was found to be perfectly sound and not decomposed, the mouth being opened with a pleasant smile, and there was rosy flush on the cheeks. The whole party were seized with terror and hurried back to Kring, with the exception of the Supan. The second visit was made in company with a priest, and the party also took a heavy stick of hawthorn sharpened to a point. The grave and body were found to be exactly as they had been left. The priest kneeled down solemnly and held the crucifix aloft: “O vampire, look at this,” he said; “here is Jesus Christ who loosed us from the pains of hell and died for us upon the tree!”

He went on to address the corpse, when it was seen that great tears were rolling down the vampire’s cheeks. A hawthorn stake was brought forward, and as often as they strove to drive it through the body the sharpened wood rebounded, and it was not until one of the number sprang into the grave and cut off the vampire’s head that the evil spirit departed with a loud shriek and a contortion of the limbs.”

The moral of these stories? Forget these antiquated notions of Croatia being war-torn; you’re much more likely to confront (the not so antiquated??) threat of vampires. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Thanks to the wonderful site Istrianet.org for the Valvasor and Grando texts. Here’s an article in English on recent interest in the Grando legend, and here’s one in Croatian.

Every summer as I travel the Adriatic highway north towards Slovenia, I’ve passed a town outside the bigger city of Rijeka that has caught my attention. The town is named Bakar, and it’s very cute, crowned by a castle, and huddling in one corner of a lovely bay. However, this cute town suffered during communist times from the terrible blight of having a giant coal plant plopped right down on the bay. So I’ve long wondered about Bakar and its history… and this is the story.

Though it seems small today, with a population of about 1500 people, Bakar was once a major Adriatic port town. It started small, of course, probably settled by Illyrian tribes in the few centuries before Christ. The Illyrians may have tried to mine copper in the area–and in fact, one theory of how Bakar gets its name is from the minerals in the neighborhood, since “bakar” means “copper” in Croatian.

Bakar only began to bloom, though, in the Middle Ages. The town belonged to one of the two most important noble families in Croatian history, the Zrinski family. In the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, the Zrinskis were almost like regional kings, so vast were their holdings. Their lands stretched from what is today Hungary all the way to Bakar on the sea, and in one area their estates were strung together consecutively over a distance of 200 kilometers.

Under the Zrinskis, Bakar developed into one of the most important ports in the northern Adriatic. For decades it was the main outlet to the sea for the joint Hungarian-Croatian kingdom. Ships carrying salt, timber, olive oil, wax, skins, as well as books constantly came and went from Bakar’s harbor. Particularly in the later 1500s, once the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans had cut off many of the overland routes from more southerly Adriatic ports, Bakar’s dominance over trade increased. Even the great maritime republic of Ragusa (known today as Dubrovnik), Venice’s long-time rival in the Adriatic, ended up using Bakar as an outlet for commerce. Bakar’s main competitor at this time was Rijeka, the port just a few kilometers to the north.

By the end of the 1600s, though, Bakar’s star began to fade. One factor in its decline was the demise of the Zrinski family, which was largely wiped out by the Habsburgs after a conspiracy instigated by the Zrinskis to free Croatia from Habsburg rule. As part of that conspiracy, Petar Zrinski actually invited Louis XIV to land armies at Bakar for an invasion of Croatia that would make Louis the new king! Even once it lost its aristocratic patrons, Bakar was still a notable town. According to the 1787 census, for example, Bakar had a population of 7600 people, more than competitor Rijeka’s 6000. Bakar in those days in fact dwarfed Zagreb, the present-day capital, which in 1787 had only 3000 people; today Zagreb counts nearly a million.

The nineteenth century, though, brought two detrimental developments to Bakar. One was the rise of steamships. Bakar had been a significant shipbuilding center, but that was for sailing ships, which quickly became obsolete in the face of commercial shipping powered by steam. Then, in 1883, the railway connecting the coast to the interior bypassed Bakar: it went to Rijeka instead, thus ensuring Rijeka’s growth into the major industrial port of Austria-Hungary.

So Bakar entered a period of slow decline. The truly toxic development, however, that was nearly the nail in the town’s coffin, came in the 1970s, when communist Yugoslavia decided to build the coal plant in the harbor. This plant, together with the nearby oil refinery, brought serious environmental damage to Bakar’s bay. The damage became apparently quickly. For centuries the people of Bakar had produced a sparkling wine, Bakarska vodica, that was all but killed off by the coal plant’s pollution. The bay had once supported a sizeable tuna fishery as well, but that industry also died out as the water became contaminated and tuna were over-fished.

Seeing this giant coal plant in such a lovely bay, and located so near such a charming little town, was pretty monstrous, as I can attest. I couldn’t find any pictures of the plant, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The good news is that in 1995, after twenty years of operation, the plant was dismantled. Today there are big, barren fields right by the water where the whole industrial complex once sat, but fortunately the real eyesore is gone.

So now, after the tough economic times of the 1990s, the citizens of Bakar are trying to decide how to climb back on the road to prosperity. There’s a push for increased tourism, but there are also ideas for expanding some (less invasive) industrial development nearby. Bakar will probably never regain the prominent status it once had. But I bet in the coming years the town will be spruced up–even though the road still passes it by, since the new Adriatic superhighway perches on the hills far above. My advice is to get off the superhighway and head down to the water, and check out this charming little seaside down that has seen some glory days and some dark days in its more than 800 year history.

There are two particular islands in the Adriatic that I associate with Yugoslavia’s communist regime under its founder, Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Neither of these two islands, frankly, show Tito and his regime in a very positive light. The first island–or rather, archipelago of islands–are the Brijuni Islands, Tito’s favorite summer resort. The second is Goli Otok, communist Yugoslavia’s prison island.

 Brijuni

The Brijuni Islands (or “Brioni,” as they’re known by their Italian name) sit just 3 km off the coast of Istria, not too far from the city of Pula. This archipelago has quite a history. The remains of dinosaurs and Stone Age humans have both been found here. In Roman times, patricians built luxurious residences on the islands. The Byzantines, worried more about defense than luxury, constructed a fort. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, luxury was back: an Austrian industrial magnate by the name of Paul Kupelwieser bought the archipelago and built villas, hotels, and parks.

In his own day, Tito picked up on that era of Austro-Hungarian swank and had his “summer palace” here–fitting, perhaps, for the man referred to by the great English historian A.J.P. Taylor as “the last Habsburg.” But Tito did live in style, reserving the island of Vanga for his palace and the larger island of Veli Brijun for his guests. And there were some posh guests, too, both before and during Tito’s time: the likes of Josephine Baker, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sophia Loren all glammed up Brijuni. Tito also hosted some rather less beautiful but perhaps more powerful guests, including some of the most important political figures of the day. In 1956 Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, and Tito started the Nonaligned Movement here, an important initiative in the Cold War.

It was common for visiting foreign leaders to give Tito some gifts–and often the gifts were animals. So over the years quite a menagerie was built up on Veli Brijun. Tito probably even shot some of them, since he maintained a private hunting reserve here. Today, though, two elephants given by Indira Gahdhi in 1975 still enjoy the island lifestyle. You can also meet one of Tito’s pet parrots who has outlived his Marshal. The islands are a significant nature reserve in their own right, with some 700 types of plants, including stone oaks that are hundreds of years old, and 250 different bird species.

The islands were made a national park in 1983, three years after Tito’s death. Nowadays the public can visit just two of the islands, Mali Brijun and Veli Brijun. You take a ferry over for a daytrip, or you can stay the night. It can be pretty nice, though, since cars aren’t allowed on the islands they’re fairly peaceful. So it’s a unique chance to live the life of a communist satrap.

 Goli Otok prison

Goli Otok, on the other hand, is not so pleasant. Its name means “Bare Island,” though it could also be called “Yugoslavia’s Alcatraz.” Both names are apt: Goli Otok is a forbidding lump of rock out in the Adriatic, nearest the island of Rab.

After Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, Goli Otok became for five years the site of “re-education” for Yugoslav communists whom Tito suspected of being a little too friendly with Uncle Joe in Moscow. This re-education involved forced labor in the island’s quarry and frequent beatings. Despite Tito’s paranoia about Stalin’s threats to Yugoslavia, many of the prisoners may not have been guilty of much of anything–for some, their only “crime” was not agreeing with Tito and daring to say so. In later decades, people were sent here for other offenses as well, such as deserting from the army.

In fact, one of my friends’ fathers did his military service on the island as a guard. He didn’t like being a guard there, watching over people who had only dared to speak their minds, but for each year you served as a guard on Goli Otok, it counted for two years of your military service, so you could get out more quickly. Most of the Yugoslav public didn’t know about Goli Otok and what went on there, however; the regime didn’t even acknowledge the prison’s existence until the 1980s.

The prison was shut down in 1988 and abandoned in 1989. Today you can only get out there with your own boat. It’s a historically resonant place, but there is not a whole lot to see, mostly various crumbling structures. This is a pretty comprehensive site about Goli Otok if you want to know more.

My first book was recently published — and copies are positively flying off the shelves! Admittedly, the book doesn’t have much to do with the Adriatic. But it is about Central European cultural history, so that’s pretty close to what I do on this site.

The book is Music Makes the Nation, and it explores how music was used in nineteenth-century nationalist movements. I focus on three influential nationalist composers: Richard Wagner in Germany, Bedrich Smetana in the Czech lands, and Edvard Grieg in Norway. If you’re interested in art, politics, and how some of the greatest musical works of all time played an important role in history, then click on over to Amazon.com and order copies for yourself and everyone you know!

Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe

In other news, the blog will be slowing down a bit in the coming months. I’ll be spending much of the summer on the road in Europe, and when I’m not traveling, I’ll be working hard writing A Traveller’s History of Croatia, which will be published by Interlink Publishers in the US and Arris Books in the UK. So even if my thousands of loyal fans are disappointed at sporadic blog posts, you’ll have the new Croatia book to look forward to!

Glagolitic is an unusual script pre-dating Cyrillic that was once used in Croata particularly for liturgical purposes. Most tourists, probably hearing about Glagolitic for the first time, would shrug their shoulders and say, “So what?” But Glagolitic has a symbolic importance for nationalistic Croatians–to them, it represents an early cultural achievement that distinguished Croatian culture. The Croatians, you see, were allowed to have both services in their own language and religious documents written in Glagolitic, way back in the ninth century CE when the popes required the rest of Western Christendom to use Latin.

Still, “so what,” right? Well, what should make Glagolitic interesting for the average tourist today is a series of monuments built in Istria in 1977. Back in that year Josip Bratulic and Zelimir Janes created eleven sculptures along the seven kilometer route between the towns of Hum and Roc. These sculptures are all pretty modest–no overblown socialist realism statues here–but following this route is a great way to learn something about Croatian culture and see a bit of the beautiful Istrian countryside.

The Glagolitic Alley begins just outside the town of Roc, not too far away from the resort town of Opatija, which makes a good base for exploring this part of Istria. The first monument you come to on the Alley is the symbol of the Cakavski sabor, the group that designed and executed the art along the route. This first sculpture takes the form of the Glagolitic letter for “s,” which also stands for the “s” in the Cakavski sabor’s name.

The next sculpture is my favorite. It’s the Table of Saints Cyril and Methodius. These were the two brothers, originally Greek monks, who are credited with doing the most to Christianize the Slavs. Part of that project involved creating an alphabet the Slavs could use: first Cyril created Glagolitic, and then later Cyrillic. Obviously Cyrillic has persisted as the alphabet for some of the Slavs, like the Serbs, Russians, and Bulgarians, even though the Croatians, Czechs, Slovenes, Poles and Slovaks all use the Latin alphabet now. The Table symbolizes gathering, the gathering of the Croatians around their script. It overlooks a lovely valley, with a cypress tree to keep it company.

Along the route there are then monuments to Kliment of Ohrid, a student of Cyril and Methodius; to the oldest Croatian documents written in Glagolitic; to persecuted Croatian Protestants and other “heretics”; to the great tenth century bishop Grgur of Nin who fought to preserve Croatian autonomy within the Latin Church; to the first book printed in the Croatian language; and to the residents of Hum for struggling to maintain peace and freedom throughout their history. This is a picture of another of my favorites among the sculptures, representing the nearby Mt. Ucka–here with a stone atop, recalling what locals call the “hat” of clouds the mountain sometimes wears:

The Glagolitic Alley ends at the gate of tiny Hum, which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s smallest village.” Only about twenty people still live there, but it’s a very cute example of the typical fortified hilltowns of the Istrian interior. Hum has a decent little restaurant, the Humska konoba, where you can stop and have some of the classic Istrian pasta with truffles, and try the locally-made mistletoe liquor:

So even if Glagolitic seems awfully obscure, at the very least it’s a good excuse for a beautiful drive or bike ride through the Istrian countryside! I took most of the pictures here from this website, which has some more decent images of the Glagolitic Alley. And here’s a link to a GoogleMap of the route.

I once knew a guy who was into re-enacting World War Two battles. One time he was going to jump out of an airplane with his whole re-enactment “battalion” to make believe some parachuted-in firefight in France. The only problem was that the skydiving company wouldn’t let him jump with the rest of his group… because this guy was too fat.

What does this story have to do the Adriatic? Well, it tells you that re-enacting historical battles can be silly but kind of fun. It also tells you that people today are often fatter than they were in history. All of these lessons apply to Korcula’s annual re-enactment of one of the greatest naval battles in medieval Europe.

 Korcula

This battle was a titanic clash in 1298 between the rival fleets of Venice and Genoa. Venice launched some 95 ships at the Genoans, who were seriously outnumbered. Legend has it that among those sailing for Venice was none other than Marco Polo, who, also according to legend, called Korcula his hometown.

Fortune was not with Marco Polo and the Venetians that day in early September some seven hundred years ago. The Venetian commander, son of the doge, was killed. Of those 95 ships, the Venetians lost 85. And despite being outnumbered, the hardy Genoans managed to kill 9000 of their enemies. Even Marco Polo was supposedly taken prisoner and thrown into a cell in Genoa… where he began dictating the memoirs of his travels, which subsequently became famous, and remain so until this day.

Much more recently–just a few years ago, in fact–the people of Korcula began re-enacting this storied battle as both a commemoration and a tourist bonanza. I was there last September when the re-enactment took place. It was indeed a little bit silly. Korculan guys paraded around in medieval outfits. Actors, including one portraying Marco Polo, delivered somewhat cheesy speeches in Croatian that very few of the tourist onlookers actually understood. A bunch of excursion boats sailed around in the strait between Korcula and the Peljesac peninsula, pretending to attack each other in the very same waters where once the soldiers and sailors really were at each others’ throats.

But hey, it was fun. It’s a bit of low-key spectacle. The Korculans do their best. And it is kind of a neat way to connect to a stirring historical event. I’ve included a few of my pictures from that day, but if you want to check out a pretty good, edited video of the whole festivities, surf over to this site.

For a more in-depth account of the historical event, see this summary.

Nudity in Croatia has a very long history: some of the very first people there were naked. In fact, if you go far enough back, people actually had to put clothes on (like bear skins and loincloths) before they could take them off. These days, you can’t stop people from taking their clothes off in Croatia. So popular is naturism in this country that on the tours I lead, for example, as soon as we cross the border into Croatia, I make everyone on the bus drop trou.

No, it’s not true. I just had to get the jokes out of my system. Really, naturism is such an easy target, it’s not even fair to make jokes about it. And its devotees have heard them all anyway, I’m sure. Instead, I think we owe them a little respect. That’s why I’m using what seems to be the preferred term, “naturism,” rather than the more descriptive but less politically correct “nudism.”

What is true, though, is that naturism in Croatia is a big deal. The country pioneered commercial naturist resorts back in the 1960s, and today there are 30 official naturist resorts, along with many, many “unofficial” clothing-optional beaches. By one estimate, some 15% of all the tourists who come to Croatia come to get naked. That totals up to around one million naturists visiting Croatia every year. They tend to come from a couple countries in particular, such that there is no better place in the world to survey sunburnt, naked, Germans, Austrians, Dutch, Italians, Slovenians, Czechs, and Hungarians.

Interestingly, among those naturists you will actually find relatively few Croatians. The Croatians, for the most part, like to sunbathe with their clothes on. So how did naturism get to be such a big deal here? I can explain it in two words: hippies and communists (they’re not necessarily the same thing, despite what you might think).

Let’s start with the hippies. And I don’t mean just the long-haired, pot-smoking flower children of the Summer of Love. No, I’m lumping into this term all people who are a bit bohemian, a bit rebellious, who chafe under the strict, conventional morals of bourgeois society. By that definition, we have to go back to the last few decades of the nineteenth century, to the first stirrings of the modern naturist movement. In the heady days of the Victorian Era, with its teeming cities and smoke-belching factories, there arose a conviction among certain free-thinkers that humans, to stay healthy, had to get back to nature. The idea was to expose yourself to the natural elements, to fresh air and sunlight–and ideally to expose all of yourself.

The idea of being naked in public thus grew out of associated movements espousing lifestyle reform such as vegetarianism, abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and naturopathy. Such movements had their adherents throughout northwestern Europe (principally in England, France, and Germany), but it was among those peace-loving Germans that letting it all hang out outdoors really took off. Two men, Heinrich Pudor and Richard Ungewitter, became famous for advocating naturism, and it wasn’t long before experimental private clubs began opening in Germany (as well as France and England) where members could practice what Pudor and Ungewitter preached. These clubs combined the whole raft of typical lifestyle reform ideas: nudity, abstinence, vegetarianism, and mandatory calisthenics.

 English beach, Rab (image)

Fast forward now to August, 1936, and the island of Rab. In that month, King Edward VIII of England and his American mistress, Wallis Simpson, went skinny dipping in the bay of Kandarola. In this case, the emperor was well aware he was wearing no clothes, and his nakedness stands as a landmark in Croatian naturism–it’s also the reason why the bay where he swam is sometimes still referred to as “English beach” today. Edward, though, might not have taken the plunge had Rab not already enjoyed some renown as a naturist destination. At least as far back as 1907 tourists had been coming to the island to practice this lifestyle, taking advantage of the benign Croatian climate, which needless to say requires rather less insulation than those of England or Germany.

In the 1960s, then, tourism began to skyrocket in Yugoslavia. Here is obviously where the communists come in. When the Yugoslav authorities realized the economic bonanza they could reap by promoting Croatia’s sun and fun to other Europeans, the floodgates were opened. By 1965, restrictions on the movement of foreigners in Yugoslavia were removed, making travel much easier. Likewise, in the same year the highway along the Adriatic was completed, making the whole coast from Istria on down to Montenegro much more accessible.

What may seem surprising is that the communist authorities identified quite early on Croatia’s appeal to the naturist niche market, and it was already in 1961 that Europe’s first naturist resort opened in Istria near the town of Vrsar. Koversada, as the resort is called, has since also become one of Europe’s largest naturist resorts, reportedly able to accommodate some 6000 guests. Set on a private island with a bridge to the mainland, Koversada offers five kilometers of beaches, all kinds of sporting facilities, beauty pageants, and, well, acres of naked people. The legendary lothario Casanova, who once took a swim here in his birthday suit (or so the story goes), would hardly recognize the place.

 Koversada (image)

The communists built up a string of other resorts along the coast as well. They wouldn’t have built them, though, if there hadn’t been a market. Here the hippies enter the picture again. By the late 1960s, Europe and North America were seeing another cultural explosion of interest in lifestyle reform. Peace, love, the environment–”turn on, tune in, drop out,” and all the familiar trappings of flower power inspired another back-to-naturism movement much like the one that had flared in the late nineteenth century. As a result, there were many more people than in the infamously staid 1950s who wanted to get naked in public.

As the number of tourists to the Croatian coast grew, and as among that number there were ever more people wanting to sunbathe in the all together, Yugoslav authorities became quite accommodating. Besides building the naturist resorts, they also increasingly designated certain beaches as clothing optional. When locals took fright at the growing expanse of naked Germans, the authorities often would actually take the side of the naturist tourists. One example is with the naturist beach on the island of Lokrum, just off Dubrovnik. By the end of the 1960s, one beach on the island had gained renown as the best naturist haven near Dubrovnik. Over the course of a summer, the beach would attract thousands of people. But many of Dubrovnik’s citizens weren’t happy about it. They wanted the authorities to crack down on the nudity–but, as it happened, the authorities in 1970 actually made the beach officially naturist!

 Lokrum island off Dubrovnik (image)

Since that time, though, most Croatians have accepted their country’s reputation as a mecca for naturism. There are truly few places more friendly to nude tourists than Croatia. In fact, the country’s main tourism website has a prominent link for naturism. The infrastructure and resources for naturists are both well developed. The best single site is www.cronatur.com, which has tons of useful information, including a blurb on history which was my main source for this post. You can also check out this other list of Croatia’s best nude beaches. Just remember that in Croatia, most clothing-optional beaches are designated by the German term “FKK,” which stands for Frei Koerper Kultur, or “free body culture,” the term invented by those original naturist pioneers in their enthusiasm for lifestyle reform.

So that’s how hippies and communists made naturism what it is today in Croatia. And in case you’re wondering… no, getting sunburned in sensitive places isn’t really my thing. But if you’re into it, then have fun. Just don’t forget your sunscreen!

I’ve been regretting for some time now that I haven’t written more about Montenegro. It’s a spectacular place… but so many people are transfixed by Croatia’s undeniable charms that they often forget this little country with the short coastline just south of Dubrovnik. For travelers who are a little more adventurous, though, and who want to hit the next hot Mediterranean destination before everybody else gets there, Montenegro should be at the top of the itinerary. In fact, Lonely Planet has put Montenegro on its Blue List of the world’s best destinations for 2008.

While I work up some good Adriatic Fanatic-style posts exploring the history and culture of this little gem, I thought I’d point the way to some useful websites so you can start exploring on your own. Your first stop should be the best, most recent magazine overview of Montenegro, from Travel & Leisure magazine’s April 2008 issue. Author Charles MacLean surveys the coast, which is where most visitors will want to go, but also heads inland to attractions like the Tara Gorge, Europe’s deepest. His conclusion? Yep, you really do need to go now, before it’s too late.

 (image credit)

The best kitchen-sink site is visit-montenegro.com. It’s a helpful compendium of all kinds of information, with everything from best beaches to railroad schedules.

My tip for a “feast your eyes” website is photo-montenegro.com. If you have no idea what the fuss over Montenegro is about, and somehow the pictures I’ve included in this post don’t appetize you, then peruse the photos at this site and I guarantee you’ll want to go.

(image credit)

There are a couple other places you can surf to for more information, though none of them are quite as worthwhile as the three I’ve just mentioned. The New York Times’ travel guide has a couple articles on Montenegro; the first, “An Adriatic Stretch is Awaiting its Riviera Moment,” is worthwhile reading. Likewise, the Washington Post offers an article which is a little dated, but forms part of a decent series on Balkan destinations. Finally, for a budget travel perspective, here’s a brief blurb I like most of all for its slide show.

So though Montenegro’s stretch of the Adriatic coastline is fairly short–certainly compared to Croatia’s–it has a lot to offer, and if the scene in Dalmatia seems too hopping, just head south to Montenegro’s Bay of Kotor, which should still be quieter… though not for long!

Thanks to Cliff for his contributions!

One thing that I’ll always regret is not being able to see the Adriatic 500 years ago, or even 100 years ago. Until I get my time machine perfected (it’s in pieces in my garage at the moment), the best way to do the time warp again, back to the Adriatic of the past, is by reading old guidebooks to the area. There are a handful of them out there, in a variety of languages. I’ll periodically share some of the highlights from these long-dead travelers’ tales.

You could scarcely imagine a more erudite guide to the eastern Adriatic than F. Hamilton Jackson, who in 1908 published his account of two trips to Croatia. Jackson is listed on the frontispiece of his book as “Vice-President of the Institute of Decorative Designers, Cantor Lecturer, Etc.” He was an impressively knowledgeable art historian, and his guidebook is most useful as a very sophisticated survey of some of the Croatian coast’s artistic and architectural riches, from Roman ruins to Renaissance reliquaries.

He digs into seemingly every last cathedral treasure, delivering his pronouncements on the artistic worth of column capitals, Titian paintings, tympanum carvings, and altarpieces featuring saints’ withered arms and heads. He inventories the floorplans of obscure churches and Roman sites, reporting their dimensions and even the fragmentary Latin inscriptions.

Jackson was also an accomplished artist himself. Many of his sketches of the treasures and places he surveyed are reproduced in the book. They often offer a glimpse at the way a town square or harbor used to look, a hundred some years ago, before being dragged into the 21st century. He includes photographs as well, many of which unfortunately haven’t turned out well in the electronic scan version of the book.

If this sounds boring, well, it might be if you’re not interested in art history. But Jackson also turns his eye to the towns and people he visits. He unfailingly and very valuably describes the local costumes of all the different villagers he encounters–and that’s really a window into the past, to the variety of everyday peasant wear that has long since disappeared. The men of Rovigno (today’s Rovinj), for example, wear “ornamented leather shoes, tight hose of wool, a broad-sleeved white shirt with a frill in front, dark waistcoat, and flat black cap. They have the curious custom of wearing one large earring in the left ear.” These days, Rovinj’s men look just about the same as guys anywhere in Europe.

He also touches on other forms of local culture here and there. He recounts in some detail the method for averting a blood feud–it involves a murderer and his whole famiy asking pardon from the murdered man’s family, offering unborn children as peacemakers, doing the “dance of blood,” and coughing up some silver pieces as well. Best, perhaps, to stay well clear of any blood feuds while you’re in Croatia. Remember, instead, a Dalmatian proverb Jackson cites: “He who sings thinks not of evil.”

Jackson also waxes poetic on occasion, his uppercrust British reserve melting under the power of those magical Adriatic sunsets. Who can’t get carried away by the beauty of this part of the world? Reading his book is like taking a travel course with a very dry, proper, Oxbridge expert where Croatian sun ‘n fun takes a backseat to scholarship. And that’s not such a bad thing.

Jackson’s book is available on Google Books.

Recently a friend sought my advice for a cycling trip to Croatia he was thinking about taking. I decided it was a perfect opportunity to do a post with ideas for some fantastic bike trips you could take along the Adriatic coast. So I’ve got some itinerary ideas of my own, some links to companies who operate bike tours in the area, as well as some other related websites that are worth a visit.

My itinerary ideas:

There are a couple places I think you could happily spend a few days cycling around, or you could link together these places for a longer trip. My first suggestion, not surprisingly, is Istria. Base yourself in a great hilltown like Motovun, or one of the lovely seaside towns like Rovinj. Then you can hit some highlights, like Pula’s Roman amphitheater, the Lim canal, other tiny hilltowns like Groznjan or Hum, or the medieval ghost town of Dvigrad, not to mention putting in stops at some wonderful wineries, truffle shops, and restaurants along the way. Istria is definitely a bit hilly, but the terrain isn’t brutal, and in the interior, especially, the roads shouldn’t be too crowded, even in high season.

My second suggestion would be to head to Rijeka and catch a ferry for one of the islands. If you want to get away from some of the crowds, head to Cres: it’s quieter, more rugged, but still with some nice little towns and beautiful landscapes. It would also be fun to spend a few days cycling around Hvar. Besides seeing the amazing main town, there are other cute villages, as well as fields full of lavender, some caves, and the spectacle of the international yacht set that now descends on the island each summer. Here are links to some cycling routes on Cres and Hvar. As a last island suggestion, Brac would be great. You could bike around to the villages of Supetar, Bol, and Sumartin, get some windsurfing in at Croatia’s best spot for it, and of course visit the magnificent beach at Zlatni Rat:

 (image credit)

I wouldn’t highly recommend cycling in mainland Dalmatia, since in my experience the older, winding roads can be so clogged during the summer months that it could be a little scary biking with so much traffic, at least in my opinion. Instead, my last suggestion would be to do a loop around the Bay of Kotor, Dubrovnik, and may even over the mountains into Hercegovina. An easy reach from Dubrovnik, Kotor has several little towns amidst the awesome scenery of the fjord, and the roads should be pretty low-key. If you’re hardcore you can head right up over the mountains to some really unbeaten paths in Montenegro. The same goes for the route up from Dubrovnik up towards the town of Trebinje in Hercegovina. You will have left the tourists behind, gotten some killer exercise, and taken in some pretty amazing mountains.

Tour operators:

More and more companies are starting to offer “adventure tours” of one sort or another in Croatia. I can’t vouch for any of these companies in particular; if you’re thinking about a guided tour, check out their prices and itineraries and see what looks good to you.

Here’s one list of a bunch of bike tour operators in Croatia, and here’s another. Pedalsea Adventures is an established tour company offering “adventure vacations,” and REI offers two Croatia tours I would bet are good.

 Kotor (image credit)

Other useful links:

There’s an excellent list of resources at find-croatia.com. You can also surf over to croatiatraveller.com’s cycling-related page. Finally, for those who might find actual cycling a little too sweaty, here’s your shot at some armchair cycling via a New York Times article about a bike trip in Istria. One word of warning: if you read it, you’ll want to go!

Any comments or questions about cycling along the Adriatic? Let us hear about it in the comments!