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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.

If you’re ever sailing on a ship through the Adriatic–whether your own mega-yacht (if you’re Paul Allen), a chartered tourist boat, or one of the Croatian ferries–you need to be very careful. You’re sailing in pirate waters. That’s right, those inviting turquoise seas of the Adriatic have been the home of bloodthirsty buccaneers more than once in history.

The most famous and tenacious band of pirates to call the Adriatic home were known as the Uskoks. The latter half of the sixteenth century and the first few decades of the seventeenth were their glory days. The Uskoks started out as a band of renegades, deserters from the Turkish armies in the territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Their name derives from the South Slav word for “to jump in,” but it has come to mean something more like turncoat.

What the Uskoks may have looked like (image credit)

At first, the fortress of Klis was their hideout. But later, a few hundred of them settled in the coastal town of Senj. This location was well protected on all sides, by forests (which are long gone) and mountains (which still loom over the town). Interestingly, despite their home in the South Slav lands, the Uskoks weren’t all Slavs. As their fame spread throughout Europe, adventure seekers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells from a number of countries came to join them. They even counted a few English gentlemen among their ranks!

And though they started out attacking the Turks–their sworn enemy–after about 1566 they turned their piracy on all ships in the Adriatic. They made life difficult for the Venetians, in particular. Why didn’t the Venetians or the Turks just wipe out this small but hardy band of freebooters? One answer is geopolitics: Austria supported the Uskoks because the pirates preyed on two of Austria’s rivals, the Venetians and the Ottomans. Also, the Uskoks were known to pay bribes to the Western powers to get themselves off the hook.

So for several decades there was many an “Arrrh!” to be heard on the Adriatic as the Uskoks overtook a Venetian merchantman or Turkish naval ship. They held out until 1617, when by the Peace of Madrid Venice and the Austrians agreed to root out the Uskoks. Several of the pirates were hung and beheaded, and the rest were resettled… but nobody knows with absolute certainty where. There are towns with Uskok-related names right on the Croatian-Slovenian border north of the city of Karlovac. Some Uskoks may have also ended up in Istria, where Mt. Ucka–the backyard of the resort town of Opatija–may also recollect their name.

The Uskok fortress at Senj today: (image credit)

Like any worthy pirates, even once the Uskoks died out, legends about them lived on. There are many folksongs and poems in Croatian telling their stories. For instance, it was for a long time believed that the intense winds around were Senj were the Uskoks’ mysterious doing: supposedly the pirates knew how to light a fire in a certain mountain cave and thereby raise a gale out in the Gulf of Kvarner that no vessel could survive. These sort of tales have continued to capture imaginations into the present time. The Uskok-inspired classic German children’s story Die Rote Zora und ihre Bande has recently been made into a movie.

If you ask me, wherever the Uskoks may have scattered, they eventually managed to make their way back to their homebase of Senj. How else to explain that still today 60% of the population of Senj sports either an eyepatch or a pegleg?

This is just the first post about the exploits of the Uskoks and other Adriatic pirates. Many more piratical tales remain to be told… so stay tuned.

A mystery lies hidden deep in the turquoise waters off Rovinj.

There was once a city named Cissa somewhere along this part of the Istrian coast. The great Roman geographer Pliny the Elder mentioned the city in the first century CE. We know that Cissa was famed in the heyday of the Roman Empire for producing fine purple dyes that could be used on the emperors’ regal garments.

Today, Cissa is a lost city: no one knows where it was located. The people of Rovinj think they know, however. For centuries the fishermen of this area have told a story that Cissa once existed on a peninsula jutting off the mainland. But then disaster struck. The stories don’t tell us the exact year, but they do tell us the exact date: on 16 September, sometime between the fourth and eighth centuries, a catastrophic earthquake shook Istria.

This date is the feast day of St. Eufemija, the patron saint of Rovinj. When that earthquake struck, it leveled Cissa, plunging the once-prosperous city into the sea. The peninsula on which the city sat fragmented into several islands that still exist today, such as St. Andrija. Those of the population who were able to escape founded nearby the city that then became Rovinj.

For more than a millennium, the history of Cissa, like its very stones, faded from view. It wasn’t until a nineteenth-century historian named Pietro Kandler tried to sort myth from legend that modern scholars became interested in those old fishermen’s stories. Talking to the locals, Kandler learned that there was a certain spot, not too far offshore, where their fishing nets would frequently get caught on something deep in the water, and when they pulled them up, the men’s nets would often be torn.

Could they have been sailing right over the lost city, all this time? Kandler concluded that he had identified the location of ancient Cissa. He even left directions for how to find it. Standing at the top of the bell tower of St. Eufemija’s church, on the highest hill in Rovinj, he said that between the island of St. Ivan and a smaller islet the sunken city must rest. Kandler, however, had no way of exploring the depths.

It wasn’t until several decades later that an Austro-Hungarian investigative team set out to see if Kandler was right. And they had the technology he lacked: a diver in a heavy suit and cumbersome copper helmet dropped down into the water in search of the Istrian Atlantis. No one expected what he found. Walls. Ancient city walls. He was sure of it, he said: he had once been a mason, the diver insisted, and the stones he had seen in the depths had unquestionably been the work of men. The diver wasn’t able to explore fully, though, because of the depth and the limitations of his equipment.

Since that time no one has been able to establish with absolute certainty that the ruins of Cissa lie there beneath the ocean so close to Rovinj. In fact, there seems to be no hard proof that Cissa ever existed precisely on this coast at all. So the story of the Istrian Atlantis may not actually be true.

But if it isn’t, then why, throughout all these centuries, have the fishermen kept bringing up in their nets ancient bricks, and tiles, and amphorae?

Back in the middle ages, a sure cure for all your ills was a relic. Some bit of a saint or other holy figure could fix just about anything, whether blindness or infidel invasion. The veneration of relics is a practice that is actually a holdover from pre-Christian Europe, when all sorts of inanimate objects were assumed to have magical powers.

These days, in Europe almost any Catholic church worth its transubstantiated wine preserves for its miraculous powers some interesting body part of someone long dead. Among my favorites anywhere is the right hand of St. Stephen, the king who Christianized Hungary. Found appropriately enough in St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, this “Holy Right,” as the Hungarians call it, actually looks more like the “holy beef jerky,” which is what I call it.

The Croatian coast is no slouch when it comes to relics, either. Many towns often have very costly, ornate reliquaries to hold those old desiccated saint appendages. For instance, St. Christopher is the patron saint of Rab, and the cathedral there houses his head. What’s left of it, anyway. One legend claims that back before he converted to Christianity, Christopher had the head of a dog. While there’s sadly no evidence of that today, if you go to Rab you can see the skull with the magnificent crown given by Queen Elizabeth of Hungary back in the 14th century.

 (image credit)

In the days when Dubrovnik was the independent republic of Ragusa, the republic’s flag used to feature the image of St. Blaise, its patron saint. In the early days of the Church, Blaise had been a bishop in Asia Minor. Then one day in the 10th century a pilgrim came to Ragusa from Armenia… and what did he happen to be traveling with but St. Blaise’s head! Blaise had appeared to this pilgrim in a dream, so the story goes, and told him to warn the Ragusans that Venice was about to attack. The pious Ragusans heeded the warning and managed to save their city. In gratitude for this miraculous intervention they made Blaise the patron saint, and you can still see his head, as well as his hand and foot, in the treasury of Dubrovnik’s cathedral.

 (image credit)

Clearly these saints were pretty well-traveled, even after their death. Another good story concerns St. Giovanni Orsini of Trogir. The villain, again, is those dastardly Venetians. When the Venetians sacked Trogir in 1171, they opened the sarcophagus containing Orsini’s bones, hoping to find some treasure. The grave robbers tried to remove a ring from the saint’s body, but it refused to come off. So they just took the whole arm, and brought it back to a church in Venice. It didn’t stay there, however. After waiting a discreet three years, the arm rose up and flew through the air back to Trogir, where one morning it was found resting on the saint’s shrine.

Those, admittedly, are all relics from holy figures you may never have heard of. For my money, then, the most valuable and most famous relic of all Dalmatia belonged to Zadar, which kept a wondrous vial of–get this–the Virgin Mary’s milk.

Any other weird relics you’ve seen on your travels? And did they work any miracles for you? Drop us a line in the comments.

I love legends, myths, and other dubious stories that plumb the mysteries of a place. Here’s a good one about the island of Rab:

Once upon a time there was a young shepherd named Kalifront, who guarded the sheep of his father on Rab. Kalifront’s father was a friend of Barbat, the powerful but somewhat thick-witted lord of the eastern part of the island, after whom that part of the island is still named today.

Lord Barbat had a daughter, Draga, who naturally—since this is a legend—was the most beautiful of all the maidens of Rab. Barbat was thick-witted because he let his one and only beautiful daughter hang around with the island’s shepherds. It wasn’t long before Kalifront, consumed with all-too-typical teenage hormones, fell in love with Draga.

His better judgment drunken with lust, Kalifront ignored the obvious fact that he, as a low-born shepherd, would stand no chance with the lord’s daughter. So one day he poured his heart out to her, swearing that no boy had ever loved any girl more than Kalifront loved Draga.

Draga was not amused. Like the haughty cheerleader hit upon by a pimple-faced dweeb, she spurned Kalifront. But, since this was a long time ago, Draga was not quite as promiscuous as the average cheerleader today. In fact, her mother had vowed Draga’s chastity to the goddess Diana, and Draga used that as one of the many reasons why she and Kalifront could never be together. That, and Kalifront was hopelessly uncool.

Teenage lust cannot be denied, however, and Kalifront was determined to have her. Draga saw the look in his eyes and fled. Kalifront pursued her. Across the island they ran, through the fields of sheep (who probably would have been willing recipients of Kalifront’s attentions), along the rocky coastline, over the mountaintops… and finally the boy caught up with the beautiful girl at a dead end, right in front of the cave known as Loparska Jamina.

Seeing no way out, helpless, Draga did what the desperate usually do: she prayed. She beseeched the goddess Diana to protect her chastity. And the goddess listened.

The gods, though, typically grant our prayers only in a roundabout way. So Diana ensured that Draga would remain forever chaste by turning her into a stone statue right there in front of the cave. Kalifront, for thinking with the head between his legs and not the one on his neck, she punished too.

Kalifront was cursed never to find peace until the little stream that poured out of the cave dried up. Until that time, he could only eat the wild fruits of the forest—and the goddess demanded that every day he continue replenishing those fruits and that forest by planting new trees.

Because of Kalifront’s plantings, the forest gradually grew thicker and thicker. And a strange transformation gradually came over the boy, too. As the forest grew thicker, there grew upon Kalifront’s back a thicket of leaves and branches and roots. Over the years he grew ever greener, until finally, as a result of Diana’s curse, he became one with the forest he had planted.

Nowadays that forest on Rab bears his name, Kalifront, just like the other part of the island was named after the lord Barbat. So that lowly, horn dog shepherd boy has gotten his place in history after all.

(Adapted after a version of the legend from the Rab tourist office)

Notice Kalifront and Barbat on this modern map of Rab? (image credit)