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I’m very happy to announce that my new book–A Traveller’s History of Croatia–is now hitting stores! It was lots of fun to write, and if you like what I write about on this site, I think you’ll really like the book.

You can find it on Amazon here: A Traveller’s History of Croatia

I wrote it to be a sophisticated but engaging look at all of Croatia’s tumultuous history. Most of the other books out there on Croatia’s history are pretty dry and academic. This one is much more fun, though it doesn’t sacrifice scholarly rigor. I cover everything from Croatia’s fabulous Roman and Greek heritage to its period of medieval splendor under Venetian and Hungarian rule. I recount the dramatic struggle for dominance between the Venetians, the Habsburgs, and the Ottoman Turks that lasted from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Then I detail the indelible stamp the Habsburgs put on the country during the century when they controlled it all, up until 1918 when World War One catapulted Croatia into the new country of Yugoslavia. The book does a really good job, I think, of explaining the very complex conflicts in which Croatia was embroiled during the twentieth century, from the chaos of the Second World War, to the difficult decades in Tito’s Yugoslavia, to the civil war of the 1990s.

I originally created this site as a lead-in to the book. Since the book is now out, I hope you’ll follow the lead and dig a bit deeper into Croatia’s history! Thanks for reading!

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.

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!

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.

I left off part I of this post in the middle decades of the 1800s as Split’s Riva–its classically Mediterranean waterfront promenade–was undergoing an amazing transformation. By the end of the nineteenth century the Riva had become a place for trendy cafes, opulent hotels, and leisurely strolling. Though those posh perambulators were gradually taking over, for centuries it was the merchants and their maritime commerce that had defined the Riva.

The rough-and-tumble life of the sailors began to be pushed out under Austrian rule. In 1835 what’s thought to have been the first hotel opened on the Riva, mainly to house Austrian army officers as well as Italian businessmen. Though most travelers still arrived to the Riva by boat, some started to come via one of the surest signs of nineteenth-century progress: the Austrians built a railroad line right down to the harbor. As much as the railroad symbolized the change that had come to Split, it actually caused the demolition of another such symbol. In 1825 a wooden theater had been built at the southeastern end of the Riva, which hosted hosted balls, musical evenings, comedies, operas, and other performances. Much as the arrival of the first cinema ninety years later, this theater showed how Split was becoming just a bit more prosperous and bourgeois.

What both the theater and the railroad replaced tells a lot about how the waterfront was changing. For centuries, one of Split’s most important, beautiful, and traditional structures sat at the southeastern corner of Diocletian’s Palace. This was the famous lazaretto, formerly located on a spot where today you can find Split’s outdoor market. A lazaretto was a quarantine facility for merchants and their goods. Merchants and sometimes sailors would have to spend 21 or 42 days in quarantine, until it was determined that that they and their goods were clean.

Why so much caution? The reason is that for several centuries Split was perhaps the single most important transit point for commerce between the Ottoman Empire and western Europe. From roughly the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Turks ruled the lands not far from Split, just over the mountains. The Turkish caravans, sometimes numbering as many as 500 horses, bearing wares from all over the vast territory of the Ottoman Empire, would regularly come over the mountain pass and down to the harbor. Split, as part of the great Venetian Empire, linked these Ottoman caravans to the rest of Europe through Venice’s maritime might.

To house all these caravans and far-flung travelers and sailors, in the 1600s the Venetians built on the Riva what became one of the largest and reputedly most beautiful lazaretti in all of Europe. I would love to have seen the Riva in those days, teeming with exotic goods and people from distant lands. Reading travelers’ descriptions from the time, the Riva really sounds to have been a meeting point between East and West. Even into the early 1800s, as tourism grew, travelers from England and Germany were captivated by the still-noticeable influence of Turkish merchants on the Riva.

This image of 1757, with turbaned Turks in the foreground, offers a glimpse of what that vanished world might have looked like:

The Riva of this drawing is still mostly a workaday place, crowded with commerce, the palace’s facade obstructed by a number of buildings that had grown onto it like barnacles. These sort of structures typically fulfilled a variety of functions. Some were offices for managing the harbor activity, some were houses, and in 1786 an establishment run by the Italian Filippo Frezza opened its doors. Known as the “Bottega di caffe e da scalitera,” it was the Riva’s very first cafe and pastry shop.

Over the centuries, the Riva has in fact many times has been crowded by buildings. Usually they would last a few decades, then be cleared… only for more of the same to spring up not long afterwards. The conclusive clearing, though, was undertaken by the French General Marmont in the first decade of the 1800s, when Napoleon had taken control of Dalmatia. Marmont ordered that the palace’s monumental facade be preserved from clutter, thereby establishing the tradition that holds today. He also contributed to the Riva in another way, by dismantling several of the fortified towers the Venetians had built along the harborfront and using the stone as landfill to widen the Riva.

Until Marmont and then the Austrians came along, the look and life along the Riva had changed relatively little over the centuries. One custom that long persisted was the wood market. Various travelers remarked on this picturesque and characteristic slice of Split life. During the winters, merchants would come in from the islands (some of which had fairly extensive forests) to sell wood. Women, usually from the higher villages toward the mountains, would come down into the city to buy the wood, then haul it on their backs all the way back up to their villages. These women, heavily laden with bundles of wood, were apparently quite a sight.

Still, though, the Riva wasn’t all about commerce. It has also almost forever been a place for celebrations. In centuries past, when circuses came to town they would often make their home down by the harbor. In the Middle Ages, church holidays often centered on the Riva. For Christmas, Easter, and All Saints great processions would take place, marching along the waterfront to the cathedral of St. Duje inside the palace. On great feast days, all the town’s elite, from the church officials through the noble families, would take part. Sometimes the harbor would even be transformed with boats for fireworks or music out on the water.

The most important celebration along the Riva, though–and in fact the most important celebration in Split itself–takes place in connection with the feast day of St. Duje, the town’s patron saint. Though the party, known as Sudamja, lasts several days, the culmination is 7 May, St. Duje’s day. Since medieval times, the festivities have included fireworks, footraces, pole climbing, regattas, and even an unusual game kind of like bingo. It really is Split’s biggest blow-out, and if you can ever manage to be in the area in early May, you shouldn’t miss it. Here’s a picture of some Sudamja fireworks with the Riva all lit up:

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So though a lot has changed on the Riva in even just the past few years (like the botched 2007 renovation), some things, as always, stay the same. Thanks to the surviving facade of his palace, even Emperor Diocletian might still recognize the Riva, some 1700 years later. Though back in his time, his palace was the waterfront. Nowadays, he might not be so happy about having to share his strolling space–but share he would, since the Riva belongs to everyone in Split, as the city’s magnificent front yard, one of the most magnificent public spaces in the Mediterranean world.

Those who read Croatian may want to check out Goran Borcic’s article on the Riva, which served as my main source.

One of my favorite places along the whole Adriatic is the Riva of Split, the waterfront promenade that extends from Diocletian’s Palace to the Franciscan monastery. This is simply a great public space, and it’s so evocative of Mediterranean atmosphere. Thousands of years of history are staring down at you as you stroll; the Riva is Split’s front yard, and how it has changed is a mirror of how the whole region has changed.

I’ll never forget my first stroll along the Riva. It was in December of 1999. I had just spent several days in a dark, cold, wintry Zagreb before I caught the plane up over the mountains and down toward the ocean. As soon as I arrived at the waterfront, my jaw dropped. The temperature was in the mid 60s. It was sunny. There were palm trees! I remember an old man wearing a beret out doing a late afternoon passegiatta. I could not imagine a greater contrast from that short flight out of snowy Zagreb. I had left Central Europe to enter the Mediterranean world. I was enchanted.

As much as I might like to believe it, the Riva’s history doesn’t begin with my discovering it. Rather, the Riva, like Split itself, would not exist if the Emperor Diocletian (c. 244-316 CE) hadn’t decided to retire from running Rome to build a pleasure palace on the very shores of the Adriatic. But I’m getting ahead of (or behind?) myself. Since this is my blog, dammit!, I can tell the history of the Riva any way I want. So I’m going to tell it backwards, starting with last year.

The latest chapter in the Riva’s long history was indeed written in 2007. On 7 May of that year, a completely redone Riva–eight months in the making–debuted before the public. And it was resoundingly booed. The walkway in front of Diocletian’s Palace is now paved with a bright, pale concrete, and lined with aggressively modern, angular white awnings. One web commenter called the look “Star Trek in Split.” People complained that all the white gave the space a tremendous glare. They’re right: in full sunlight on the Riva last summer, I was blinded without sunglasses.

There just isn’t much shade to be had. It might be nice then, you’d think, to sit under an awning at one of the cafes. The cafes were in fact all required to buy the same tables and chairs, in the interest of stylistic consistency. But with the makeover, rents for the cafes increased, and so in turn did the prices for customers. Combined with the glare and the public’s general distaste for the new Riva, many locals have instead preferred to head inside to the palace to get coffee.

For a funny look at the Riva’s botched face-lift, have a peek at this video from YouTube:

On the plus side, though, there are now plenty of benches to sit on, and I like that they’re typically accompanied by nice little gardens filled with Mediterranean herbs. Stone from the island of Brac, instead of concrete, lines the walkway closer to the harbor. But overall, charm is pretty minimal on the new Riva. Even the city council seems to have recognized the mistake. With a public outcry calling the original decision to remake the Riva corrupt and insufficiently transparent, city officials have promised a do-over.

I won’t have a chance until this summer to see if the city has made good on its promise to “re-restore” the Riva to its former glory. If anybody has the latest details of where the Riva stands now, please let us know in the comments.

This “former glory” has been mucked about with before, though. For instance, in the 1880s Split’s mayor and all-around mover-and-shaker Antonio Bajamonti had a monumental fountain built at one end of the Riva. It was funded partly by donations from Split’s citizens. In the 1940s the Yugoslav communist regime removed this grand fountain, however, because they regarded its aesthetic as fascist. It was quite a historical feat for a fountain built before fascism ever existed to be fascist, but such was the logic of the communists… who naturally built a more proletariat-friendly fountain in its place.

The Riva probably would have been spared the ham-handed caresses of Tito’s regime if it hadn’t been one of the most prominent public spaces in all of Croatia, not to mention Yugoslavia. It was in the first several decades of the twentieth century that the Riva’s glamor really grew. It received its trademark ranks of palms during the 1920s. In this decade, too, the surface was first made asphalt, for optimal strolling and driving. That’s right: earlier in the twentieth century it was quite common for cars to drive along today’s quintessentially pedestrian promenade.

Old-timers might still remember the taxi station at the western end of the Riva by the Franciscan church. In the early decades of the last century this was where many locals got their first look at–and ride in–an automobile. But those high-class, motor-powered taxis were well located for the prestitious clientele that frequented the nearby cafes on the Riva. During the Europe-wide “golden age of the cafe,” which stretched roughly from the last few decades of the 1800s to the first few of the 1900s, Split had its fair share of swank establishments. For instance, a Viennese-style cafe, complete with marble tables, mirrors on the walls, and newspapers from all over Europe, made quite a splash when it opened in 1930. Then, as now, there were few more pleasant ways to while away the hours than having a tipple and gazing at that blue Adriatic in the harbor.

You can get a pretty good idea of that lovely old Riva from this 1930 picture–notice both the young palms and the “fascist” fountain the communists later tore down:

Along with the cafes, posh hotels also came to the Riva towards the end of the nineteenth century. The grandest of them all was the Grand Hotel Bellevue, whose first incarnation opened in 1875 in the building at the western end of the Riva known as the Prokurativa. The Bellevue was where Split’s business elite would mix with artists and worldwide celebrities like Agatha Christie, Bernard Shaw, Anatole France, and Enrico Caruso. Perhaps some of those celebrities even waltzed their way over to the nearby movie theater; Split’s first opened in 1909 just off the Riva. The Bellevue, incidentally, is still operating, though it’s faded since its heyday.

The Prokurativa, one of the Riva’s most striking structures, was designed to recall St. Mark’s Square in Venice. This building, too, was the brainchild of mayor Antonio Bajamonti, who in 1860 had a vision for a multi-use hub of activity right in the historic center of town. It took several decades before the hotel, cafe, shops, and theater managed to materialize–in fact, the Prokurativa wasn’t officially completed until 1928. To me, it seems that Bajamonti’s bustling vision was never fully realized, since today the Prokurativa tends to feel rather empty, much too pretty for the very little that happens there.

In any case, there was a day in the 1870s when all of Split did bustle. That was in 1875, when the first emperor in some 1400 years came to visit. Kaiser Franz Josef, the monarch of Austria-Hungary and hence ruler over Croatia, came to town, and the Habsburg flags were flying. City officials undertook many beautification efforts for the imperial visit, and those efforts in many ways symbolize the long historical transformation the Riva was experiencing. From a place of work and occasional celebration, it was becoming a promenade for leisure. Cafes were replacing the docks and storehouses, bourgeois gentlemen in bowler hats were replacing the turbaned Turkish merchants…

But I’ll continue the story, talking more that transformation, and the centuries prior to the nineteenth, in part two of this post.

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.

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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.

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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.