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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.

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.

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!

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!

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?

Along with klapa, there are some other great folk music styles you can hear along the eastern Adriatic coast. In Rovinj–probably the loveliest seaside town in Istria–a characteristic style of folk singing is called the “bitinada.”

A bitinada group consists of a solo singer and a chorus of backup singers. These backup singers, known as the “bitinadora,” not only give the style its name, they are also what make this music so memorable. As they sing, they imitate the sound of instruments like the guitar, violin, mandolin, and contrabass. Providing rhythmic and harmonic support to the solo singer, a really big and skilled bitinadora will even imitate harps and clarinets! When they get going, they can sound like a whole orchestra.

Does this sound weird? It’s actually pretty magical–and really not all that unusual. In fact, the bitinada has affinities with similar imitative folk styles in Liguria, Sardinia, and Tuscany. One thing that several of these regions have in common with Istria is a long tradition of fishing. If you think about it, back in the days before radios and iPods, those fishermen had to entertain themselves somehow on those long days and nights aboard their boats. And so they would sing. But if you’re hard at work fishing, steering your boat across the waves and managing your nets, you don’t have a free hand to play an instrument. So that’s how the fishermen started imitating guitars, mandolins, and so on.

It’s no surprise, then, that a lot of bitinada songs deal with life at sea. They express the feelings of the lonely fisherman out under the nighttime sky, they praise the trustworthiness of the traditional boat known as the “batana,” and they tell of the good life back home in port at Rovinj.

The songs are traditionally sung either in Italian or the Rovignese dialect, related to Italian. Back at the end of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth, the popularity of the bitinada songs spurred the formation of a lot of choirs in Rovinj. Some of the best were made up of workers at the old tobacco factory. Today there are still quite a few groups, and around Rovinj you can pick up some of their CDs–or better yet, hear them live.

In fact, one of my definitions of a “life is good moment” is to be in Rovinj on a summer day when the town is having a festival. On these days, the fishermen still bring in their catch, fresh out of the Adriatic and right up to the old harbor. They set up barbecues, and the whole port is filled with the smell of grilling fish. The bitinada groups come out and sing, and that Istrian wine flows freely. I hope everybody has the chance to see Rovinj on such a day–and you’ll learn firsthand why this town was long famed as “the most musical” of all Istrian cities.

I couldn’t find any samples of bitinada on the net, but here’s an excerpt from the lyrics of one bitinada song, called “Spunta il sole”–”the sun is rising”:

Spunta il sole                                    The sun is rising
spunta il sole a la colina                  The sun is rising over the hill
il tamburo                                         The drum
il tamburo e gia suona                     The drum is already beating
bela non piangere se parto via       My love, don’t cry if I go away
al mio ritorno                                    When I return
al mio ritorno saro da te                  When I return I’ll be yours
bela non piangere se parto via        My love, don’t cry if I go away
al mio ritorno                                    When I return
al mio ritorno saro da te                  When I return I’ll be yours

(image credit)