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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.

The Croatian coast is a land of good wine, good food (if you know the right restaurants or have local to cook for you), and good times. During the summer in particular there can be quite a party atmosphere, as all that wine flows freely, the nudists are doing their thing, and the discos stay open until late late.

Luckily for those who are so inclined, even Jadrolinija, the Croatian ferry service, has your party interests in mind. Check out these emergency instructions on one of Jadrolinija’s hydrofoils.

Some people will insist that drugs should be used not just in an emergency… but I don’t listen to them. Just say no. Or maybe in Croatian, “samo reci ne.”

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?

First, the good news. If you love fish, all along the eastern Adriatic you can have some really wonderful seafood meals. Nearly every restaurant along the Croatian coast seems to be a seafood restaurant, in fact.

Now, the bad news. (Yes, you knew it was coming.) Because of overfishing, much of the seafood you might eat in that charming little harborside bistro could actually come from North America or even farther away.

Let’s look at the situation in Croatia specifically. As tourism there has boomed in the last several years, the demand for seafood has increased enormously. Croatia has not been able to satisfy that demand with fish from its own waters for several reasons. Its fishing fleet is rather small and technologically behind Spanish and Italian fleets, two of its main Mediterranean competitors. Also, Croatia’s infrastructure to transport and process fishers’ catches is relatively underdeveloped.

But that’s only looking at the problem from the country’s narrower economic perspective. Not surprisingly, demand for seafood in the Adriatic is tied to demand for seafood all over the world–and that skyrocketing demand has contributed to overfishing of many of the world’s fish stocks. In the Adriatic, anchovies, baby clams, and tuna, among others, have all been nearly fished out.

The declining fish stocks in the Adriatic have certainly been hard on the fishermen in the region. Fewer and fewer people can make their living from fishing anymore. In Croatia, at least, many of them have found jobs in the country’s fish farms, where tuna, sea bass, and orada are all raised in places like Brac and Ston. So while the wild bluefin tuna that were once plentiful in the Adriatic are almost gone, they do still survive in farms. What’s interesting, though, is that almost none of this tuna will end up on your plate in Croatia–virtually all of it is exported to Japan.

So despite its immense and spectacular coastline, then, Croatia has in recent years imported ever more fish to feed the growing numbers of tourists. In the last decade, Croatia’s seafood imports more than doubled, rising from $33 million to $71 million between 2000 and 2004 alone, with Spain as the single largest supplier. There’s a good chance, then, that the shark steak you were hoping to enjoy was flown in from an Atlantic catch, as many species of sharks in the Mediterranean are now nearly extinct.

What’s a gourmand to do, then? Well, if you’re a selfish bastard you could just try to eat as much seafood as possible right now, hoping to maximize your share before the fish are all gone. The unavoidable fact is that there just aren’t enough fish in the sea to feed all the people who want to eat them nowadays. But let’s face it, if you go on that kind of a seafood binge, you’re a jerk–and you’ll probably be a dead jerk, as well, given the unhealthy mercury content in many species of fish.

Instead, let me give you some tips for trying to eat local and/or sustainable seafood when you’re in the Adriatic. The best thing to do, if you’ve got a kitchen where you’re staying, is to go to the town’s fish market, ask what’s local, then take it home and cook it up. There’s no absolute guarantee that the fish on sale is either local or sustainable, though as governments in both Croatia and the European Union tighten regulations on fishing, there’s at least some hope that catches will be conscientiously managed.

In a restaurant, likewise, you should always ask the waiter if the fish is fresh or frozen, farmed or wild. You should also inspect the menu and steer clear of any fish you see that are known to be endangered. The Environmental Defense Organization has published an “eco-friendly” guide to seafood that’s indispensable for knowing what species to avoid. Among things you can commonly see on offer along the Croatian coast, you should try not to order shark, swordfish, white hake, grouper, skate, and monkfish. All of these species are seriously ecologically threatened.

It’s still possible to eat well, and ethically, when it comes to Adriatic seafood. But you just have to know that what you’re eating is safe, and that it might not even be from the Adriatic. Rather than getting grumpy at yet another sign of our planet’s precarious eco-system, thinking carefully about the fish you’re ordering should, I hope, make you appreciate your meal at that harborside bistro by the beautiful blue sea all the more.

 (image credit)