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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!

First, a word of warning: if you’re in Dalmatia in the summertime, and you expect to be parading around the beaches wearing not very much (or nothing at all!), then stay away from these two. This much sugar and cream is going to make your thong uncomfortable–particularly for everyone who’s looking at you.

But if that warning doesn’t deter you, then oh my, tuck in to one of these dee-licious desserts! You can find them all along the Dalmatian coast, but they’re most famous in Dubrovnik, particularly rozata. Rozata is like a creme caramel or flan; everybody and her uncle has a special recipe, but usually it’s flavored with vanilla, rum, and lemon. Paradizet is a little less common; some have compared it to a Vienna cream cake.

If you’re in Dubrovnik, I absolutely have a recommendation on a great place to sample these two delicacies. It’s the Gradska kavarna, the main city cafe in the old town. When the afternoon sun gets a little intense, pop into the kavarna for a coffee and some rozata, just like Dubrovnik’s intellectuals have been doing for a hundred years. But remember that you’re probably not allowed in there in your thong.

There are quite a few recipes out there on the internet for rozata. This one looked the best to me:

 (image credit)

Prep Time: 15 Minutes
Cook Time: 50 Minutes
Cooling time: 120 Minutes
Ready in: 3 Hours 5 Minutes
Serving: 6 people

Ingredients:
1 cup white sugar
1/4 cup water
6 egg yolks
1 liter of milk

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, cook sugar with water, stirring, until melted and light brown. Pour into a pan or cake mold, tilting to coat the bottom of the pan. Set aside.
3. In a bowl, gently whisk together evaporated milk, condensed milk, and egg yolks and mix.
4. Line a roasting pan with a damp kitchen towel. Place baking dish on towel, inside roasting pan, and place roasting pan on oven rack. Fill roasting pan with water to reach halfway up the sides of the baking dish.
5. Bake in preheated oven 45 to 50 minutes, until set. Let cool completely.
6. To unfold, run a knife around the edges of the pan and invert the rozata onto a rimmed serving platter. Refrigerate 2 hours and pour with Caramel Sauce before serving.

Caramel Sauce

Ingredients:
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup water
1 cup heavy cream
Directions:
1. In a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the sugar and water and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring often. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is a deep caramel color and has the consistency of thin syrup, 10 to 15 minutes.
2. Remove from the heat. Stir in the cream, return the saucepan to the high heat, and boil the sauce until it regains the consistency of thick syrup, about 2 minutes.
3. Cool it.

Source: http://www.dubrovnik-online.com/english/restaurants.php

There’s only one recipe out there I found for paradizet, and it’s not going to be quite as good as you can get in Dubrovnik, but give it a shot:

PARADIZET
Yield: 1 Recipe

4 Egg yolks
4 Egg whites
5 ts Sugar
1/2 qt Milk
5 lg Cookies (about)Beat egg yolks with 4 tablespoons sugar. Beat the egg whites. Boil
the milk with 1 tablespoon sugar. When the milk is boiling, add the
beaten egg to the boiling milk, spoon by spoon, letting it boil for a
couple of minutes and removing it, spoon by spoon and drop into a
bowl in which you previously place five crunched cookies. Continue
this until there are no more egg whites left. Then pour the remaining
milk over the beaten egg yolks, stirring over a hot plate until it
stiffens (like pudding). When it is thick, pourit over the egg whites
and cookies. Cool in refrigerator and serve cold. Source: Mary Usmiani “Our Favorite Recipes,” St. Anthony Croatian
Catholic Church

Paradizet (image credit)

It’s hard to miss it: many places you go in Dalmatia you’ll see spray-painted across a wall the word “Torcida.” Outsiders will be totally clueless as to what this ubiquitous graffiti means.

The answer to the mystery is both amusing and a little sad. Torcida is the name of the big, rambunctious fan club for Split’s football (i.e., soccer) team, Hajduk. Torcida members are regarded as being some of the most loyal and occasionally some of the most rowdy fans (and hooligans) in Europe.

Torcida also claims to be the oldest fan club in Europe, dating to 1950. The original members took their inspiration from South American fan clubs, and in fact “torcida” is simply a Brazilian word for a football fan club.

From their very first days under Tito’s Yugoslavia, Torcida members were already getting into fights. When fans of the Belgrade clubs Partizan or Red Star came to Split, look out–there were clashes. Torcida fans are infamous for pushing some military vehicles into the harbor in 1971. How did they get away with that kind of lawlessness in an authoritarian regime? They didn’t; over the years, many Torcida members have spent time in jail.

In decades past, Torcida members used to hang out on Split’s Riva. For a while the cafe Dubrovnik on the Riva was their unofficial headquarters. As so often when you get together a bunch of young guys with too much testosterone and too little brains, trouble wasn’t far away. In the last days of Yugoslavia, Torcida was reportedly considered by the police to be almost a terrorist organization, guilty of fomenting conflict between the various ethnic groups in the country. Then in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia disintegrated and war broke out, quite a few Torcida supporters did go fight for Croatia.

These days, though certainly not all Torcida members are thugs, the club does have its fair share. The football team, Hajduk, is often fined for its fans’ violence. Supposedly Hajduk actually ranks among the most fined clubs because of Torcida members. So maybe it’s no surprise that among the fan forums at torcida.org, there are long threads on how to defend yourself against the police, and what to do if you’re in a brawl. To be fair, though, there’s also plenty of typical fan frothing over the state of the team and players’ performances.

Torcida fans cluster in the north stands of Split’s Poljude stadium. Hajduk players wear white jerseys, so Torcida fans have also called themselves “the white boys” and “the white army,” which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all white supremacists. The following fan video gives a good flavor of Torcida fervor:

The video gets rapturous about how Torcida and Hajduk “are one body,” and the song’s refrain runs, “I love you, Hajduk, white angels… I love, Hajduk, Croatia, and Split.”

The north stands can get pretty crazy when the Torcida supporters light off all their flares, as shown in the video. Sometimes the flare smoke causes matches to be delayed. Besides the chaos, though, Torcida fans also come up with some pretty clever songs and banners. For instance, one of the banners in the video makes this offer to the opposing team: “I’ll put the clock back ten minutes for you.”

Among the many songs Torcida fans sing, lots of them are funny… and unprintable. Here are just a couple (clean) examples, which of course aren’t quite as good in translation, but you’ll get the feel: “We don’t have a mother. We don’t have a father. All we care about is Hajduk and the beer bottle!” Or there’s this one: “I’m from Dalmatia, here I was born.  The blue sea knows I love Split’s Hajduks!” That’s wholesome, right? Kind of like this one: “O Hajduks, o Hajduks, I love only you. O Hajduks, o Hajduks, you are my whole heart!”

So maybe all that Torcida graffiti is reprehensible, and maybe a fair few of the fans are hooligans… but it’s all really about love! Now it doesn’t sound so bad, right? If you think you might want to join up with Torcida, my advice is to get in touch with this guy:

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.