Dub-Dub, Dubrovnik to Dublin

Dubrovnik has to be the pearl of a trip to the Balkans.  Knowing this would be a great location, we left it to the end of our trip, which was also convenient for our return flight back to Dublin.  Dubrovnik was the historic city state of Ragusa, one of the major forces in the Mediterranean and the chief rival to Venice.  The amazing fortifications and defenses which survive to this day, meant that the city stayed independent even as the areas around it were invaded and taken over.  However, two major forces that caused lots of wreckage were an earthquake in 1667 and the Siege of Dubrovnik in 1991.  The former flattened almost all the houses and palaces inside the city, with the exception of the Sponza Palace and part of the Rector’s Palace, so most of the city is effectively about 350 years old these days. 

During Tito’s era post WWII, even as other cities had ugly, functional communist era edifices erected, Dubrovnik kept its medieval charm.  This was deliberate – it kept the city a tourist magnet and a hard currency cash cow.

In 1991 the Serbian dominated Yugoslav Peoples Army surprisingly attacked Dubrovnik, which had been far from the fighting. The old city was bombed from the air and shelled from land and sea. After eight months, the Croatian army broke through, but not before more than 100 civilians had been killed and 30,000 people forced out of their homes.

Today, one really can’t see any evidence of this damage, except that 2/3 of all the roofs in the old city were damaged and if you look at the roofs, those with bright colors were damaged, the few that survived are much darker.

These days Dubrovnik is back to its former splendor and tourism is back in full force.  The city is again a major Adriatic cruise destination.  We learned that one of the reasons nearby Kotor in Montenegro is on the rise and has so many cruise visitors is that Dubrovnik is essentially at capacity and so the cruise lines needed a new place to go. Apart from the several ships in port, which is about 2 Km from the old city, we also observed an additional ship at anchor on the far side of the city, whose passengers presumably have to be tendered into the city, but who also probably had a much prettier view from their decks.

We actually began our exploration of Dubrovnik just outside town at the Trsteno Arboretum, a lovely oasis of calm and vegetative beauty.  This is also a Game of Thrones shooting location and if you are a GoT nut, you should definitely consider coming to Dubrovnik as lots of filming was done in and around the city.  There are Game of Thrones walking tours where guides take people to some of them and show, through photos, how the locations were transformed into what is seen on screen.  For anyone who does watch GoT, you definitely experience some deja vu moments as you walk through the city.

The old city has only a couple of gates, and the Pile Gate is the main entrance today.  Above the drawbridge is a small statue of St. Blaise, the town’s patron saint who holds a model of the city in his hand.  Images of him are seen all over the city and interestingly sometime he holds the model in the right hand, other times the left.  On one occasion there were a couple of ceremonial guards in uniform stationed by the gate.  Amazingly I was able to find a break of a couple of seconds when there was not a mob of tourists coming or going.  Really this picture is very deceptive – a few moments before and later this space was just about wall to wall people.

Every city has its main drag, and the Stradun is the  300 yard long main street in the old town that takes you from the Pile Gate all the way through to the Sponza Palace and an exit to the Old Port.  Along the way there are old churches, fountains, and shops, just as there have been for centuries.

In front of the Sponza Palace is Orlando’s Column – which was the historical location for the town crier to make their announcements.  The higher he stood up the column, the more important the news. An interesting bit of local trivia is that this statue’s forearm length was a standard unit of measurement for the city.

Around the corner from the Sponza Palace is the other old main building that pre dates the 1667 earthquake, the Rector’s Palace.  The Rector was a role similar to the Doge in Venice.  Worried about any one person becoming too powerful the Rector was a position that was rotated on a regular basis – monthly!  Imagine if we had mayors that only served a one month term.  Seems to me that the Rector probably treated their time at the Rector’s Palace like a hotel stay.  It would hardly seem to be worth it to move all your stuff in, only to have to move it out a few weeks later.

Probably the main attraction in the city is walking the City Walls.  This is quite an expensive ticket, but the views are very impressive and make it a must do.   Plus you get a good workout climbing up and down the steps in various areas.  We were fortunate that it was a cool day, which made it very pleasant.  I could see how it could become a bit arduous if it was especially warm.  There are three spots at which one can enter or leave the walls, but one it only allowed one entrance and one exit, so we made sure to do a complete circuit of the walls which rewarded us with amazing views over the old city and out over the ocean and the nearby coastline. 

The northernmost, highest part of the walls is dominated by the Minceta Tower, seen in the adjacent photo. On the far side of the city is the wearhouse like St. John’s fort, protecting the harbor.  Most of these old builidngs house low grade museums which we chose to skip.

The same ticket for the walls is also good for visiting the fort of St. Lawrence just outside the Old City.  We learned that the ticket could be used the following day, so we kept this for when we returned to the old city the next day.

The Fort of St. Lawrence is on the opposite side of a small bay near the Pile Gate and is a most impressive location.  No wonder Dubrovnik was able to remain an independent city state when most of the surrounding areas fell to different conquerors.

The interior of the Fort is unfurnished, but offers a number of different “looks” that Game of Thrones took good advantage of to make a number of ficticious locations from one property.

Perhaps the best overall view of the old town comes from the nearby hills peak of Mount Srd above the city.  There is a cable car that runs from the old city to the ruins of an old Napoleonic fortress from 1810.  This was an area that Croatia was able to hold in the Siege of Dubrovnik and was strategic in the defence of the city.  However, since we still had our car, we instead drove ourselves up several switchbacks to get to the same place.  Looking down, one gets to see the Old City and the coast, looking inland one sees the nearby mountains in Bosnia.   One is warned not to wander off the beaten path as there is still a concern that in remote areas there may still be mines left behind.

Outside the sea wall side of the Old City is an unusual Cafe called Buza. Walking along the Old Walls it looks like the walls descend vertically into the sea, but in fact there is a narrow sliver of rock between the walls and the water.  There are actually two Buza Cafes, which I guess complete with each other.  They provide a series of terraces hugging the rocks and indeed you can sit on the rocks to have your drink and be rewarded with a unique refreshment experience.  To get here you have to enter the old city, climb up through the old city streets and squares to get to the base of the walls, then find a narrow doorway that takes you outside the walls and onto the narrow terrances.

From Dubrovnik it was time to fly back to Dublin and spend another week helping my parents. 

Motor to Kotor, then a Boat.

Taking advantage of our location close to the border, we got an early start from Catvat to head to Montenegro and a day trip around the Bay of Kotor.

Montenegro is one of the youngest countries in the world, gaining its independence in 2006.  Interestingly, they use the Euro as their currency, unlike their former Yugoslav neighbors, Croatia, which uses the Kuna, Bosnia, which uses the Bosnian Mark, and Serbia, which uses the Serbian Dinar. 

Between this trip and a previous trip to Slovenia, we have now been to all of the former Yugoslav states, except Macedonia. Side note – I was curious why when you look at a map you see FYROM for this country.  It turns out that Greece objects to this independent country being called Macedonia, a name they consider as associated with part of modern Greece (and home of Alexander the Great).  An so the official current name of this country is “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” or FYROM.  I suppose this would be a bit like calling the USA “the former colonies of the British Empire”, which is not a great name for an independent country.

The drive starts by passing by a few dreary towns, but rapidly opens up to beautiful, impressive scenery – very steep, tall mountains flowing down to a large, clover leaf shaped series of bays.  What makes this area so militarily important is that the neck of these three bays at the Verige Strait is very narrow (less than a quarter mile), but very deep, so that even today cruise ships can sail in to the interior town of Kotor.  However, this has been an important maritime site since at least Illyrian times in the 3rd Century BCE when Queen Teuta spanned the strait with a shipwrecking mechanism in order to collect taxes.  The bay is apparently littered with such shipwrecks. But she was probably too successful as she attracted to attention of the Romans, who seized most of her holdings.

Verige is a Slavic name derived from the Slavic word for chain.  The strait is so narrow that the Slavs were able to stretch a chain across it to control access.  The Venetians upped the ante by placing canons on either side of the strait, as well as in the opposite town of Perast, making the bay essentially impenetrable.

Perast was our first stop, and a small, but very pretty town, located right on the shores of the bay.  In fact a few restaurants are setup on docks that poke out into the bay, which makes for a lovely place to have a cup of coffee or a meal.

The main attraction in this area is Our Lady of the Rocks. According to legend, the islet was made over the centuries by local seamen who kept an ancient oath after finding an icon on a rock in the sea in 1452.  Upon returning from each successful voyage, locals laid a

rock in the Bay. Over time, the islet gradually emerged from the sea, helped along by the deliberate sinking of old ships full of rocks.  A church was erected on the rock and in 1632 the present Church of Our Lady of the Rocks was built, and a small museum is next door.   In the back of the altar in the Church is a small hole where the faithful can reach in to touch the original icon.  In the museum are all sorts of offerings from sailors and their families for safe journeys and answered prayers.

One of the most interesting is an embroidered painting made by a woman using her own hair.  As you look around the image, you can see the color change from blonde to gray as she aged.

In the nearby town of Ljuta, which claims to have the shortest river in the world, we ate at the Stari Mlini (old mill) restaurant which had a great array of really fresh fish, including trout from their own trout pond.  We had a lovely meal and then drove on to the main town of Kotor.

 

Kotor is a military town that dates back to Roman times.  It is now a major cruise ship stop with some 350,000 passengers visiting annually.  The local fortified town is impressive and in some ways similar to other towns we’ve seen, but in the setting of a pretty waterside with steep mountains rising from the edge of town.  There is an impressive fortified wall running up the mountainside built as part of the town’s defenses.

Rather than drive all the way back around the bay, we proceeded on to Lepetane and took a quick ferry across another narrow part of the bay to head back to Croatia and our apartment in Catvat.

Eating in the Balkans

Dining in the Balkans is an interesting experience.  There are lots of restaurants, but there is not much variety.  For one thing, except in the capitals, we didn’t see ethnic restaurants such as Chinese, and even in the capitals, there seemed to be only one or two.

Instead, the restaurants tend to be pretty much straight up meat and fish restaurants, although the Italian influence is also widely evident with lots of pizza and pasta joints, but with nothing like the variety of food one might expect to find in a restaurant in Italy.

However, the standard of everything was excellent – fresh products generally prepared simply, with few sauces.  The quality of the fish was as good as the best I’ve eaten anywhere and I don’t think the restaurants serve any that didn’t come in on the boat that morning.  If you don’t eat meat, but do eat fish, you’ll eat very well in this region - especially by the coast, but even inland we had excellent river and lake fish such as trout.  If you are a vegetarian, your choices will generally be simply prepared vegetables (generally meant as a side dish to meat or fish), pasta, or pizza.  If you are a vegan, pack a lot of your own food!

We were led to expect poor service in restaurants, but our experience was otherwise.  Yes, the service is slow, but this is more a reflection of the relaxed lifestyle in this part of the world.  The waiters were very friendly and helpful in helping us avoid things we couldn’t eat and generally being attentive in their own way.

On the liquid side of things, there were always plenty of drink options. House wine and beer is very inexpensive, often about the same as bottled water and less than soda.  There were also some unusual  options such as – grapefruit “beer”, lemon-mint cider, elderflower cider, etc. 

For those with a sweet tooth, Ice cream joints are ubiquitous and generally very inexpensive – about $1 a scoop or less in most places.  There are also innumerable bakeries, which tended to stay open late and in addition to providing fresh bread, also sold pastries of some kind.  Sometimes these were just chocolate croissants or similar (often not bad), other times, they had a wide variety of cakes and baked goods which were excellent and on a par with what one might find in France or Austria (maybe a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian influence).

Costs were interesting and for the for most part increased as the trip progressed as our latter destinations were more popular tourist spots.  By European standards, I would say that at the most expensive (e.g. Dubrovnik), prices were on a par with good restaurants in other major European capitals such as Dublin or Paris.  However, for everywhere else, the costs tended to be significantly less.

While the quality of food we experienced was very good, on a longer trip, the lack of variety, especially with our restricted dietary preferences, meant that mealtimes sometimes felt a bit repetitive.

Split-Catvat

Departing Split we headed North (away from our final destination for the day) in order to make a couple of stops.  First was a tiny town on the coast called Kastel Gomlica, which was used as a filming location for Game of Thrones. (For GoT geeks, this is where Arya wheels her fishmonger’s wheelbarrow.)  There is absolutely nothing to note that the location is anything special and there were zero tourists around.  It is a small site, but very quaint and it was nice to have it to ourselves.

From there, we went to the nearby town of Trogir, also used for GoT filming, but this town has a lot more going on, and a lot more tourists, including a couple of super yachts tied up on the dock.  The old town is actually on an island and has a very impressive fort on the seaward end.

We headed back south along the coast and stopped at the seaside town of Gradac where we had a nice lunch and I took a bit of a nap.  Driving on towards Dubrovnik, you actually pass though a narrow strip of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the town of Neum.  This is Bosnia’s only coastal access, and it also means that Dubrovnik and the surrounding territory is separated from the rest of Croatia, which isn’t entirely surprising if you know that Dubrovnik was its own city state called Ragusa (similar to, and rival of, Venice) until Napoleon folded it into the French Empire in the early 1800s.

We knew as we got close to the tail end of our trip that we would be spending the final few days in Dubrovnik, from where we would fly back to Dublin. We also knew we wanted to drive over the border to Montenegro and drive the Bay of Kotor. So, we decided to stay a couple of nights in Catvat, about 25 minutes southeast of Dubrovnik, close to the border and actually right next to the Dubrovnik Airport.

The advantage of this is that we could stay in a quieter and less expensive place than Dubrovnik, get a head start on our Montenegro trip and experience another Croatian village.  As we later discovered when we stayed in Dubrovnik, accommodations and food ended up being way less (maybe as much as 50%) of the bigger city, and the small town has a lovely bay view and very relaxed feel.

On our second night in Catvat there was a huge lightning storm – the most powerful I have ever experienced.  It started around 8pm and didn’t finish until at least 2am.   I’ve taken photos of lightning before, which is somewhat specialized, and not particularly easy with the camera I had with me.   What amazed me on a couple of the shots is that I had the aperture set for its minimum setting (i.e. the smallest hole letting in the least amount of light), and when I looked at the ensuing photos, the scene was lit up like it was daylight.   This means the light generated by the lighting was incredibly bright, and thus very, very close.  Made for some good photos though! The image below was taken after midnight.