Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Dalmatian Holiday

Not one but two trips south of the border to Yugoslavia this year! (Yes, I know Yugoslavia doesn’t exist any longer, but please humor me) In this case it is the Dalmatian coast, to bake in the sun and eat nothing but grilled squid and cevapcici, and maybe a little bit of prsut (Dalmatian prosciutto minus the vowels) on my toast for breakfast.

Bosnian grill. Who told them beer should be sweet?
Móni and I had been to Croatia on numerous occasions, all up and down the Dalmatian coast. It’s our closest stretch of seashore, so is a kind of a default beach holiday for Hungarians who need a salt-water fix they can’t find on Lake Balaton. Lots of interesting stuff to see, although we wouldn’t be covering much of any new ground on this trip. Basically, the further south you go on the coast, the more dramatic the scenery, and the less crowded the beaches, so for this trip we had picked out a spot on the Peljesac peninsula between Split and Dubrovnik, a long mountainous knob sticking out of the sea, yearning to be an island but not quite succeeding, and studded with little fishing villages and vineyards – we were in the tiny village of Postup, the second most famous wine producing area in all of Croatia.

Cove at Postup

Folti the otter. Taken from Korcula. Orebic and Postup in background.


This was a sort of mix-and-match family holiday for us (with Móni’s sister Andi and her partner Péter, and Péter’s parents, and my Mother and husband Gil, who fly to Europe regularly to visit her family and fit in a trip with us to some part of Europe they hadn’t seen before. And, of course, Folti, who temporarily mutates into an otter whenever we visit the seacoast, or any body of water short of a puddle, in which she mutates into a miniature furry hippopotamus) renting an apartment for a week and taking daytrips some of the time and enjoying the sun and sea for the rest, which the proper way to enjoy a Mediterranean holiday. Wherever you go, there is always something interesting to see nearby.

I can tell you it took a lot of work to find some kind of combination of 4 bedrooms, four bathrooms in a beach residence that takes dogs and that everyone could agree on. Nothing fancy, and a bit far from both civilization and the beach, but with a marvelous view of Korcula and the Adriatic.

We reach it after a two-day drive—having stopped over in Trogir in middle Dalmatia, a lovely little town close to Split, where we picked up Mom and Gil, who had flown down from Budapest. Trogir was where we stayed for the week on our first visit to Croatia, and I recommend it for a quick airborne visit from points north and west, since Split airport is right next door, especially if you are a plane spotting aficionado.

After finding our apartment and resting our drivers for the first day, we took our first excursion to Dubrovnik on the second day: a well-preserved little gem of a former city state that flourished on maritime trade for several centuries by outwitting its much stronger enemies, like the Turks and Venetians, until Napoleon came around and ended the party. It took a beating in the Yugoslav wars but was already restored by my first visit, in 2002 or so. Now there are loads and loads of tourists, and of course, mediocre overpriced cooking to feed them.


Main square of Dubrovnik

Labarynthine alleyways

But walk out the old city gate and you're at the beach

No cars. My kind of town.

Fascinating interplay of light and shadow


Second day trip is to Korcula town and a tour around lovely Korcula island, across the sound by Ferry from Postup. This was once a fairly important port, as far back as medieval times, and claims Marco Polo as one of its sons. These cities on the coast have always been closely linked to Italy, and particularly to Venice, although not on an entirely friendly basis, and one enters into the debate about whether he was a Dalmatia Italian or a Dalmatian Croat, or even a Dalmatian at all, at one’s own peril. Great grilled fish in the little fishing villages outside of Korcula town itself.

Gazing out yonder from the tower of what might be the Marco Polo family house, depending on whom you ask
The third day trip is to Mostar, in Bosnia. Well, technically, Herzegovina. The Stari Most, now the Novi Stari Most, since after surviving 500 years of Balkan history, the Croat artillery saw fit to shell the original, along with the rest of the downtown area, for no good strategic reason except to remove physical cultural evidence of the Islamic presence in the region. There’s a new Muslim cemetery next to one of the downtown mosques where every single headstone I saw, for infants, children, adults, and geriatrics, all bore 1993 as the year of death.

Just like the cover of my copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Exotic stuff for a fair price, probably made in China

Nice restored houses and shovelled house

Looking up the Neretva from the bridge

Folti leading Andi and Peter up the bridge

For a few Euros you can watch these guys risk death. Or even better, wait for someone else to pay and watch for free.

Where'd he go?


Mom and Gil in front of Mosque


Mosque interior. Work of Mimar Sinan - creator of the Istanbul cityscape

Turkish-style house

Shell damage. expensive cars. dramatic setting.




But the city seems to be recovering nicely now, at least from an outsider's point of view. Mostar still looked pretty much like a war zone at our last visit in 2005, which formed an interesting counterpart to the flowering banks of the Neretva and the rebuilt bridge rising above them. Today, almost all of the major buildings in the bustling downtown area seem to be rebuilt, although a lot of the walls still show shell/bullet damage – which we still have in Budapest too in many spots, left over from WWII and 1956.


You don’t usually get too much colorful interaction with the locals on these beach holidays in high season, especially with a big family group, but there was a funny one here with a jovial Bosnian border guard who, spying the “H” on Peter’s license plate, initiated a conversation with Peter which consisted entirely of their reciting the names of Hungarian and Serbian water polo players, pointing and laughing. And then: “London!” “London! Da! Da! Ahahahhaa!” Point. Waggle finger. "Ahahahahha"

The less jovial Bosnian police are notoriously concerned about making sure tourists do not risk and limb by taking the unfamiliar roadways at the same speeds that the locals do, or even giving the appearance, to them, of doing so, despite what your odometers say. Peter’s father, driving the other car met them this time, although we knew from experience to crawl along and enjoy the (very striking) scenery along the Netetva. Fortunately, fines can be negotiated to meet any budget, as long as you don’t expect a written record. Don’t get angry; just think of it as a tourist tax.

The rest of the week was given over to resting on the beach, but not for Arthur. In 2005 when we were here in the area, I swore that one day I would conquer Sveti Ilija (Saint Elijah), the 961m peak looming atop the peninsula, and now the hour of our reckoning had struck.

Szent Ilija from Korcula

After some initial interest from among my various co-travelers collapsed, it was by myself that I set out from the Franciscan monastery in Orebic. Excelsior! It’s not really a good idea to climb such mountains solo, particularly in the light drizzle that was falling, so I hung around to make sure others were also making the climb, and partially glommed on to a couple Poles with whom I could compare notes in pidgin German as to where the cross marking our final destination might stand: “Hier giebts es kein Kreuz!”, “Vielleicht da drüben!”, “ja! noch ein bisschen”.

Italy, the Gulf of Lyons, and North Africa


Hier haben wir ein Kreuz.

Made it in 2 hours and 45 minutes. From the peak you get a great view of most of Europe and parts of northern Africa, and Asia Minor. Back down in about 2, which exactly corresponded to the lifespan of the Chinese children’s knockoff Juventus FC knapsack I had picked up in Mostar the previous day for 5 euro for the purpose of slogging my water bottles up this hill.

On the final day, able to hobble no further than the distance between the kitchen and the backyard grill (the old fashioned kind with a chimney) I appointed myself grillmaster and fired up a bunch of squid and cevapcici – exactly what we had been eating all week for three times the price at restaurants all over the area.

Croatians make the best grilled calamari. Everyone else wants to bread it like some kind of crazy onion ring, which completely kills the flavor, you might as well just eat onions, but the Croats know that it should be grilled whole until only slightly chewy (a tip—tentacles don’t grill well. You can throw the tentacles in a tomato sauce for pasta instead). The squid were all frozen imported from South America, so I don’t know why we can’t do this in Hungary. One gets conflicting information about how much fish and squid is actually left in the Adriatic these days. Based on my look at fish markets and supermarkets both here and on the Italian side last year, I would guess not so much as one would like.

In many ways, for me, Croatian is the ultimate national cuisine because due its odd shape and history, half of the country is really, historically and climate-wise, part of Central Europe and they eat stuff that is similar to the tastier things that Hungarians eat, whereas on the coast the Italian influence provides them with excellent pastas and risottos, including seafood for as long as stocks hold out, and the Balkan influence means they have excellent seasoned grilled meats and burek and whatnot. So if some hypothetical culinary bully came along with a baseball bat and informed me I could only eat food from one country for the rest of my life, but could pick which one, I might pick Croatian as kind of a cop out.

The local red wine turns out very well too, even though I didn’t taste too much as it was August with heavy-duty walking involved, so I was more interested in the juice of the barley when it came time to rehydrate, but we did try some from the local vintners and they do in fact make some stalwart southern reds out of this plavi mali “little blue” grape of theirs, some a bit raisin-y. Whites were a bit less interesting, but I don’t usually go bananas over Mediterranean whites anyway, except for sherries.

Our week is up. Time to clear out. On the way back we have to deposit Mom and Gil at Split for their flight home, so assuming traffic holds out this will be the day to show them Diocletian’s palace. The traffic does hold out! Generally, apartments in Croatia change over on Saturdays, which means that everybody wants in and out at the same time and on past trips we have had to contend with epic traffic jams, but now that the new highway is in place (and it really is a splendid highway if pricy at the tollgate, with lots tunnels through the Dinaric Alps that look like they were put there by serious Teutonic engineering company) almost the entire way down to Dubrovnik, there were really no problems.

So we had an hour and a half to join the throngs in a quick tour of Split. One thing about a declining birth rate in Europe is at least in a few decades those of us who remain will be able to enjoy our cultural patrimony in peace. In truth though, places like Split and Dubrovnik should be seen at least once in life, so we can’t begrudge our fellow tourists for showing up, only for their idiotic comments. They should read the book first so they know what they are looking at instead of standing in the way gawking. One of these days I would like to visit the Adriatic in the off-season. November or March. Probably not Split though. Trieste and the Slovene coast is next on my list. Border regions! Love them! Also need to make it to Sarajevo sometime.

My copy of “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” isn’t going to survive too many more trips to the Balkan so I picked up an overpriced copy of Misha Glenny’s “Fall of Yugoslavia” at one of the Split bookstores to see if it changes my mind on anything. So far not: still feel that the Serbs were unfairly singled out, maligned, and air-struck in a complicated situation full of devious politicians where there was plenty of blame to go around.

Lots of waterfalls

Last stop – on the way home we slept overnight in bungalows at a campsite near Plitvice National Park (finally a place I hadn’t already seen once or twice!). This is a beautiful assortment of lakes at different levels connected by a somewhat otherworldly network of waterfalls. We only had a few hours to walk around on the platforms they had though, so this area will merit a future visit for a few days of hiking someday, if the bears don’t eat us.

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