I spent my last week in Europe traveling down the Croatian coast. Croatians are blessed with the most beautiful coastline. It’s a rocky coast, and in places, mountains reach all the way down to the Adriatic Sea.
My first stop was Zadar, a walled city on the Central Dalmatian Coast. The city itself is very small — most of it can be seen in a day. At night, the city becomes overcrowded with tourists — it was quite unpleasant, actually. Instead of wandering around Zadar my second full day there, I took a trip to the Kornati Islands National Park. The landscape of the islands is really interesting — it’s rocky with desert vegetation peeking through in places. I noticed that the air was dry — a big contrast when compared with most places along the Croatian coast. There were “wild” donkeys everywhere. They kept fighting, begging for food, and causing a general disturbance.
After my lovely day at the national park, I took the bus to Split, where I met my friend Hillary and her friend Sandra. Split’s Old Town is cute. The focus of the town is Diocletian’s Palace. There’s also a really pretty promenade along the water, near the port. We didn’t do much in Split besides wander.
We took a day trip out to Hvar Island. Hvar is one of the prettiest islands. The Old Town is flanked by two monasteries. It looked like a miniature Venice without all of the crowds. After wandering through Hvar town, we walked out to the best beach on the island — in front of the Hotel Adriatica. Hours of swimming and sunbathing followed. The Adriatic is one of the warmest bodies of water I’ve ever swam in. In the words of a friend of mine, it’s “heavenly.” It’s so salty that it hardly takes any effort to float.
On the way back, we suffered through Mr. Toad’s Wild Boat Ride. t was seriously awful. We were coming back from Hvar Island, and the combination of fumes, choppy waves, and crazy boat driver made everybody sick. People were throwing up everywhere — it was disgusting. I spent most of the ride on the back of the boat, searching for a spot of fresh fume-free air.
When I went inside, I got into an interesting discussion with the Frenchmen sitting across from us. One of them (I didn’t catch his name, unfortunately) and I had an animated discussion about the relations between France and the United States. I told him that almost every American wants to go to Paris. We see it as the center of culture, ideas, and art. He said that many people in France really want to go to the US, as they are great admirers of our culture and natural beauty. It was nice to hear this. I was under the impression that people in France really don’t like us - our governments haven’t been on the best of terms lately. Maybe I will go to Paris in March after all…
My last stop was Dubrovnik. I returned to the place where my love affair with The Balkans began; back to that beautiful walled city. Being able to speak a little Croatian made my trip to Dubrovnik a lot nicer. One of the women in the shops heard Hillary and I speaking Croatian to each other, and she told us that our pronunciation was so good that when Sandra walked in, she addressed her in Croatian! She thought we were from somewhere else in Croatia! That made me happy.
I felt a little self-conscious speaking Croatian. At my university, the South Slavic language is taught together — as Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. As my professor is Serbian, he uses the ekavian dialect widely spoken in Serbia as the base. He makes sure to cover the pronunciation and spelling differences between the three dialects (linguistics say that the “languages” aren’t different enough to actually be considered separate languages. They have the same grammar and the same words, for the most part. As mentioned by someone in an earlier post, it’s like the difference between British English and American English). Because I’d been in Serbia so long, I’d gotten used to speaking the ekavian dialect. Along the Dalmatian coast, they use the ijekavian dialect. For example, the word for “here” in Serbia is “ovde.” In Croatia, it’s “ovdje.”
Most people didn’t mind it that I sounded Serb when I spoke their language. Instead of saying “Govorim hrvatski jezik” (I speak the Croatian language), I started saying “Govorim jezik” (I speak the language).
However, some American expats in the expat bar introduced me to one of the restaurant owners in Dubrovnik. He first asked me if I had any Croatian relatives (I don’t), and then he asked me where I’d been learning the language. “Zagreb? Ovdje?”
I responded truthfully. I told him that I studied Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian at the University of Washington in Seattle. And I told him that I’d been in Serbia for seven weeks at a language school.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. The woman behind him on the steps let out a long “ooohhhh.” And after that, when I made a valient attempt to speak some more, he told me that one of the words I’d spoken was a “Serb word.” It really made me feel like shit. After that, I didn’t try to speak the language with anybody.
One of my expat friends told me later that he had lived in Herzegovina during the Balkan Wars. He probably lost friends, and experienced horrible things.
And I empathize with that. But here’s the thing. Everyone in The Balkans has a horrible story, it seems. It was interesting — afterwards, we started watching YouTube movies in Croatian, and one of the kids there started explaining to me what was going on. He said that the Croatian president didn’t govern for the people, that he was too focused on Europe. He said that Tudjman’s government was corrupt. Funny — I heard similar things when I was in Serbia.
But I want to get back to my earlier point. Everyone in The Balkans seems to have a horrible story. And you hear versions of the same story in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. As Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic writes in “They Would Never Hurt a Fly,” — “Did the Croatian Army commit war crimes or not? It is, of course, a hard truth: the war was about forming a nation-state, which involved ‘ethnic cleansing’; two hundred thousand Serbs were forced to leave the Krajina; their homes were burned and plundered ; some four hundred civilians were killed; Serb civilians in Gospic, Pakrac or Sisak were executed en masse; twenty-four thousand Muslims were detained by Bosnian Croatian soldiers in forty-four concentration camps […] However, nobody wants to speak this truth out loud. Nor does anybody want to hear it, for that matter. This is because in Croatia the truth is dangerous. […] In this, Croatia is not alone. Serbs also have problems with the truth. In their own eyes they are the biggest victims of both Milosevic and NATO. Indeed, Serbian society suffered severe consequences — from embargoes to NATO bombing — as a result of the wars it waged against its neighbours, but the whole truth about what happened has not yet surfaced or become part of the public debate. In this respect Serbia and Croatia share a consensus about the lies of the past ten years. The reason is simple, one that goes beyond the Tudjman-Milosevic ideology. Too many people were in some way involved in the war, and too many of them profited from it. It is easier, and much more comfortable, to live with lies than to confront the truth, and with that truth the possibility of individual guilt — and collective responsibility” (15-17).
Earlier, Drakulic describes the differences between what Serbs today are taught about the war, and what Croatians are taught. Croatian children, she says, are taught that the war was a defensive war. And as a defensive war, Croat soldiers cannot have committed war crimes. She says that a child in Serbia would grow up “in denial about the war” (10), implying that they would not even learn about the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in school.
Everybody has a horrible story. Nobody talks about it. There is no established historical “truth” about the Balkan Wars. Drakulic believes that this is the task of the International Criminal Court, a body which, as she explains later, is not regarded highly in either Serbia or Croatia.
Someone told me once that after the Holocaust, children in Germany had to learn about it. In order so it would never happen again. So why, after the worst war in Europe since World War II, are children in Croatia and Serbia taught different things? What Drakulic was describing sure sounded like propaganda to me. And if these stereotypes and misrepresentations of history aren’t addressed, and soon, there is a very real potential that the Balkans could be a powder keg in the future. As Drakulic states in “They Would Never Hurt a Fly,” people and countries in The Balkans need to acknowledge their responsibility for what happened during the 1990s. It’s like the region needs to collectively air its dirty laundry, face up to the facts and findings of the ICC, agree on what to teach children, begin building ties again, and move on. There will not be a lasting peace without it.
Croatia will join the EU in 2010 or 2011. Serbia will probably join the EU in the future, after Croatia. What happens if Serbia joins the EU, and there’s all of this baggage between Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia?
I think it was Desmond Tutu who said that we cannot have peace without reconciliation. And we cannot have reconciliation without peace. So we’d better start working on it.
It’s been an interesting summer. Thanks for following along with me on my travels. I know I’ll be back in this part of the world. There’s something about The Balkans that just captures one’s heart and soul and won’t let go. I can’t explain how. I can’t explain why. But I know that I will always be coming back here. I am, like the title of Mark Mazower’s book, another fool in The Balkans.
Good night, everybody.