Croatia: Experiencing its beauty and warmth in cold bleak Birmingham
This is the second time Croatia has appeared in my Armchair Travels. On the first occasion it was post-Communist Concrete Croatia, providing refuge for young Bosnians fleeing the post-Yugoslavia war. But anyone who has watched Game of Thrones or even visited this luxurious country in real life will know that this is far from the whole picture. This is also a country of Roman towns, cobbled streets, friendly people, stunning country-side, hot sun, clean beaches and fine, fine wine. It is also relatively cheap, full of happy tourists and a haven for public art such as an organ that is played by the sea. It has also a long history of experimental classical music!
In other words Croatia is so nice that there are songs with titles such as visit Croatia… and films like Aleksi in which a young, disorganised photographer tries to move to Berlin, believing that it will offer a more stimulating existence than taking photos, sleeping with various men, living in her parents’ house and working at her parent’s vineyard. I guess when I was 28, I would have also thought that beauty and peace is pointless when you can’t go to a gig or watch an arthouse movie. I know haven’t made the plot sound that exciting, but that’s because it isn’t! Despite that, it was a worthwhile distraction to spend a couple of hours in the Croatian countryside and imagining what it would be like to live there and hate that, instead of living here and hating Birmingham.
The Croatia described in this week’s book Adios Cowboy is not quite as idyllic. In fact it’s quite hellish. Written by Olja Savičević Ivančević, this is a book described as lifting the lid on the dark alleys of a beautiful Mediterranean town, revealing that beneath the beauty there is poverty, crime, child abuse, lies, murder, suicide and more. The problem of course is that all of these things also exist beneath the filth of an ugly, cold, grey, wet town. So even after spending a few hours living through those characters’ misery I would still quite like to move to Croatia. After all if you are going to be poor, scared, bored and lonely, you may as well do it whilst surrounded by beauty!
I guess you are probably going to start noticing a trend here, but I really, really love the food of Croatia. You get most of the pleasures of Italian food, but also the complexities of Eastern European cooking. So we ate Croatian risotto, and Croatian Goulash, ate Croatian pizza and, most impressively of all, found a half-Croatian restaurant which sold San Servolo beer and a desert which may be a funnel cake or a kiflice — I can’t remember, probably because we finished the meal with some local shots, the name of which also escapes me, but may have been Oharavac green walnut liqueur. It seems that the Croats are fans of walnuts and so I thought it would be rude not to buy a bottle. You drink with grated ice, or you can add it to coffee. I have drunk it a few times since and whilst I enjoy it at the time, it has always led to a cracking headache so it is about the only Croatian thing I cannot recommend.
So that is it for this tiny piece of paradise, but before you go I would strongly suggest checking out this map showing how Croatia has changed since 1796… a nice reminder that nation states come and go and borders are bizarre… But not as bizarre as governments as we will find out next week in Cuba!
