Split

Our Guide

Morning break in Trogir

Trogir plazza cafe

St. Martin with
his grill!
(Look it up!)

Island town on coast

Oyster beds along the coast.

And There But For a Little Girl, Go We…

Monument to those executed by the Nazis

Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosovic, Marshal Tito,ethnic cleansing … all these were words that flowed through my brain during the late 80’s and 90’s.  The words didn’t mean a whole lot, except there were people way across the globe fighting and killing each other for some reason or other.  But, tucked away in Middle America, it really didn’t affect me one way or the other.  At least, not directly.  And, in the 2000’s, when we in St. Louis were told we had the largest group of Bosnians resettled during and after “the war”, I felt vaguely proud that the government thought enough of St. Louis to send them here.  I heard they were great stonemasons and bricklayers.  And they were Muslim.  But then, who cares about things like that in America.

One of the ubiqutous shrines

What I found out when we stopped in Split, Croatia, is that they really DID care about that in the former
 Yugoslavia.  In fact, the ethnic divisions, from Christians to Jews to Muslims and everything in between, was enough to cause a war.  And the war was deadly enough that hundreds of thousands of people were annihilated.  You see, the Serbs felt they were strong enough to have their own ethnically pure country.  To heck with the other non-Serbian groups.  They were weaklings anyway.  They had no armies or weapons, so the Serbs, under Milosovic’s leadership, decided to eliminate the others.  Especially the other ethnic groups.  And why not just eliminate those that had “mixed” blood too?  And why not eliminate the children of mixed marriages, so the new Serbia would be “pure”?! 

Food with local wine (after grappa!)

So they set about annihilating everyone not Serbian.  And they annihilated the countryside as well.  Families were separated, parts of them killed, surviving on whatever they could find in garbage heaps, or, if they were lucky, rotting in the fields of vacant farms.

How did it end?  Well, we, the US, joined the UN to bomb the area enough to end the war as, T.S. Eliot so eloquently wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”  With the country destroyed, the war stumbled to a close.  And Yugoslavia was gone, Croatia was born.

Nov. 12, 2011.  Flash Forward.  We Americans land via cruise ship in Split, Croatia.  It looks much like any modern city, except for the walls where they point out the bullet holes.  And the new buildings.  We all climb into a touring bus, like good dobies. 

  

It's a 20 month old girl.

And as we careen through the countryside, we notice fields of grape vines, vegetables.  Even vegetable fields in the front yards of the scattered homes.  There seemed to be an abundance of homegrown veggies everywhere!  And, after we had traveled about an hour climbing ever higher into the hills/mountains, we reached a small village that appeared to be hundreds of years old.  All the homes were made of rocks piled on each other.  And the roofs were slate, roughly cut, laid on top of wood branches.  So, when you looked up, you could see sun peeking through the home-made slate shingles.

We climbed up a dirt road to a complex of stone hut/houses where we were to see how a typical village family lived.  When I asked how old the homes (because there was a collection of “rooms/houses”), the grandmotherly looking owner said it was at least 300 years old.  And she and her family and their ancestors, for that matter, had always lived there!  They were so far from any town that they were born in the houses with mid-wives and were, for the most part, totally self-sufficient. 

Stone "igloo"

Our lunch, which was cooked in the cookhouse over open fires, still used, included homemade grappa (that’s the drink Princess Diana’s driver was drinking the night she was killed!) with figs, since figs don’t preserve well.  And we had air-dried prosciutto along with homemade cheese and homemade bread.  In that moment, we went back in our brains 300 years.  But, so we wouldn’t forget, we stopped at a little Catholic monument on the road, where names were crudely carved into the stones – names of all the people who were slaughtered on that spot during the war!

Wandering around, we saw the chicken house and yard, with not only chickens, but also ducks.  Where were the cows and pigs?  That I can’t tell you, but I know they were there somewhere!  And, next to the chicken house was a, for a better description, an “igloo” made of stone with that same round door.  That structure, they told us, was the first “house” on the site and it was 1,000 years old.  Yup.  One thousand years.

Living in this complex were grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, children – and Lucia.  Lucia was exactly 20 months old, the same age as my Iris.  And she was climbing all over the stone walls, stairs, fences, in and out of structures.  No helmets.  No gates.  No playpens.  No restrictions.  No toys, actually, except for a little homemade table and chairs.  And she was laughing, loving the influx of new people.  And, as the local musicians played a guitar, she whirled and twirled and clapped her hands.  Children are the same all over.  And Lucia was just like Iris.

As we left, Lucia was waving goodbye – to her Mama.  “Bye-bye, Mama!  Bye-bye, she laughed.  And the war seemed so far away. Hard to imagine a decade ago these peaceful people were fearful for their families, friends and neighbors. But then our guide, who explained that now all ethnic groups live peacefully together, said, “We can forgive, but we should never forget.”