Frolickin´in the Balkans

Traveling in the Balkans -- beauty and sadness side by side. As much as we've been reading about the wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia, I don't think it's possible to really understand. Sarajevo shows off its tolerance with four different places of worship in about one city block that survived through centuries (mosque, synagogue, Catholic cathedral, Orthodox church). So why are there craters in the streets and bullet-pockmarked buildings throughout the city from the 1990s?

Sarajevo in particular went through so much pain -- some people to whom we spoke just wouldn't talk at all about the war. A stirring museum told the stories of survival and resilience and ingenuity through those years, when city dwellers squeezed vegetable gardens into unlikely places and virtually all supplies came via a tunnel from the airport (the tunnel also held the only tele- communication lines out of the city).









But the central city at least has been restored and its cobble- stone streets showcase a lovely cafe-culture atmosphere for walking around.









We made our way to Mostar (in the Herze- govinian south) by an impressive train which cuts straight through the beautiful, very rocky countryside...lots of tunnels! Unfortunately, it was a drizzly day and my dark photos do not show off the green and gorgeous land. (I am sure you are all clamoring to have Marty's mad photo skillz back).







We shared our train compart- ment with a fine young man from Mostar, Ermin, ecstatic about having found a job in Mostar after living in Sarajevo for about a year (the unemployment rate in Bih is somewhere around 40 percent). He was a very young boy during the war years, and his family left Mostar for the relative safety of his father's village. When that seemed just as unsafe, they set off in a group of about 120 people to return to Mostar (through forest, no food, extremely difficult circumstances), but were caught by Serbian forces on the way. Only 8 people out of the group survived, when Ermin's father pushed them into a cave to hide. The suvivors did include Ermin´s nuclear family (parents and sister); a harrowing memory (and story) nonetheless.



Mostar is indeed a sweet little town, most famous for its charming bridge called Stari Most, which was destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt a decade later exactly as before -- same quarry, same design, same building methods (it took longer to build the second time). We saw a heart-tugging video of its history: pre-war, the actual bombing and collapse into the river, rebuilding, grand re-opening (fireworks, symphony, the famous bridge divers). It's also very striking to see Muslim cemetaries where every grave is dated 1993.




And then on to Dubrovnik and Croatian friendliness on the beautiful Dalmatian coast. Our guesthouse host, Pero, poured us two types of grappa to sip as he sketched city highights on a map. One (for Brian) was pure firewater; I got a sweet one, a bit port-like, made by his grandmother out of walnuts. Dubrovnik's city walls are special because you can walk atop them all around the old city, with ever-changing views as you complete your 1.5-mile circuit. The extent of recovery here is really amazing -- the main pedestrian tourist street is paved with marble, and at least in the center, you don't actually see the damage more visible in Sarajevo. But all the orange roofs in this photo are new (sigh); only the few brown ones in the photo escaped destruction.









The next morning, we saw the city walls from a decidedly different vantage point -- a glorious swim in the Adriatic, waving up to the tourists on the walls where we'd been 16 hours before. We got down to the sea via stairs cut into the rocks below the white cafe umbrellas in this photo.











We moved on to the island of Korčula and continued our athletic explor- ations by mountain bike (highest quality bike rentals ever, snazzy red Cannondales with disc brakes!). Our ride was half on-road and half off-road, with a lagoon swimming stop in the middle of the day; just heavenly. And after returning to town, we topped the day off with a Croatian specialty of wine-braised beef with herbs, served on top of gnocchi (Croatia is amazingly close to Italy, really!). And ice cream. ;-)





Despite our biking excursion, we were feeling full of old cities without enough nature, so we linked two of Croatia´s larger cities -- Split and the capital, Zagreb -- with an overnight at Plitvice Lakes National Park. A few hours of hiking among this gorgeous system of terraced lakes set us straight. The 16 lakes range in color from clear to bright blues and greens, formed by natural travertine dams, and feeding each other in cascades via waterfalls or small rushing streams. The park is fabulously organized with boardwalks over the water allowing you to follow the arrangement of lakes, plus shuttle buses and boats going across the large middle lake so you don't have to backtrack. It's really a stunning place, very different from other lake areas I've ever been.




Our few hours in Split included Brian making friends with Gregory of Nin, a 10th-century bishop who introduced Croatian-language services (rather than Latin) into the Catholic church. You can't see it in the photo, but his toe is worn gold and shiny from people rubbing it for good luck. Not Brian's toe, Gregory's.