Govorote li Engleske?
A row of old women line the dockside in Split. They are not however for the specialist tastes of Croatian men, but a service for tourists, a room for a night, but no lady of the night. Step off a bus or boat in Croatia and accomodation for the night or a week can be virtually guaranteed in the private room system. I blurt “slobodna sobe?” – free room – and look hopefully. One lady steps forward, she speaks no English and a little German and commands "dva sto kuna" I think, but a hand signal tells me yes, the room is two hundred kuna, about £20, a bit expensive in Croatia, but I had travelled for five days having washed only in the sea. More importantly I was tired, and the last ferry to Hvar Island had left the dock, leaving me stranded in Split. She leads me to a block of three inner city apartments. Not only do I get a shower and intermittent hot water in the flat, the protection of our Lord Jesus is thrown in for free, the framed figure watching over me as I sleep, whilst an ageing sticker of the Pope provides additional company. These two details, and the gecko that shared my room, separate it from being a London flat.
I knew that my endurance was below the average backpackers as I wilted in Zagreb, watching the Australian and Italian youth whizz by, jangling as they went; but even with a half litre of Lasko lager, the friendly goat on the side of the glass smiling back at me, I glisten in the sun. By now I can order in Croatian "Lasko pivo molim", but have to accompany this hopeful sentence with a signal which normally means big but occasionnally results in a pitcher. Alcohol is an institution in Croatia with service starting as soon as the cafes open, in Zagreb they open at 5am. Of course moderation is expected, but when every conceivable fruit is distilled into an intensely flavoured and highly alcoholic spirit, sljovovica – plum brandy – being the most widespread, the strive to engage in this tradition is high on the list of things to do.
Zagreb was originally two settlements, but there are two new faces to the city. In the south, an array of gardens and monuments to past Croatians, including the highly polished and visited horsebacked Jelacic, leader of the Croatian 1848 rebellion. A symbol of Croatian pride and resistance, which after decades of mothballing under Tito was restored by Tudjmann as one of the first acts of the hard won Croatian independence; but as I meander up to the north, breath heavy with sljovovica, I lose myself in a maze of flats blackened by smog, Tito’s facades peel away. An hour and a communist era tram later and I find the bus station and exit to the coast.
In holidaymaker resort Pula, backpackers don’t walk. They march with a sense of purpose, guidebook in hand and foldaway pot strapped to bag. Despite the similarities in destination, neither are they on holiday, they are in fact ‘travelling’, which is an altogether more profound experience, as the gap year student will tell you, with an air of authority and a wisened look. I might have bought into this packaged profundity, but I am still a tourist with lurid shorts. A tourist with a scant knowledge of either the language or recent events, a vague notion that there was a war in the early nineties, but this is abstract history for me. My ignorance is shown, when at 3 in the morning in Rijeka, I ask Mizzy, a Croat from Vukovar who resettled in Australia in 1996, "Wasn’t there some sort of siege or something there?", a cool "Yes" and a brief silence is the response, until she then tells me the implications of "a siege or something".
Croatia is not however an Eastern Bloc basketcase, and this is evidenced by the passion which Mizzy still has. Her family may be reluctant to return, but her future is in Hrvastska, she says in an Australian twang. Pride in her nation converts itself into a more virulent nationalism in the cities I visit, marks of the war have disappeared from Zadar’s buildings since it was under siege, but not from its people. Being a Croat means being Catholic and this religious conviction is held without the apology and embarrassment that characterises Britain’s relation with religion. A gable wall depicting the crowned son of man yards away from the Roman ampitheatre in Pula illustrates its importance. A T-shirt in Zadar with the slogan, "Jesus beat the Devil with both hands tied behind His back", however reveals my own English cynicism as I scornfully laugh.
An experience blinkered by conversations prefaced with "Govorote li engleske?", prevents the deep and meaningful interaction that the backpacker desires to tell the Common Room in Fresher’s Week, in the words of Emma an English NGO worker, "you only scratch the surface" of Croatia. By sticking to the superificially tourist and recommended restaurants, Zadar’s nationalist underbelly, shown by a poster supporting General Gotovina, a war criminal to most, a hero to a few, is drifted over. A more overt manifestation of racism is sprayed across the walls of Pula, I am greeted by graffiti, in English proclaiming, "White Power" throughout the Roman city. A minority with a grudge I say to myself sitting on the terraced beach against the warm Adriatic. As I leave the city that night, I pass a man. My age, my height; black combats, black boots; white laces, "White Power". I look at the floor as I rush to the overnight bus to anywhere.
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