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Published: June 12th 2017
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Quite a view from the bus approaching Dubrovnik.My college self was more enamored than I currently am, but since we are working to a theme I might as well stick with it. One wonders what my thirty year old self will think of the Great Pun Experiment of the last few years. Woolgathering on my part. Picking up where we left off,
From Mostar I hopped another bus over to Dubrovnik, which meant crossing one of the more confusing stretches of border in the world.
For reasons that have a surprising amount to do with the Ottoman Empire's diplomatic relationship to the neighboring Republic of Ragusa, Bosnia-Herzegovina owns the tiniest sliver of coastline, flanked on both sides by modern day Croatia. As far as I can tell this mostly meant the existence of one border pit stop and an obligation to cross no fewer than four border checkpoints on the way from Dubrovnik and then to Split. Still, I think it was worth the trip. If nothing else, the coastline of Croatia is one of the most beautiful landscapes around. Barebones rock juts out at odd angles from gemstone waters on one side, and steep hills and mountain greens rise on the other. In the middle,
on an extremely suspect bus traveling just a little too fast around the curves of a two lane highway with few guard rails, was me.
The Republic of King's Landing. Dubrovnik is a remarkable place to visit for a day, and like its mother country Venice it feels almost trapped in amber from another time. Dubrovnik was founded by the Byzantines in one of the stock market highs of their empire, and it then spent most of the rest of its time under siege or threatened by one of the many powers that dogged the children of Constantine for centuries. Like Byzantium, Dubrovnik fell prey to the Venetians when the Fourth Crusade was redirected from its original goals of Religion and Profit to just plain Profit. After the crusaders seized on a revolt in Constantinople to carve up the Empire into microstate chunks, Dubrovnik fell into Venetian hands in 1205, and stayed there for 150 years. As Venice waned, the city developed a healthy sense of independence and managed to play the various powers of the region off against each other for a notional sovereignty as the Republic of Ragusa. Pulling a page from the Venetian's relations with Byzantium,
Teeny Dragon
Tucked into a back room in Diocletian's Palace. they then proceeded to compete and annoy their parent city of Venice for centuries. The wealth of the city spoke for itself in my visit. High thick walls ring the city, and a beautiful red roofed interior catches the eye from miles away. It's attracted its fair share of historical as well as modern pests as a consequence. Like many microstates, Napoleon's conquest of the region put an end to Ragusa, and an imposed General's later betrayal would actually make the term 'Ragusan' a French equivalent of Benedict Arnold in later years. In more recent times, the city fell under siege by the Serbian contingent of the JNA, or Yugoslav National Army, as the country violently imploded. Unlike Mostar though, the damage has since faded, beyond from the odd sign or memorial.
Indeed, modern Dubrovnik is so picturesque its often used as a backdrop for filmmakers searching for a functionally medieval looking city. Most effectively, the city plays the role of King's Landing in Game of Thrones. In spite of a healthy dose of green screening touch ups, if one squints a bit at certain spots the similarity is there. Dubrovnik was nice to walk through, but I found
Dead eyed Kit Harrington and Emilia Clarke
Decisively captures Kit's state of being at points. myself a bit underwhelmed by the actual substance inside the city. Like Venice, the memory of past glories and its modern role as the throne of the Lannisters and Targaeryans leaves little room for the city today inside the walls.
Splitting an Empire. So a day later I headed up to Split. Unlike Dubrovnik, this was actually on some vacation time and a weekend, which meant spending less time inside an empty hostel than some others. I should make a point of this, but I was mostly traveling through a region at the tail end of the tourist season. A lot of the time this meant that my interactions with other people were fairly minimal. Mostly that was fine. Outside of Belgrade I was mostly in a thinking kind of mood anyways, and a quiet hostel is an easier place to work than one where a bunch of like-minded twenty somethings are keen to chat or pass on drinks of their grandfather's rakija. Split was mostly like that for the first part, and then I found myself falling in with an ex-marine from Korea named Joe. I don't think the two of us could have been more different, everything
Salona
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings!
Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair. from age to military experience, to the profound and occasionally UFO-adjacent spirituality Joe had been wrestling with all his life set us apart. But we had a lovely time together anyways, mostly traipsing through the parks.
Split was not meant to be a city. Split was meant to be a retirement home for Emperor Diocletian on the other side of the bay from a city called Salona. Diocletian was a rare bird. After fighting his way into power, he opted to retire in 305 to his palace after 20 years of rule. He must have felt he had earned it, having established a series of structural fixes to help stabilize the Empire at all levels, including a wave of persecutions against perceived subversive sects like Christianity. Even imperial power was split in half, with a further two sub emperors forming a Tetrarchy to ensure consistent succession. As everything he had built disintegrated faster than a sandcastle at high tide he still declined to return to power, famously claiming "If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed". Admittedly, he had a very fine house built for his gardening, more of a large fortress really.
It was that latter quality that drew the survivors of Salona to it more than three hundred years after Diocletian's death. Like Dubrovnik, Salona had been tied to the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire, but unlike its southern neighbor Salona would not survive the 8th Century. After going back and forth a few times the region's capital was violently sacked, and the survivors fled to the islands off the coast. They had every intent of reconquering Salona someday, but intention never became reality. Split was as far as anyone got, apart from not one, but two, attempts to retrieve the bones of their patron saint from the ruins of the capital. In a moment of near divine irony, Diocletian's mausoleum was converted into the cathedral of Split, complete with the bones of many that Diocletian's purge had martyred. The best of the bunch was a saintly man with an apparently holy millstone tied around his neck to memorialize the way he died. With plenty of bones about it, Split sprawled out from the palace into the modern city, living as a reminder that whatever we may call them, the collapse of western Rome marked a chaotic and dark time for the inhabitants of urban Europe.
If the last two gushing paragraphs weren't obvious, I loved Split. I would have loved it more if I hadn't managed to bungle my schedule and missed a chance to visit Split's archaeological museum to see its Roman treasures. Instead, I went to the ethnological museum Split, which, apparently more of a difference than Splitting hairs. With the place closed on Sunday, I muttered some choice curse words and then decided I would make the best of it.
That meant walking to Salona, a good 10 kilometers away. All things considered it was a rather nice visit. Like many things Balkan, the ruins are remarkable, cheap, and unlike sites in Italy or western Europe, effectively unguarded and only just maintained. Antiquities theft isn’t unheard of, as while the site remains an archaeologically rich location the funding isn’t there to do more than some cursory digs officially. The upside meant visiting the remains of a Roman amphitheater with only a cat for company. In what looks like horrible foreshadowing now, on the way back a local cyclist and I fell into chatting about Donald Trump of all things. He commented on a past mayor of Split who reminded him strongly of Trump, and worried that Trump stood a chance of winning the presidential election if the same pattern of ostentatious wealth masking an insubstantial and impulsive rapist held true. Months later I can only regret my misplaced confidence in the electorate and voter laws at the time. One can only hope that 1,300 years from now later generations are able to amble over our own ruins with the same delight I found in Salona.
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