Old Dubrovnik, One More Time

Before we return across the Atlantic and travel across the "New Worlds" once more

Ever since I accidentally enrolled in a course about “Venice and the Western Balkans” twenty years ago, I was fascinated with the mediaeval, Renaissance, and early modern Adriatic.

Perhaps it is, like the great French historian Fernand Braudel wrote, the fascination of those who hail from north of the Alps; but it has become a passion that stayed with me for twenty years (and counting). You might find it a wee bit tedious to look at places—from Opatija via Trogir to Senj, for example—that sound a little bit ‘strange’ to you; but the area once known as “Dalmatia” is one of my personal “best places” to go.

For those who are considering a trip, I’m happily dispensing suggestions, directions, and, perhaps even more importantly, online resources to get you hooked convince that to go there is a good idea. If you wish to explore the Dalmatian coast, I highly recommend the weblog “Secrets Dalmatia”.

Now, here you may find the first two instalments in this mini-series:

Greetings from "The Pearl of the Adriatic"

Dubrovnik Across the 20th Century

And here are more picture postcards that speak, at least to me, because they show a bygone era, and, with allusions to Italo Svevo’s (in my opinion) masterpiece The Invisible Cities (orig. Le citttà invisibile), they also tell us something about the other cities along the Dalmatian coast.

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The Sights—and (some) People—of Old Dubrovnik

We have already encountered this kind of enduring perspective in part two of this mini-series; in this third instalment, we shall—finally—meet some people, too.

We may as well “zoom out” a bit and follow the people into the mountains above the turquoise-blue Adriatic:

Both of these picture postcards, although undated, hail from before the Second World War (and I am basing my estimation on the quality of the photograph).

Donkeys, Dubrovnik, and People after World War Two

By contrast, the following two picture postcards, while showing essentially the same motif, itself a slight variation of the “pictorial canon” of Dubrovnik, are from after 1945 (which is also based on the quality of the photograph):

I would also add that I deem it more likely than not that the party on the donkeys are tourists, researchers, or the like, as opposed to my reading that the people shown in the above picture postcards (from before the Second World War) are—locals, like in the two picture postcards below:

Change Outside Dubrovnik—in Coloured Postcards

As we shift to the latter decades of the Cold War, black-and-white picture postcards (and photography and TV, too) went out of style. Hence, we get colourful sights to behold, as well as the ability to spot a few more changes to the cityscape:

We now have many more paved roads, especially leading up the mountain slopes; tourists come to the same spot—approximately from where the above “canonical” images were taken—as the below picture postcard shows:

And note finally, that I wrote the truth about the turquoise-blue waters of the Adriatic.

Author’s Note

In this way, the influence of Karl Kaser’s scholarship on the historical anthropology of south-eastern Europe—and my scholarship, too—may perhaps be best paraphrased via an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s fictional dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in The Invisible Cities:

“Every time I describe a place I am saying something about the western Balkans.”

Adapted from Italo Calvino’s The Invisible Cities, trans. ed. (1974), 85-86, with my modifications.

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