Dubrovnik Old Town – Greg and Mandy's Travels

Croatia has a few interesting rules. The first is that you can’t run a free tour. So, in Zagreb they charged an optional 1 euro, in Split they refused to run them (but they would run full fee paying ones), and here in Dubrovnik they seemed happy to run them as long as you signed up. They then threatened to charge you 2 euros if you failed to turn up. No idea how they would get the money off you, but that’s a secondary issue.

Another strange rule they have came to light today when we went to buy an early morning cappuccino. “Don’t sell them.”, the shop keeper said, “but I can sell you an expresso, a latte or a macchiato.” “Can you do a latte with extra froth?” I asked. “Yes, but I can’t sell it as a cappuccino, as I’m just a cafe. If I sell a cappuccino, then I’m deemed to be a restaurant, and have to provide toilets.”

So, with a frothy latte in hand, we went off to our morning almost free tour. Our tour guide of the old town today had two pet peevs, Serbs and people who can’t pronounce Dubrovnik correctly. The rest of the world pronounces it Da-BROV-nik, but woe betide us if we didn’t pronounce it DOO-brovnik when asking a question. Actually, maybe that’s why nobody asked a question the whole tour, or maybe it’s because he was a very serious, professional guide.

So, we got a comprehensive, serious tour, though later on he did make an attempt at a joke about football. Lots of dates and figures, but the gist of it is as follows.

DOO-brovnik was a very prosperous independent republic for much of it’s existence, due to their skill as nautical merchants and a fleet of swift commercial craft. Buy low and sell high was their motto and they made lots of money trading right around the known world. Whenever they were threatened by an opposing power, instead of fighting and being creamed like all their neighbours, they negotiated a treaty with anybody, and paid them lots for the privilege of staying an independent republic. In fact they had no standing militia, just a few defenders of the fort.

Worked a treat. Byzantines, Venetians, Austrians, Hungarians, Ottomans, didn’t matter who, until Napoleon double crossed them in 1814, and that was the end of the autonomous republic Also explains the one thing that I’d never understood. When you look at the map, you’ll see that DOO-brovnik is part of Croatia, but it’s actually separated from the rest of Croatia by about 10 miles of coast that belongs to Bosnia. Why? Well, it seems that they had paid the Ottomans enough to feel safe, but weren’t that sure about the Austro-Hungarians, so as well as paying the Ottomans off, they gave them the strip of land on the northern end of DOO-brovnik as a buffer zone, so that the Austro-Hungarians had to defeat the Ottomans before they could get to them. Their insurance, successful as it was, now causes thousands of people to have to go through multiple border crossings to stay in the same country.

Being an older, serious, professional guide, he must have lived through the civil war of the 1990s, so its understandable that he wanted to show us the damage inflicted on the city, the photographs, the maps of the mortar hits, and blame it all on the Serbs, but as we’ve found all throughout the region, no side was blameless in the conflict.

Lots of tourists in groups, so quite busy, but we were assured that it was nothing compared to yesterday when three cruise ships were in. We were also told that the record is thirteen cruise ships in a single day. Not for the faint hearted.

Wandered around for a while in the old city once the tour finished, then walked all the way back to our apartment in the port area, just in time watch Krokodil Dundee from 1984 on one of the four Croatian TV channels we can get. Nice to see a bit of Linda again.

Tea at the local pizza restaurant, where we had pizza served with knives and forks.