Why and How

Why Slovenia and Croatia?

Sorry — no short answer to this one. It has a front story and a back story.

The front story began when we decided on an overseas vacation to celebrate two milestones: my 70th birthday at the end of 2007, and our 45th anniversary half a year later, in July of 2008. Dorothea asked if, since my birthday was involved, I’d like to revisit Ireland, where we hadn’t been for 30 years. But at that time the worldwide economic collapse was still in the future, unforeseen by most people (certainly including us).

From everything I was hearing at the time, Ireland — like most of the Euro zone — had become a very expensive place for holders of American dollars to visit. Rightly or wrongly, we gathered that the same was true for most Grand Tour destinations in Europe, or at least Western Europe. But we thought Prague, which we’d heard many good things about, might be a good place to visit. Perhaps, as part of the former Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic — even though it had adopted the Euro — might offer food and lodging at somewhat more reasonable prices. (This may have been fantasy on our part; we never got to find out.)

A well-traveled friend told me that the rail journey from Venice to Prague, much of it through beautiful Alpine scenery, was an experience worth having. I looked into that on the Internet, but it appeared that even one night in Venice would put quite a dent in our finances. However, I knew that Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana (which I had also heard was worth visiting) was not far east of Venice and also had rail connections to Prague. It would cost about the same to fly there.

So we began to think about starting our trip in Ljubljana. We could travel to Prague by way of either Salzburg or Vienna; the trains went both ways. At that point we decided that we had narrowed our sights enough to start looking at guidebooks. Browsing in the travel section of Barnes & Noble, we both picked up books on Slovenia, just flipping through and looking at the color pictures.

I should explain that, while we’re both interested in nearly everything you can see or experience on a trip, Dorothea puts a slightly higher priority on natural scenery — countryside, forests, and mountains — than on the delights of urban culture, whereas I’m tilted slightly in the other direction. (I must admit that gastronomic adventures are high on my personal list.)

Anyway, after we’d been browsing through the books for a few minutes, Dorothea turned to me and said, “Why don’t we just go to Slovenia and Croatia?” She had been looking at Rick Steves’s guidebook, which covers both countries, and pictures of snowy Slovenian mountains and rugged Croatian seacoast cast an almost instantaneous spell. I was in no mood to argue with her suggestion, because... well, here comes the back story.

For various reasons I’ve been interested for many years in the region that used to be Yugoslavia. These reasons aren’t easily accounted for; I have no ancestral connection (so far as I’m aware) with any Slavic country, but for some reason all of them have fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

Russia was a partial exception. Like most people, I've read some of its literary classics. Education had made Russia, like England, France, Germany, and Italy, come to seem historically and culturally familiar territory. This is an illusion; there's certainly a lot I don’t know about each of those countries. But the smaller Slavic countries and the Balkans in particular have always had the attraction of being much less known. Perhaps my interest began when, as a boy, I read a library book that told stirring tales about the heroes of Polish history. As I grew up, other influences followed — for instance, Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina.

During the sixties I remember being fascinated by a German film set in the Bosnian city of Mostar during World War II. It starred Maria Schell as a German nurse who falls in love with a handsome Partisan. It was really the background — the city and especially its famous bridge — that accounted for most of my fascination, and I have to say that in those days anything that could draw my attention away from Maria Schell was an object of truly impressive power. In the same year that I saw that film, I studied epic poems collected (mainly in Bosnia) and translated by Albert Lord, the great scholar who wrote The Singer of Tales. He taught the class in which I read the poems.

My interest in all things Slavic was intensified when it came to the Balkans. I had read Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which persuaded me to share her romantic love of Yugoslavia in general and Serbia in particular. (Events later in the 20th century compelled me to see both in a more realistic light.)

It’s true that neither Slovenia nor Croatia is entirely a Balkan country, although the southern parts of Croatia fall well within that zone. Not only are both countries mostly — in Slovenia’s case entirely — north of the Balkan mountains, but neither country underwent the long Turkish occupation that profoundly influenced the culture of the whole area we think of as “the Balkans.” That region includes the formerly Yugoslav countries of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo, but it also includes Bulgaria — a Slavic country that was never part of Yugoslavia and has been related to it only as a rival and sometimes an outright enemy — as well as Romania, Albania, and Greece, none of whose languages are Slavic.

Despite Slovenia and Croatia not being technically Balkan, however, I was interested in any place that had once been part of Yugoslavia, and when we spent more time on the guidebooks (two that we bought and took home that day, and a couple of others we acquired later) we both found many things we wanted to see. I don’t need to list those attractions here; they are the main subject of this website. Not surprisingly, both countries had other sights we'd have liked to see, had there been time. I even tried to plan a trip that would take us down the Dalmatian coast all the way to Dubrovnik, and include a side trip to Mostar, but eventually I had to recognize that two aging travelers using public transport can cover only so much ground in 2½ weeks.

Dalmatia and nearby parts of Bosnia and Montenegro are still on our wish list; maybe we’ll get there some day. In the meantime, we found a great deal to see and enjoy in the places we did get to, and neither of us would revise the itinerary (although, if we had the magic powers necessary to accomplish such a thing, we might arrange for a little more sunshine in Bled).

Ethnicity, Nationality, and Language Terms

Somewhere in one of the books I read while gathering background for this website, I found a note by the author that he or she had used the terms Serb and Croat (whether as nouns or adjectives) in reference to ethnicity, and Serbian and Croatian in reference to nationality in the strict sense — that is, a Serb might be a citizen of Croatia, but a Serbian could only be a citizen of Serbia; Croat troops might serve in the Yugoslav National Army, but Croatian military units could exist only in and for Croatia. Similar distinctions can be made between Slovene and Slovenian. I thought this was a useful practice, and tried to follow it, although I offer no guarantee that I was perfectly consistent.

One conscious inconsistency: I followed the general custom in referring to the three languages as Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene (instead of Slovenian). Consistency in usage is no virtue when it defies convention.

Another possible point of confusion: many of us have been around long enough to be familiar with the term Serbo-Croatian as the name of the Slavic language spoken in Yugoslavia and its successor states Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Now we have to think of Serbian and Croatian, at least, as separate languages. Also, in the new state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian or Bosniak is becoming distinct from the Serbo-Croatian that everyone used to speak there until the breakup. However, this language belongs to the Bosniak (Muslim) community alone — the Croats still speak Croatian, and the population of the Srpska Republika, which remains separate from the federation that includes both other groups, would doubtless react fiercely to the suggestion that they speak anything other than Serbian.

The differences among Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniak are minor, although all three communities have been diligently working to increase them, as if linguistic similarity was in some way an affront to national pride. Likewise Montenegro, since separating from Serbia, has begun an effort to develop a distinctly Montenegrin tongue.

Serbo-Croatian, however, was not originally the common language of Balkan Slavs. Serbs, Croats and Bosnians were always able to understand and communicate with one another, but (as in other places) geographical separation produced a wide variety of local dialects. It wasn’t until the growth of national sentiment in the early 19th century that intellectuals in various South Slavic communities became convinced that a standard literary dialect was one means of advancing national aims. Slovenes took part in this discussion, but their language differed too greatly from the others to be included in the plan. Serbo-Croatian, based on the dialect spoken most widely in the lands occupied by Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, was officially created by the Vienna Literary Agreement, signed by representatives of all South Slavic groups, at a conference held in 1850. (One of the sponsors was the leading Slavicist of the time, Franc Miklošić, who held the chair of Slavic philology at the University of Vienna, and happened to be a Slovene.) A committee was appointed to determine which local variants would be adopted as officially Serbo-Croatian; the runners-up were banished (at least from formal writing, though naturally people went on using them in daily conversation).

Germany and Italy, two countries whose own national ambitions were on the rise at that time, had shown the way by each designating one of its local dialects as the basis for an official national language, and the Vienna conference was following their example. South Slavs had to wait a few decades longer to achieve political independence, but Serbo-Croatian inevitably became a political as well as an intellectual cause. It was the official national language of both Yugoslavias: the monarchy before World War II and the socialist republic after it, both of which wanted to emphasize the unity rather than the variety of their populations.

It shouldn’t be surprising, I guess, that the new nations of 1991 and subsequent years would want to cast aside this linguistic symbol of a political affiliation that had become onerous. It’s worth bearing in mind that popular speech in each of these nations still had its own local peculiarities, differing not only among nations, but among districts within each of them. The idea of a committee sitting down to invent a new word for railway station or airport just so that it won’t be the same as the word used on the other side of a certain border has its comical side, but that’s only one part of the process, and perhaps not even a necessary one. The natural workings of language are likely to create larger and more important differences over time.

Getting Around the Site

You can get to any of the main pages in this site (defined as the pages that narrate the stages of the trip, plus the home page and the site map) by clicking the tabs at the top of all these main pages. If you click a tab with the name of a place, you’ll see a page that explains what attracted us to that destination and offers a menu of the narrative pages and photo galleries that describe what we did or illustrate what we saw there. The “Getting There” and “Getting Back” tabs take you directly to the pages that tell these parts of the story.

The “Home” and “Site Map” tabs also each take you directly to the named page. But if you keep your mouse hovering on the “Home” tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu where you can find much of the background information I added to the site (including these navigating tips). Quite lot of the background information is about the history and languages of the countries we visited, and I put it in because that’s the kind of thing I like to do. You don’t have to read any of it — I'll never know, and there won't be a test.

Here are some additional ways to navigate:


On the home page only, you'll see a button near the top to take you back to the Bowenplace home page.

At the top of each narrative page, you’ll find a button to take you to the photo gallery or galleries that go with that page, and another to take you back to the previous section of the narrative; at the bottom there’s a button for the next narrative section. (History pages are the same except that they have no photo galleries and thus no buttons for them.) You can use the Next and Previous Section buttons if you want to read through the narrative or history pages without constantly going back to the menus to move on.

Each photo gallery page has a set of links at the top that you can use to step back to the previous gallery, sideways to the corresponding narrative page, or forward to the next gallery. (There are links for the site map and the home page as well.) So you can move through photo galleries in sequence just as you can through narrative or history pages, avoiding menus if that’s your preference.

At the foot of every page in the website, regardless of type, you’ll find a “breadcrumb trail” that looks like this:

Home > Name of page you’re on >

Some sites have breadcrumb trails that list the last several pages you’ve visited, in order, so that you can retrace your steps and go back to any page you've been on by clicking its "breadcrumb." But the breadcrumbs on this site represent only Home (which, as you probably didn’t need to be told, displays the home page when you click it) and the page you're already looking at. This redundant second link isn’t as useless as you might think, however. Clicking it redisplays the top of the page, which — unless you have a very slow Internet connection — is often quicker than scrolling up.

Finally, don’t forget that you can use the site map to find any page on the site and jump directly to it. Although not every page in the site has a direct link to the site map, you’re never more than one click away from the home page, which does have one of those direct links.

(Also, don't forget that your browser has Forward and Back buttons.)

Displaying Pictures and Maps

This is a somewhat simpler business than it is on our previous travel websites. Most images on the site can be enlarged by just clicking them. The rest of the screen darkens (this is called a lightbox effect) to make the picture stand out. If the cursor becomes a little hand when you put it on an picture or map, you’ll see a bigger version in the “lightbox” when you click. (The only exception I’m aware of is the map on the “Geography Lab” page, where certain parts of the map are sensitized to display other information when clicked.)

The lightbox effect works throughout the site, including all picture galleries. If the "hand cursor" doesn’t show when you move the mouse onto an image, it’s either because you're already looking at the biggest version we could find, or because the image is on the same page as one of the unfolding “accordion” menus, where we couldn't use the lightbox effect because of a software conflict.

When you look at an image in the lightbox, you’ll probably notice that, while the cursor is on it, you can see a legend in a little white box at the upper left (PREV) or right (NEXT), depending on where the cursor is. As this legend indicates, you can display the next image on the page by clicking anywhere to the right of an imaginary line down the middle of the image you’re looking at, or go back to the previous image by clicking to the left of that line. (If these busy little boxes interfere with with your esthetic enjoyment of the picture or map, move the cursor off the image and the boxes will go away.) This click-forward-or-back capability makes it possible to go through a series of pictures as quickly you want (or, at least, as quickly as your Internet connection will permit). Whether you look at one picture or many, the lightbox doesn’t quit until you click the X that’s always visible in the bottom margin.

Some maps — the ones that you open by clicking on a map icon — are set up to open in a separate browser window so that you can easily refer to them without having to call them back repeatedly. (In some browsers, they open in a new tag instead of a new window, depending on settings.)

Changing Text Size

If you find the text on the screen too small to read comfortably, your browser has controls you can use to enlarge it. Some keyboards also have a Zoom key that does the same thing. Browsers generally give you a choice of enlarging the text only, or enlarging the entire page including pictures. (However, they tend to lose sharpness when you do this.) To find your browser's Zoom commands, look under View in the menu bar.

What We Took

Since this would be our first extended trip without a car, we took care to carry no more than we could comfortably manage by ourselves — certainly not for the length of a day’s hike, but at least for the time it might take to move among trains, taxis, buses, and hotels. This meant that our beloved but wheelless Canvas Duffels of Great Capacity would have to remain at home, replaced by the kind of wheeled, stiff-sided duffels with telescoping handles that nearly everyone seems to travel with these days. We bought ours from Rick Steves’s website, and found them both serviceable and reasonably priced. We supplemented the wheeled duffels with smaller bags made to slip over the handle when it’s extended and ride on top of the duffel. I wouldn’t claim that it was a breeze to move this combination about with one hand, but we could do that with only a minor effort (except when we came to a stairway).

The duffels were of the size that just qualifies them to be carry-on luggage, but we didn’t use them that way on this trip — instead, we each checked both the duffel and the smaller bag, and took as carry-ons only the third major element of our travel kit: a small backpack. When I say small, I mean the “daypack” size that doesn’t require a frame, but still holds an impressive amount of stuff: cameras, books, toothbrush and undies in case the checked baggage went astray, and all that. (However, we didn’t waste much time worrying that it would go astray, having decided to put our trust in Swiss efficiency.) Checking our bags also meant freedom from some of the tiresome constraints placed (for good reason) on the contents of carried luggage.

Our bags had room for almost but not quite as many clothes as we had carried in the past, and we had to be a little more conscious than before about packing for a 17-day trip. On our road trip around the US in late spring, we had had a whole station wagon to carry us and our gear, and we threw in enough to dress suitably for muggy days in New Orleans, a snowy day (Memorial Day weekend though it was) in Yellowstone Park, and everything in between. Packing for Thailand hadn’t been a great challenge — we knew that November there would be like August here, from one end of the month to the other.

We knew that on this trip we’d be staying long enough in some places to have laundry done, but we also made sure that many of our garments were the kind that could be easily washed and quickly dried in a hotel room. Knowing that late spring weather in Europe can vary as much as it does here at home, we took light, waterproof jackets and fleece layers that could be worn beneath them if it turned cold. These strategies served us quite well, and we never felt inconvenienced by a lack of suitably warm, cool, or rainproof clothing. (One minor exception: the umbrella I packed, bought especially for the trip because it was very small when folded up, proved, when opened, much too small for a traveler as grandly proportioned as myself. Next time I’ll take my big one regardless.)

The guidebooks we’d found most useful when planning the trip were Rick Steves’ Croatia & Slovenia (published in 2008) and the Rough Guide for each country (both published in 2007). We carried all three with us and never regretted the burden. Photographically, we traveled light. Dorothea carried her Canon A510; I had a Canon SD800, a tiny affair that fit in my shirt pocket. We both had extra memory cards, but they hold so much nowadays that neither of us filled up the first one.

We didn't take travelers' checks, but we arrived carrying €3,000 purchased from our bank at home, and we paid all our expenses (apart from a meal at the Zurich airport on the way over) in cash. When cash ran low, we relied on local ATMs to renew the supply. This method saved us a good deal in the form of fees that the issuing banks exact on every credit card charge made overseas.

If you are thinking of sticking to cash withdrawals as we did, however, be sure to find out before you go just what and how your bank charges for ATM withdrawals in foreign countries. Banks have become very creative about attaching fees whose only practical effect is to make the ATM card more profitable for them and more expensive for you. Many, for example, add 2% or 3% to the standard 1% charge that goes to the credit card company (such as Visa or MasterCard) for withdrawals in a foreign currency. That 1% covers the cost of converting to US dollars, which is done by the credit card company, not the bank — so the extra 2% or 3% pays the bank for doing nothing whatsoever. (It's rather like the "ADP" charge that some auto dealers used to add to the price stickers of especially popular models: this acronym, I was informed, stood for "Additional Dealer Profit.") Our own bank used a different technique: it kept its percentage charge low, but imposed a flat fee on each and every withdrawal in a foreign currency, regardless of size. Some friends of ours who tried to foil potential thieves by withdrawing cash in frequent small amounts found out later that those multiple withdrawal fees had raised the cost of the Euros they bought far above the going rate of exchange.

We did a bit of research before leaving and found that we could get Visa ATM cards for a cash account we already had with Fidelity, who passed along the 1% Visa charge, but added nothing to it. Many credit unions and even a few commercial banks also offer ATM cards that won't soak you with no-value-added charges.

Street Names

In both Slovene and Croatian, it’s customary to express the proper name of a street or square as what would be, in English, a possessive. Where we would say simply “Washington Street,” the equivalent in either of those countries would translate as “Street of Washington.” They also use adjectives to name streets, as we sometimes do — “Main Street,” for example — but streets named for people are more common (at least in the capital cities, where I suppose commemorative naming is most likely to be the norm).

The “possessiveness” of a street or square name can be indicated in either of two ways: by using the genitive case of the noun (which, if you’ve studied Latin, German, or a similarly inflected language, you’ll recognize as a standard means of indicating possession), or by forming a “possessive adjective” from the noun. In Bled, we walked along cesta Svobode, the ‘avenue of Freedom,’ and in Lovran, along setalište Maršala Tita, the ‘boulevard of Marshal Tito‘ — both names formed with nouns in the genitive case. In Ljubljana, we crossed trg Prešernov ('Prešeren square') and in Zagreb trg Strossmayerov (Strossmayer square), both named with possessive adjectives. If there were linguistic equivalents in the US, they might have names like “Washingtonian Square” or “Grantian Avenue.”

For the most part I’ve fully translated the names of squares, changing the noun case to nominative (for example, Prešeren rather than Prešernov square) but for streets, even when I translated ulica to ‘street‘ or cesta to ‘avenue‘ (and so on), I stuck with what we saw on the signs, and didn’t change the case of the noun. You might also notice that I left the initial letters of the native terms for square, street, avenue, and such uncapitalized. In this I followed the example of the Rough Guides, which I believe were following the example of the Croats and Slovenes. I beg the pardon of all consistency freaks for these multiple outrages.