It could have been 1985. Gabriel had damage and a full tank, I think Majo said - how about we go for coffee in Dubrovnik? And Gabriel winked: "Come in." Driving through the Neretva valley is always full of joyful anticipation - especially when you're young and grab every chance to see the sea.
On the way, we stopped at a roadside tavern to drink water. At that time, the toilets stank bestially, especially at the beginning of summer, when the morning freshness turned into midday heat. But it didn't matter to us. We drove to mythical Dubrovnik.
The first Dubrovnik
Our journey was chaotic and inconsistent. We stopped in Gabriel's native Konjic, then in Jablanica, where his girlfriend was, then in Mostar, where we drank coffee. So we arrived in Dubrovnik only in the evening. Škoda was above the precipice with one bumper. Gabriel parked somewhere under the Jadranska magistrala. Seen from there, Dubrovnik, with its walls bathed in the sun that slanted dangerously over the open sea, looked more beautiful than on a postcard. I know that we walked down for a long time, to a place called Vrata od Buže. That entrance to the fortress continues with steep stairs lined with old Dubrovnik houses. We descended into the heart of the city full of admiration.
I don't remember that first stay very well. There was a crowd on Stradun. The socialist citizenry with deeper wallets sat in the surrounding taverns, the smell of fish, garlic and barbecue, the sound of clinking wine glasses in a toast. Dubrovnik as a socialist paradise of international reputation.
We got beer - although we went for coffee. There was no more money. We bought grapes at the supermarket, walked back up the hill to the car. We sipped sitting in the harm and watching the city turn into a cake with candles on a damask tablecloth.
At dawn we stretched, warped from dozing on the seats. The east was spilling orange sparks into the water. Majo went to stretch his legs. He returned in ten minutes and told us that he saw Ibrica Jusić walking his dog. Gabriel, who normally loved Springsteen, on the way back through Herzegovina kept playing the cassette with which I remember the "Joke, Sara" thing.
Second Dubrovnik
That first Dubrovnik died for me on October 5, 1991, when a shell fired from a JNA navy ship killed Milan Milišić, one of the most important Yugoslav writers, a native of Dubrovnik and a cosmopolitan. Miljenko Jergović will write 20 years after his death: "Croats are uncomfortable with the circumstances of his life, Serbs with the circumstances of his death." The discomfort of the Serbs could be obvious - the cannons pointed at Dubrovnik are not only criminal but also militarily, politically, and strategically completely pointless. But Croatian discomfort? It was described by Pero Kvesić, recording a telephone conversation with Milišić a few days before the poet's death: "Until then, he worked as a dramatist in the Dubrovnik theater and persistently joked that, despite the fact that there was no greater Dubrovnik than him, they fired him because because he was not orthodox and of desirable blood cells". Milišić's father Risto, a cloth merchant from Dubrovnik, was originally from the area around Trebinje, and his mother Olga was from Sarajevo. Serbian origin, Yugoslav commitment, love for the hometown.
Milan Milišić was sentenced to suspended prison in 1945 due to the published story about the Dubrovnik innkeeper, a Czech, who was shot innocently by the new communist authorities in 1983. He did not adapt to the average and the herd. That's how he died. Yugoslav Dubrovnik was killed with him. The one I had visited only six years before, in which I could find, apart from painful beauty, not a single trace of future cataclysm. In a song from 1977 (Your bottom) Milišić may have an inkling where he will die: "In a terrible place, where the light mixes/ with the sea..."
Ban's Blues
I write these lines on Banovo Brdo, which is named after Matija Ban, a native of Dubrovnik, inextricably linked with Serbian history and culture. He grew up and was educated in Dubrovnik, worked as an Italian language teacher in Constantinople, where, some say, he fell under the influence of Polish pan-Slavist emigrants. Anyway, in 1844, at the age of 26, he came to Belgrade, where he became the prince's daughter's private teacher. This was followed by diplomatic service and the ideological concept of South Slavic unification under the leadership of Serbia. It is less known that Matija Ban translated and adapted a Polish military textbook on guerrilla warfare, using the word "Chetnik" for the first time in 1848. But before that, in 1835, he coined the noun "Yugoslav". He was the first to have the idea to build the Church of St. Sava in Vračar. Towards the end of the 1.000th century, Ban was not an isolated phenomenon among the people of Dubrovnik. Historiography says that over XNUMX people from Dubrovnik, among them twenty Catholic priests, publicly declared themselves as Serbs at the end of the XNUMXth century and that the so-called The "Serb-Catholic" movement also left its mark on the city map: Nika i Meda Pucić Promenade, Pera Budmanija Street, Baltazar Bogišića Street.
This Serbo-Croatian romance was dismissed as historical excess. Politicians from the end of the 1862th century worked on this. The villa of Matija Bana, which was built in XNUMX on Golo brdo, which would later become Ban's hill, was one of the first buildings demolished by Austro-Hungarian cannons at the beginning of the Great War. All that remains is the name of this region, which forever connects Dubrovnik and Belgrade.
Third Dubrovnik
Sometime in the fall of 2008, Dubrovnik reappeared in my real life. I was invited to a regional meeting on the possibilities of reconciliation. The organizers reserved hotel rooms for the participants Excelsior. From the window, Dubrovnik stretched out like a framed picture on which the sea sparkled, and the ship was moving in the direction of Lokrum, leaving a white trail behind. Since 1913, the names of the white world have been coming here - from Queen Elizabeth, to Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, Roger Moore, Sophia Loren, Francis Ford Coppola - some of the photos in the corridors, covered with thick paths testify to this. I felt that maybe my place was no longer in the seat damages up above the city, but certainly not here, among the plutocratic ghosts.
A group of regional enthusiasts, after many seminars on techniques of constructively digging into the past in the name of the future, went for a drink in a cafe near Stradun. Autumn was already advanced, there were few tourists. But the cafe was full. The owner served drinks at the bar because there were no seats at the tables. A young man and a girl who spoke Ekavian caught his attention. He stopped the Italian canzone, which until then had colored the evening with bright tones, and put another compact disc in the device. From the speakers came:
You are a woman from a country where passion reigns, makes people drunk with wine, love songs and power!
Bajaga's case from September 1991, when Milan Milišić was still alive, and Dubrovnik had not been shelled. Bajaga barely got to the chorus - You hide your heart in the skin of a crocodile/ and look me in the face with the eyes of a civilian - when a hoarse male voice was heard from the depths of the room: "Turn it off!" The boss looked in amazement at the guy wearing a leather rocker jacket, his beard turning silver with the first gray hairs. He walked up to the bar, slammed his fist on it and said, “This city was on fire. Turn it off”.
The boss gave us an apologetic look. He turned off the Bajaga and played some British pop. Everyone continued to chat pretending nothing had happened.
The ultimate Dubrovnik
Seven years later, I arrive by bus on a one-day trip from Herceg Novi. I enter the city at the Pila Gate above which Meštroivić's statue of St. Blaise greets me. Everything is there, including Stradun and Sponza and the Duke's Palace and those several thousand steps. End of May, and the sun burns mercilessly. I climb the fortress, peek into the shady alleys. I'm fighting for a place with a crowd of tourists pouring into the city from the cruise ship. Guides are trained in various languages. Lingua slava - Slovenian - as the people of Dubrovnik have called their language for centuries, is hardly present in this Babylonian confusion. I remember Milan Milišić's text "Look, Dubrovnik!" from way back in 1982 "A bunch of passers-by obscures your view of the individual and the buildings, the windows, the doors. ... all this is the excess that hides the essence of the space that is Dubrovnik".
In the XNUMXs, neither cruise ships that would uncontrollably increase Dubrovnik's surplus, nor a pandemic that would peel that hypertrophied tissue from Milišić's Dubrovnik were on the horizon.
I headed outside the walls, past the Old Port, uphill, towards the bistro revelin. From there, I rest my eyes once more: boats, fortresses, belfries and domes. Two cappuccinos cost almost ten euros. Perhaps you should climb to Srđ and from there look at the city with the eyes of a student.
Milan Milišić wrote that there are many ways to see Dubrovnik, and one of them was discovered by the poet approaching his hometown on a plane. For those who can see beauty, a change of perspective works like magic: "On such occasions, I am amazed every time, like a traveler who came from afar and was accidentally surprised by the clarity of the statement".
Bonus video: