The Adriatic Sea, Azra in the tape recorder, and under the tents in the camp - girls from all over Yugoslavia. A green-eyed black woman in the neighborhood cranes her neck to the music I play. It's a stroke of fate.
We are awakened by sounds from the shore, the clattering of dishes, the calls of fishermen, the first hot breeze that heralds the heat of the day. We wash ourselves at the tap, sharing a towel. The smell of salt and pine needles, the deep blue of the night, music. That summer I am so happy that I occasionally think of sleepwalking.
Afterwards I talked to many people of my generation. Every other person has been to this seaside town at the foot of Biokovo at least once. The path was mostly the same for everyone. By train to Kardeljev - after the death of Tito's favorite theorist of Marxism Edvard Kardelje, the town of Ploče was renamed.
Guitar and cold cuts
That July, I strapped a packed tent on my back with two other friends. The ride in the compartment of the Yugoslav Railways was full of crude jokes, teasing and loud music. After changing the bus in Kardeljevo, we came to Makarska, which we knew nothing about. At the first camp we came across, we drove aluminum pegs into the dry ground full of pine needles and pitched the tent.
It is probably impossible to explain to today's generations what the minimalist charm of camping consisted of. Maybe a guitar, a little wine and some cold cuts with a side of bread were enough for us to make a sea spell.
In the first half of the eighties, Makarska was full of young people eager to have fun at the sea. Galija regularly played on one stage. It seems to me that Neša Galija has made himself so much at home on the Makarska Riviera that for me, every mention of the name of the seaside town would evoke a sound association with an almost Pavlovian reflex:
I still dream of an old love, and then I look for any.
When Neša Galija probably reluctantly emancipated himself from Makarska, where he played for nine summers in a row, in his song Skadarska, in the beginning of the nineties, in anticipation of the bloody Serbian-Croatian divorce case, the following lines appeared:
I can't drink brandy like Čačanska I can't love a bazaar like Makarska There's no one like you and me there anymore
Makarska without history
The young man is not too interested in history, because he thinks that what is happening for the first time to him is also happening to humanity for the first time. Everything before his birth seems like a gray, boring book that has been overtaken by the era of television and rock and roll. Youth has the right to such delusions. Ten years ago, my son asked me exactly about those eighties - did we have a washing machine and a refrigerator. The question was logical because we didn't have computers and mobile phones. I'm thinking about my Makarska from the eighties.
We were sitting under the monument to Andrija Kačić Miošić - at that time we did not know who the figure in the Franciscan garb represented. Saint Mark's Cathedral was a silent church that told us nothing about the centuries. Our attention was focused on the smell of fried fish and the sea. We didn't have the money for restaurant gardens where escajg rattled through the murmuring curtain. But listening to the music coming from the terraces was free.
The second time under Biokov
I was once again in Makarska. In a fishing village near Makarska in the late eighties, my mother worked as a retired teacher in a restaurant kitchen. I decided to visit her. I arrived in the city at six in the morning, the sun was becoming a huge yellow ball, the sea was golden with millions of sparks. Everything smelled of pine and hot earth.
I walked to our pier, took off my sandals and stepped into the water. Does the sea remember, does it store all that good energy in its womb?
I turned and walked up the hill with my sandals in my hands. I wanted to capture the scene in one glance. Behind the last houses was a pine forest, and in the middle of it was a marble partisan monument, with slogans that even their authors no longer believed. From the bench I sat on, I saw the coast and the cypress trees pointing their brown index fingers at the sky. I heard a growl. On a marble slab to my right lay a huge black dog. He didn't want me here. I was going down the winding road towards the square. The dog accompanied me to the first houses and stopped there. Okay, I told the dog, I won't come again. I thought he was wagging his tail.
Makarska with history
The character from the monument, Andrija Kačić Miošić, was the author of one of the most important South Slavic books of the XNUMXth century: "The Pleasant Conversation of the Slovenian People".
Croatian historiography, of course, considers him a Croat. Serbian sources classify him as a "Serb Catholic". Andrew was certainly viewed by the "Slovenian people" more widely than our contemporaries. His literary pseudonym was "Old Man Milovan".
That is why it is written on his grave in Zaostrog:
PEACE TO YOU OLD MAN MILOVAN! WHO GIVES THEIR BOOKLET
The roots of the people from this coast are connected with the Principality of Neretva/Neretljan. A millennium ago, it developed into a strong pirate stronghold between the confluence of the Neretva and Cetina rivers. Today's historians struggle with the ethnogenesis of angry pirates. In the part of the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus "On the management of the empire", the Slavic pirates who inhabited this area are "unbaptized Serbs". Croatian sources, by nature, do not focus on that statement, but say that it is about an "old Croatian tribe". Believing that polytheists, pagans, live on that coast, the emperor calls their land Pagania.
Anyway, those pirates, one of whose main strongholds was Makarska, forced the Venetians to pay tribute to them in the 1502th century. Centuries of successive masters followed - from Byzantine, through Bosnian, Venetian, Turkish, and then again Venetian and Austro-Hungarian. Under its current name, Makarska was first mentioned in XNUMX in a document by Muhamed Musin, the kadi of Foča. I have always suspected that there is some secret connection between Bosnians, the most numerous tourists, and Makarska.
Invisible history - Makarska in the film encyclopedia
Few people know that the Italian actor Giuseppe Adobati was born in Makarska in 1909. At that time, the seaside town was part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Giuseppe was engaged in theater acting in Trieste, he began to get roles during the Mussolini dictatorship, and after the war, from 1952 he was again in front of film cameras. He gets supporting roles in spaghetti westerns or horror movies. It probably speaks to a man who made a living from his craft but didn't have the charisma or luck to ascend to cinematic immortality. Giuseppe Adobati nevertheless acted in films that belong to the world's top cinematography of the last century. Many of his more successful colleagues would have given everything for even a few seconds in significant classics of cinematic modernity such as Federico Fellini's Sweet Life (1960) or Bernardo Bertocucci's The Conformist (1970). Giuseppe from Makarska could say for himself that on several occasions he was part of the team that created film history.
Third time
Thirty years after spending the summer under a tent, I decided to return there. My girlfriend at the time came with me, who became interested in Azra's music in the neighbor's tent. Time left its mark on us, less on her, more on me. On the Belgrade-Split-Makarska bus that sped through Croatia at night, I wondered if we would recognize something of our former selves in the place where we met. I booked accommodation online not far from the bus station. But the owner of the apartment did not appear. My companion stayed to talk to the saleswoman at the kiosk, and I went down to the center and booked the first hotel that seemed decent to me. It was close to the sea. When I returned, my companion and the saleswoman were drinking coffee and talking like old acquaintances. The seller was not bothered by Ekavy, she said a warm goodbye to us. It turned out that the hotel was beautiful, and that beauty had a western price.
We went out for a walk. We recognized only the square with the petrified Andrija Kačić Miošić and the small church. Nothing else from our memories matched what was going on around us. Nice promenade, fine restaurants, well-kept beaches, half-empty hotels. We managed to recognize the small wall that separated the camp from the road along the sea. Now there is a park with the same conifers that we used to see three decades ago as soon as we opened our eyes. We sat down on a park bench. It was like we were on another planet. The former town of mass, syndicated tourism is trying to find its way to the western pocket.
The mural on the building where dm drugstore was located depicted a Croatian general who was tried in The Hague, and below his image it was written: Proud Croatian!
What Makarska could really be proud of is the fish, wine and tiramisu that were served to us at the Ivo tavern. It is one of the best that was brought to my table on various Mediterranean coasts.
As we board the bus to Belgrade, I stop to say to my companion - there really isn't anyone like you and me here. Instead, I take one last look at Makarska and smile.
Bonus video:
