Remember Yugoslavia? The big communist country across from Italy?  When Yosip Broz Tito died in 1980 the constituent countries of Yugoslavia – – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, and Serbia – – decided that with the Big Dog gone, it was time to become independent, so went their own ways, tore at each other like rabid pups in the early 1990s, and eventually decided to live in peace when Bill Clinton dragged them to Dayton, Ohio, and squeezed a treaty out of them. In Kosovo, they name their baby boys Clinton to this day.

In more ancient times, when these fierce peoples chased boar through the bushes with spears, the Greeks came along and subjugated them. Then the Romans, the Venetians, the Ottomans, the Austro Hungarians, and the Nazis. Meanwhile, they fretted with each other, raided each other, and contested borders. That’s why we call it the Balkans for heaven sake, a rumble tumble corner of the world with an impossible history.

We started in Zagreb, which we pronounce ZaGREB. They say ZAgreb. The rest of the Croatian language is, uh, challenging. For one thing they need an emergency airdrop of vowels. Here is a sampler of consonant rich words I spotted on signs and posters.  KNJIGA.  TVRDA.  KRLEZA.  CRKVA.  Good luck.  Our guide’s name is Hrvoje.  By trip’s end we all still butchered it.

Zagreb is a beautiful city with architecture reminiscent of Vienna and Prague, but as you stroll the boulevards you wonder if the whole city is going down the tubes. Crumbling masonry everywhere. Graffiti. Everywhere. A 2020 earthquake (did you hear of it; I didn’t) delaminated the masonry, and workers on omnipresent scaffolds are replastering everything. Fleet footed delinquents spray-paint their tags by night and elude capture while pissing everyone off for defacing their buildings. What do you do?

Well, you could board the good ship Arethusa, cruise along the Dalmatian Coast, and stop off at the walled coastal cities of Split and Dubrovnik.  Split .  .  .  worth the visit.  But Dubrovnik .  .  .  man!  The giant wall around Dubrovnik stands today as it did at construction a millennium ago, with a two-abreast walkway atop on which you can circumnavigate the venerable town and all its churches and plazas and clock towers and narrow stone stairways that serve as residential streets.  Some few well preserved places on earth grab your imagination such that you can just live there in your mind’s eye and ear and nose.  Teleport me there!  Also, red tiled roofs.  Big time.

After we put Croatia astern, we cruised on down the Adriatic with Albania to port. If they bulldozed US One through there, they would have Big Sur.