My first ever visit to Dalmatia, in 1989, was to Zadar. Looking back, it seems a strange choice. I went on from there to Dubrovnik, but would not Split have been a more obvious starting point, if choices had to be made? But Zadar too is a remarkable town.
Dating back to Roman times, it was, under the Venetians, the administrative centre of Dalmatia, and the largest and most important town. Later, in the 19th century, it lost out to Split, which surpassed it in size and importance. Following the First World War, Zadar (Zara in Italian), with its Italian majority, was ceded to Italy, while the rest of Dalmatia, which had been part of Austria for the previous century, passed to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Yugoslavia. The city’s severest blow came during the Second World War, when it endured carpet bombing by the Allies in 1943-44. The town was devastated, 60 per cent of its building destroyed, and an estimated 1,000 of its inhabitants killed (Italians claimed a much higher figure). After the war, only the churches were renovated, while large swathes of the old town were rebuilt in modern style, medieval streets replaced by soulless blocks. Most of the Italian inhabitants fled, either from the bombs or from the Yugoslav Partisans who took control in 1944 and summarily murdered several leading Italian citizens.
The town has spread out since then, its population boosted by an influx of Croats and some Serbs from the hinterland. There is little sign of its previous Italian character. When I visited in 1989, I noted that the waiter at a seafood restaurant repeated my order to himself, and counted out the bill, in Italian. But that was about it.
The most striking feature of the town is the extraordinary church of St Donat. A ninth-century, pre-Romanesque edifice, it is quite unlike any of the later, more familiar styles of church architecture. An enormous rotunda, with three apses on one side, it looks like an enormous drum. On the inside, it has a gallery, held up by arches and, in front of the apses, two pillars from the Roman forum that once stood in the area around the church. In fact, the church includes a great deal of masonry filched from the forum. Most remarkably, chunks of Roman masonry, including upended bits of pillar, were fitted higgledy-piggledy into the foundations in an extraordinary mish-mash. Visiting Zadar in the 1880s, the English architect T.G. Jackson described St Donat’s as ‘rude to the point of barbarism, but not without a certain simple dignity’. The bombing during World War II levelled an area next to St. Donat’s, including the forum, whose outline and much masonry have now been revealed.
Jackson thought highly of other churches in Zadar, describing St Grisogonus (Krsevan, being renovated during my present visit) as a perfect example of Romanesque architecture. He left his own mark in Zadar, as he was commissioned to design the campanile of the cathedral of St Anastasia, which had been left unfinished in the 15th century.
In the 1990s, Zadar, like several other Dalmatian cities, became a noted hotbed of hard-line Croatian nationalism. In May 1991, following the murder by Serb paramilitaries of Croatian policemen in Borovo Selo, in eastern Slavonia, and of a policeman in a small place nearby, there was an anti-Serb pogrom in Zadar, as well as in Šibenik, during which Serb property and businesses were trashed, in what a local newspaper, Narodni list, described as ‘Zadar’s Chrystal Night’. That Croatian nationalism was especially fierce here may have been in part due to the proximity of Serb-controlled territory during the war. Zadar was partially cut off from the rest of Croatia for part of the war, and atrocities were committed against Croats in the surrounding area. All this left a legacy of bitterness. When Croatian forces swept through the region in 1995, most of the Serbs in the formerly Serb-controlled areas fled. In the years following, in the hinterland of Zadar, around the town of Benkovac, which had previously had a Serb majority, the local Croat population offered especially stiff resistance to the return of Serb refugees to their homes.
When I visited Zadar in 2002, a huge poster was prominently displayed, expressing support for General Ante Gotovina, who had the previous year been indicted for war crimes by the international war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, in The Hague. A decade later, and following the guilty verdict against Gotovina (see journal posting of 1 May 2011), such posters can still be seen in Dalmatian towns, on walls, in bars, proclaiming that Gotovina is a hero, not a criminal.
Zadar had not always been such a breeding ground of Croat-Serb antagonism. Narodni list, the oldest Croatian newspaper, founded in the 1860s, had, as a focus for Croatian aspirations, been directed against Italian domination. At one time it had appealed to the town’s Serbs as well as Croats. Indeed, before the formation of the Yugoslav state, Dalmatia had been a centre of Yugoslavism, and some of the most prominent advocates of Yugoslav unity had been Croats from Dalmatia.
In addition to its old churches, Zadar also boasts some fine examples of modern design. Along the quayside from St Donat’s is the Sea Organ. As one approaches, one can hear the gentle, randomly piped sounds of an organ. There in the quay are holes, the entrances to pipes that go down to the lapping waves below. As they wash against the quay, the waves push air up through the pipes, creating a soothing music. A little further along, is the ‘Greeting to the Sun’. Discs of glass set in the quay, representing the sun and all the planets, soak up sunlight into solar panels by day, the energy from which powers a multi-coloured light show by night. Visitors and the citizens of Zadar stroll over the sun disc, some of them dancing across the coloured floor, while children run about, inventing games with the lights, jumping as the colours move and ripple across the ground.
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