In the Doge's Palace: the glory and infamy of Venice

Walking through the Doge’s Palace in Venice, one marvels not only at the splendour of the Most Serene Republic, but at the sense of timelessness of a city whose greatness evaporated so suddenly, but left its monuments, its grandeur, its buildings in place, frozen in time, like an entire city transformed into a museum. Venice was not just an architectural, artistic and cultural marvel. It was the capital of an empire, at its height the greatest trading and naval power in the Mediterranean. It was well past the prime of its political power when revolutionary France kicked down the door in 1797. The republic which had survived untrammelled through a millennium of turmoil in Europe was gone, just like that. Perhaps the most poignant reminder of the suddenness of its demise is the coat of arms of the last Doge, the head of state of the republic, in the Shield Room, where the Doge held official receptions. On the wall in that room had been displayed the coat of arms of each Doge for the duration of his office. Since his exit, the arms of the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, have remained there, a sad memorial to a lost world, preserved now only as empty rooms, filled with fine artworks, but dead and gone.

Great Council chamber, Doge's Palace

I was especially struck by a series of paintings along one wall in the Great Council chamber, where the nobles of Venice once met to discuss the affairs of the republic. The paintings portray key events of the Fourth Crusade, at the beginning of the 13th Century, one of the most notable and most controversial episodes for the Republic. One of the paintings shows the conquest of Zadar, then the most important city on the Dalmatian coast. Zadar (Zara in Italian) had passed to Hungarian control a few years earlier, and Venice was determined to get it back. The Fourth Crusade presented an opportunity for the elderly Doge Enrico Dandolo. Venice had agreed to hire out ships to transport the French crusaders to the Holy Land. However, the French could not afford to pay. So the wily Venetians proposed that, in lieu of payment, the French could help them capture Zadar. The result was the sacking of the city in 1202. In Zadar, this is still seen as an infamous event. When he heard of it, Pope Innocent III excommunicated the Crusade’s participants, although he later partially relented, restricting the ban to the Venetians only. Yet here, in the Doge’s Palace, the conquest of Zadar is presented as a heroic and glorious event.

Other paintings celebrate the conquest of Constantinople and the coronation of a Venetian puppet, Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, as the new eastern Emperor. The rapaciousness of the crusaders as they smashed, looted and murdered their way through the city in 1204 made this one of the most notorious events in European history. Its legacy is still felt in the bitterness of many Orthodox Christians towards the West. The Venetian army fully participated in the capture of the town, and they shared in its plunder. Among numerous artistic works carted off back to Venice were the four great bronze horses, which dated from antiquity and had stood in the hippodrome for centuries, and which were placed above the entrance to St. Mark’s Basilica (they were replaced by replicas in the 1980s). Crusaders, who had taken an oath on the cross, desecrated the great Basilica of Hagia Sophia, raped nuns, and smashed holy icons and relics in a wanton frenzy of destruction.

The destruction wrought by the Crusaders in Constantinople had longer term consequences than the devastation of the great city. Byzantium was left withered and territorially truncated, an enfeeblement that left it unable to withstand the later Ottoman onslaught. But from the battering of Constantinople it was Venice that emerged as the greatest immediate winner. With the help of the Crusaders, Venice recaptured Zadar; humbled Byzantium; acquired key strategic territories in the eastern Mediterranean; excluded rivals Genoa and Pisa from trade in the reduced Byzantine Empire; and deflected the Crusaders from their initial goal of attacking Egypt, with which Venice was negotiating a trade deal. As depicted in the painting in the Great Council chamber, for Venice it was a triumph. And yet as I looked at the paintings, I was most struck by how such events, regarded in the Eastern Orthodox world as infamous and shameful, were here celebrated as glorious.

Hvar and Korčula; Partisans and the British

Visiting the island Hvar in November, there was little to see. Out of the tourist season, the little town of Hvar seemed rather empty, and the important sites were closed. Even the coming parliamentary election did not elicit much excitement. I observed a rally of the ruling HDZ party, attended by a crowd of mainly elderly supporters, whose mechanical applause for the dull speeches of party figures appeared no more than dutiful. Hvar is however a very charming little place. I first visited in 2000, for a wedding. The name derives from the Greek colony of Pharos, on the other side of the island. In the middle ages, the capital of the island was moved to the present site of Hvar town, the old capital being renamed Stari Grad, literally ‘the Old Town’.

Hvar

When the English architect T.G. Jackson and his wife visited Stari Grad in the 19th Century, they found little of interest. The locals tried to dissuade them from making the journey across the island to Hvar, which they described as ‘a poor decayed place’. Coincidentally, before I left Split for Hvar, my landlady there also told me that there was nothing much to see in Hvar town, and that I would do better to stay in Stari Grad. For the Jacksons, getting from Stari Grad to Hvar involved a boat down the coast, followed by donkeys across the island – an arduous trip. For me, it was a short bus ride.

Jackson was delighted by Hvar town, although he noted its dilapidation, writing that ‘on all sides we saw roofless walls set with beautiful traceried windows through which the blue sky was seen, and handsome houses with rich balconies now deserted or turned into magazines or storehouses.’ Jackson added that Hvar’s heyday was in the past, as ships no longer put in there, and the end of the Turkish threat meant there was no need for its fortifications any more.

The town is in much better condition today, although walking through the narrow streets, one still comes across occasional abandoned buildings, greenery poking through ornate stone windows. Some of them are in the process of renovation. A common problem in Dalmatia is that the ownership of fine old houses is diffused among dozens of relatives, many of them in Zagreb or spread around the world. Getting agreement on what to do with such properties can be difficult, with the result that they are left to continue their slow decline. Hvar boasts the oldest theatre in Croatia. Built in 1612, it is above the arsenal, and was under renovation when I visited.

When I visited Korčula for the first time in 1990, it poured with rain. During my second visit, more than 20 years later, the rain again poured down. And indeed, the island does seem to be notably damper than the rest of Dalmatia. Travelling by bus in 1990 from Vela Luka at the western end of the island to the town of Korčula at the eastern end, I was struck by the lush green of the place, such a contrast with the arid, rocky dryness of other Dalmatian islands. The 19th British traveller A.A. Paton wrote of the ‘luxuriant and variegated shrubbery’ on Korčula, which he described as looking like ‘one great conservatory.’

In its Venetian heyday, the town of Korčula was a prosperous place, as attested to by its fine buildings. Its glory was considerably faded when Paton and Jackson visited. Paton described the Arneri Palace, across the square from the cathedral, as ‘sadly dilapidated’. Both he and Jackson were much taken by the enormous door knocker of the palace, in the form of Hercules flanked by two lions. Jackson sketched it. Sgr. Arneri described the pleasure he derived from giving the knocker a knock, which made the risk of the knocker being stolen worthwhile. A Hapsburg prince had offered its weight in gold in exchange for the knocker. Now, the knocker is kept at the museum of Korčula, in the next-door Gabrieli Palace. It is an impressive piece. I gave it a knock myself, and understood Sgr. Arneri’s delight at its rich, deep tone.

The Arneri door knocker, Korčula

Jackson also remarked on a ruined house with a ‘splendid window with carvings of birds and serpents’. The house’s balconies had been sold to an American, for his house in New York, and the impoverished owner was being tempted by offers for the window as well. I was told at the museum that the window had been kept in Korčula, but had been removed to the cathedral museum. I asked a priest at the cathedral office if I could see the window, but was peremptorily dismissed. A Korčula woman told me that Jackson had played an important role in saving the town’s heritage, setting up a fund for the purpose, and that his contribution was still appreciated. She contrasted Jackson’s efforts on behalf of Korčula with the conduct of the former Venetian rulers, who she said had ruled only for Venice, and not for Korčula.

I had heard such bitterness towards the Venetians in Dalmatia on previous occasions. Typically, they are reproached for having stripped Dalmatia of its resources, especially timber, while showing scant concern for the economic or social well-being of the inhabitants. Of course, Venetian rule did see a cultural flowering in towns up and down the coast, as the numerous fine buildings attest. And those buildings also give evidence to the prosperity that Venice’s trading empire brought to the coastal towns. But foreign travellers confirmed the neglect and backwardness of the Dalmatian interior. Paton considered that, among the various foreign rulers of Dalmatia, the Austrians had done most for the populace, building infrastructure and introducing universal education. The Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson, remarking on the primitive state of the Dalmatian hinterland in the 1840s, also noted that the Austrians had made improvements after the neglect by the Venetians.

Korčula’s particular claim to fame, disputed by many, is its assertion that Marco Polo was a native of the island. Indeed, the house where he is supposed to have resided, round the corner from the cathedral, is one of the main attractions. During my visit, it was in the process of being renovated. Wherever he originated, it is certain that Marco Polo took part in the Battle of Korčula between the Venetians and Genoese in 1298, as a galley commander, and that he was wounded, captured and imprisoned by the victorious Genoese.

In the museum of Korčula is a collection of photographs and documents concerning the Partisan struggle against the Italian and German occupiers on the island. Along with most of the rest of Dalmatia following the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Korčula was annexed by Italy. Partisan groups were formed, as a result of whose activities six hostages were shot by the Italians in August 1942. Following the capitulation of Italy in September 1943, the Partisans briefly took control of the island, before the Germans took over in December.

Fitzroy MacLean (centre, wearing beret),

Korčula, 1943

On 4 November 1943, the first Conference of the People’s Liberation Council for the District of Korčula took place in Korčula town. Among the participants emerging from the conference in a photograph displayed at the museum is Fitzroy MacLean, Churchill’s envoy to Tito. MacLean had an illustrious career as a diplomat (he was in Moscow during Stalin’s purges, and travelled widely throughout the country, later writing about his experiences); soldier (he was an early member of the SAS); and politician (as a Conservative MP). But it was for his role in World War II Yugoslavia that he was most remembered, and with which he is most associated. I met him, a very old man by then, at the beginning of the 1990s, as Yugoslavia was on the point of collapse.

In 1943, MacLean was instrumental in a change in British policy towards Yugoslavia, away from supporting both the Royalist Chetniks of Draža Mihailović and the Communist-led Partisans, instead fully backing the Partisans. His brief from Churchill was apparently to find out who was killing the most Germans in Yugoslavia, and how Britain could help them to kill more. Maclean’s relatively brief stay in Yugoslavia, during which he was a guest of Tito, and had no contact with Mihailović’s adherents, resulted in his so-called ‘blockbuster’ report, which confirmed the already widely held view among the British that their full support should go to Tito. His report was, and remains highly controversial, contributing as it did to a switch in policy that helped the Communists triumph in Yugoslavia.

Evelyn Waugh, another of the British agents with the Partisans, warned of the consequences of Communist victory, including repression of dissent, and in particular of religion. Waugh met Maclean, and did not warm to him, expressing distaste at his evident ambition. Indeed, MacLean elicited resentment among many of the British military officers concerned with Yugoslavia, especially because of his close relationship with Churchill. Not only Maclean, but also an earlier British envoy to Tito, Bill Deakin, were close to Churchill. Churchill took a keen interest in the activities of the two young men, who he perhaps saw living through similar adventures to those of his own youth. He seemed to have an almost romantic attitude to the Partisan struggle in Yugoslavia, viewing Tito as a kind of T.E. Lawrence in the Balkans. Tito remarked that Churchill wept the first time they met, on the island of Vis in 1944, saying that he was the first person he had met from ‘enslaved Europe.’

MacLean was fully aware of the import of his recommendation to support the Partisans, which was perhaps remarkable for a man of his conservative disposition. When he noted to Churchill that, as a consequence of supporting the Partisans, Yugoslavia would be Communist after the war, Churchill apparently responded by asking whether MacLean intended to live in Yugoslavia? Ironically, MacLean did own a house on Korčula after the war.

Klis and Dalmatia's Ottoman heritage

While the Roman and Venetian history of Dalmatia is well known, less is said about the, largely effaced, Ottoman heritage. The Ottoman Empire reached the Dalmatian coast at Neum (now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina), where a thin strip of land separated the Dubrovnik Republic to the south from Venetian territory to the north. At the Empire’s height, in the 16th and 17th centuries, its territory stretched up and down the Dalmatian hinterland, within sight of the sea in places. Just a few kilometres inland from Split is the fortress of Klis, for centuries a vital strategic point controlling the pass from the interior to the sea.

Klis

The Scottish architect Robert Adam, who visited Split in 1757, and was responsible for some very important drawings of Diocletian’s palace, described the fortifications at Klis, and wrote about their strategic value. His visit coincided with the start of the Seven Year’s War, and he was suspected of being a British spy. Travelling through Dalmatia almost a hundred years later, the renowned English Egyptologist J. Gardner Wilkinson also described the strategic importance of Klis.

Looking up at Klis from Solin, now an outer suburb of Split, it is easy to see its significance. The fortress sits atop a hill standing in a gap between the mountains of the Dinaric range that blocks off the coast from the interior. In the days before highways and tunnels, control of Klis was the key to Split and the whole of Dalmatia. It had been held by Romans, Croats, Hungarians and Venetians, and in 1537 it fell to the Turks, in the long succession of wars that pitted Venice and its Dalmatian subjects against the Ottoman Empire.

Apart from a brief interlude in 1596, when a force from Split surprised the Turks and held the fortress for a few weeks, Klis was under Ottoman control for over a century, until a Venetian army recaptured it in 1648. And that was the end of the Turks. The mosque they had built inside the fortress was converted into a church, dedicated to St. Vitus. The call of the muezzin, which for over a century had echoed in the rocky hills of this now most Catholic country, would be heard no more. Yet a small trace of the Ottoman period remains in the name of the main square of the small town of Klis, below the fortress, ‘Megdan’, derived from the Turkish word ‘meydan’.

The Venetians enlarged the fortress, which they held until their empire was rubbed out by the French in 1797. The importance of the site continued even until the Second World War, when it was occupied by the Germans and bombed by the Allies.

Split underground: Reflections on Yugoslavia

Over centuries of habitation, the palace of Diocletian in Split was adapted to the needs of the residents, who built their houses among the columns and arches of the former emperor’s retirement home. It is all an extraordinary hotchpotch, with Roman arches appearing out of later buildings and passing through cafes. But underneath the palace, the basement was for centuries ignored, left much as it was, with little modification. During the Middle Ages it was gradually filled up with refuse and rubble. Only in the 1950s was the importance of what lay beneath the palace realised, and gradually the basement has been cleared away. Nowadays, the cavernous halls, with their huge archways, and the little rooms around them, are open to the public.

When I visited, the halls of the palace basement were occupied by various artistic installations, some of them involving TV screens and soundtracks. I was not moved. There was no overarching theme. I felt it was an inappropriate setting, that no thought had been given to how to fit the installations into that particular space, of how the space and the installations could enhance each other. Rather, it seemed the installations had just been plonked there for no reason. They detracted from the experience of visiting the palace basement. This was in contrast with the wonderful experience of visiting the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul in 2003, the cavernous underground crypt built in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, whose installations and low music enhanced and were enhanced by the Cistern, adding to the whole experience.

Yet there was one installation that I did find striking. It was a short televised documentary concerning a popular communist-era war film based on the true story of a teenage partisan hero, Boško Buha. The actor who played the part of Buha, Ivan Kolundžić, now a middle-aged man, had, in the 1990s, joined the Croatian forces during the independence war. In the documentary, Kolundžić gave two interviews, one as himself, and the other in the spirit of the Yugoslav, partisan tradition of which the Boško Buha film was an inspirational part. The two interviews are juxtaposed, giving two diametrically opposite views on Yugoslavia, communism and the war for Croatia’s independence.

Ivan Kolundžić as Boško Buha

In the recollection of one Kolundžić, Yugoslavia was a country in which all were united, and could travel freely without borders. By building self-management socialism, the Yugoslav variant of communist ideology, they were creating a just society. This was the beautiful dream to which many Yugoslavs were once committed, and the ideal for which partisans like Boško Buha had given their lives. As the narrator of the film noted in her interview with Kolundžić, this was the vision she grew up with, watching films such as Boško Buha. It was the vision of the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of the Yugoslav peoples.

For the other Kolundžić, Croats had never believed in the Yugoslav ideology, which had been imposed on them. They had given the appearance of going along with it merely to avoid persecution. For that Kolundžić, joining the struggle to liberate Croatia in the 1990s had been the natural thing to do, as had been the emphasis in that struggle on religious, Catholic values, so alien to communism, but so bound up with Croatian nationalism.

Kolundžić appeared convincing in both roles. To the question at the end of documentary, which Kolundžić should we believe, he replied with a smile, “me”. Watching the documentary with me were two young women, too young to have any memories of their own of Yugoslavia. Too young certainly to have been exposed to the idea that there might have been something noble in the effort to build a state based on multi-ethnic harmony, contrary to the usual 20th century practice in eastern Europe of population exchanges, expulsion and forced assimilation, all in the name of the nation state. They smiled, a faint giggle, as they passed on to the next exhibit. Yugo-nostalgia in today’s Croatia is perhaps little more than an eccentricity of a few old fogies from a past era.

But there is something uncomfortable and challenging about the Kolundžić documentary for those who accept uncritically the now dominant national ideology that Yugoslavia was always doomed, that the multi-ethnic state was a sham, and that Croats never believed in it. Undoubtedly some always loathed Yugoslavia, and were never reconciled to it. Unquestionably too, by the end of the 1980s disenchantment with the common state, with its flawed constitutional set-up, its economic failure and all its disappointed promises had undermined its legitimacy in the minds of a great many Croats, and others. But Kolundžić, speaking as Boško Buha, reminded Croats that, at some level, the Yugoslav idea had once had a positive message, at least for some.

Travelling through Dalmatia, one is repeatedly confronted with signs of the still powerful draw of Croatian nationalism, and the overwhelming influence on the national psyche of the war of the 1990s. The posters of the war hero Ante Gotovina, convicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague, the graffiti about the tragedy of Vukovar, and the pre-election posters of the ruling HDZ, all reflect the pervasiveness of Croatian national feeling. In such an environment the notion that Yugoslavia ever had any place in Croatian hearts gets short shrift in most quarters. But, as the documentary in the Split underground gently reminded, Croats were once part of Yugoslavia, they participated in it, helped build it, and at least at some level, some of them even believed in it.