Visiting Šibenik in November 2011, I had hoped to follow in the footsteps of the 19th century English Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson, on a journey up the river Krka to the Visovac and Krka monasteries. Alas, how times had changed since his visit more than 150 years earlier. Gardner Wilkinson travelled by boat, and was treated as an honoured guest at the Franciscan friary at Visovac. Today, the area around the Krka is a national park, preserved and developed for tourism. Travel up and down the river depends on the timetable of tourist boats, and in November, out of the tourist season, they were not running.
The autumn was nonetheless a wonderful time to visit the falls at Skradinski Buk, reachable by bus from Šibenik, and a short walk down to the river. With very few tourists, I could stroll peacefully around the walkways, enjoying the spectacular cascades, framed by the autumnal colours of the surrounding trees. But I wanted to make the full trip, and to do it by boat.
So back again in the spring, this time I took the boat from the park entrance at the little town of Skradin, up to the falls at Skradinski Buk. The English architect, T.G. Jackson, made this journey in the 1880s. He described passing through a gorge “if possible still more sterile and white than any we had seen.” It is true that Dalmatia is notable for its barren landscape of bleached limestone mountains, and expanses of scrubby little bushes. Behind the exquisite towns of the coast, built from the same limestone rock, it is a hard, hot, unforgiving land. But the gorge to which Jackson referred is no longer sterile. The hills on either side are a mass of green trees, the river banks trimmed with reed beds, an occasional swan gliding among them. I had more than once heard Dalmatians complain that their region had been stripped of its trees during centuries of Venetian rule, the timber used for the Republic’s ships and the piles that formed the foundations of the city’s buildings, an early example of human-induced environmental degradation. If this were so, perhaps the forests along the banks of the Krka had had time to recover since the end of Venetian exploitation.
Skradinski Buk had a heavier flow of water than the previous autumn, the normal spring swell. This was despite the drought I had been told was afflicting much of Croatia. Another 19th century visitor to the falls was the Emperor Franz Josef, in 1875. His visit is commemorated by a notice next to a viewing point built out over the river by local people for the Emperor to view the falls. According to the notice, people thronged the surrounding hills, and greeted the Emperor by shooting their pistols in the air, with shouts of “Živio” – “Long life”!
I took the tourist boat up to Visovac. The friary, on an island in the middle of the river, surrounded by cypress trees, is an idyllic scene. Unlike in Gardner Wilkinson’s day, when a foreign visitor was rare and feted, nowadays the friars generally stay out of the way of the tourists and pilgrims that pour over the island. Founded in the 14th century as an Augustinian monastery, the monks fled the encroaching Turks. In the 15th century, Franciscans moved in from Bosnia, where the order was specially favoured by the Ottoman rulers, and licensed by them to minister to their Catholic subjects.
Today, the friary serves as a seminary, housing three friars and nine seminarians at the time of my visit. During the 1990s conflict, the friary was close to the front line. Our guide told us that shells fell in the surrounding area, and even on the friary itself, and that the seminarians were removed to a safer place, on the coast.
Housed in the friary is a small museum. The walls of one room are covered with photographs of Catholic churches damaged and ruined during the war. The guide gave us his potted history of the war: in 1991 the Serbs attacked Slovenia and then Croatia; in 1992 they attacked Bosnia; and half of Bosnia is still occupied by the Serbs. It is a partial description. The walls contain no pictures of ruined Orthodox churches or mosques. There is nothing about the Serbs from the Dalmatian hinterland driven out in 1995, their homes destroyed or occupied by Croats to prevent them from ever returning. Nor about the hundreds of Serb civilians murdered in the aftermath of the Croat reconquest of Serb-controlled territory. The mention of Serb ‘occupation’ of half of Bosnia omits reference to Croatia’s participation in the attempted carve-up of Bosnia with the Serbs, in which some Herzegovinian Franciscans were implicated. Nothing about the wanton destruction of the old town of Stolac in southern Herzegovina, its Muslim population expelled, the town wrecked, not in any fighting, for there was none in Stolac, but in an attempt by its wartime Croat occupiers to expunge all evidence of its Ottoman, oriental past, and of its Muslim population.
This is so typical of Catholic Croats, as well as of Orthodox Serbs, all of their focus on the sufferings of their own people, the damage to their churches, the Golgotha of their nation, and no acknowledgement of the sufferings, the injustices against others. In all their Christian charity, there is no time or space for others.
Yet the Visovac museum also contains an exhibit which hints at a time when relations among Catholics and Orthodox in the Dalmatian hinterland were not as fraught as they became in the 20th century. The exhibit in question is the sword of Vuk Mandušić, a local 17th century hero who fought against the Turks. Mandušić is one of the characters in the epic poem, The Mountain Wreath, by the Montenegrin poet and Prince-Bishop, Petar Petrušić Njegoš, and is a favourite of Serb epic poetry. Mandušić was Orthodox, which in 21st century Dalmatia would make him a Serb. Indeed, today his legacy is celebrated by wild-eyed Serb nationalist guslar players, wailing out their violent diatribes accompanied by the tuneless one-string instrument. Yet in the 17th century he could be a hero to Catholics and Orthodox believers alike. Was he a Serb or a Croat hero? In his day the question would have been irrelevant. For the more sophisticated population of the coast, he would have been a Vlach, or Morlach, as most of the population of the wild interior were identified. Yet the sword, and the memory, of this Orthodox slayer of Turks has been preserved in a Catholic friary.
Gardner Wilkinson continued his journey by boat up the Krka. From Visovac, boats could only go as far as the Roški slap waterfalls, and in order for him to continue from there it was necessary to send ahead to the Orthodox monastery of Michael the Archangel to ask them to send a boat to the other side of the falls. According to Gardner Wilkinson’s account, this presented the Visovac friars with a dilemma. They were not in the habit of communicating with the Orthodox monastery, and were concerned not to open themselves to the possibility of an affront. But one of the friars recalled that the ‘Greeks’ had been very civil on a past occasion, and that a letter to them might initiate friendly relations. So Gardner Wilkinson was able to proceed on his journey.
He found the Orthodox monks to be as hospitable as the Franciscans, and described the archimandrite as having the ‘manners of a gentleman educated in Europe.’ He noted that, whereas in the Catholic religious houses there were pictures of the Austrian emperor, the pope etc., in the Orthodox monastery it was the Russian emperor who adorned the walls. As the Ottoman Empire retreated, Austria set itself up as the protector of the Catholics of the Balkans, whereas Russia played the same role for the Orthodox. Thus political and national identities were drawn on religious lines, between Serbs and Croats, and wider conflicts between the empires of Europe imprinted themselves on the Balkan region.
For the modern traveller there was no possibility of staying at either monastery, as Gardner Wilkinson had done. And the timetable of the tourist boats did not permit a continuation by boat up to the Orthodox monastery. So I took the bus from Šibenik to Knin, and from there travelled by train to the little town of Kistanje, a couple of miles walk from the monastery.
The journey to Kistanje was a sad affair. Seventeen years after the war, and the flight or expulsion of most of the Serbs of the region, it had still not recovered. When I first travelled through the Knin region, not long after the end of the conflict, it was a desolate landscape, scarred with ruined houses, burnt out by people determined to empty the territory of Serbs forever. Knin itself had to some extent come back to life, its departed Serbs partially replaced by incoming Bosnian Croats. An American international official who had worked in Knin for the UN during the war, and returned there a few years later with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the experience of returning reminded her of the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The town was the same, but the people were different. But the surrounding villages have been left half-empty, bereft, some elderly Serbs returning to live out their last days on their own land, but few young. Railway stations along the line to Kistanje were gutted, fallen down, still in use – trains still stopped there, but apparently not worth repairing.
Kistanje had seen some redevelopment. After the conflict, the Croatian authorities settled Croats from Janjevo, in Kosovo, in Kistanje, occupying Serb-owned houses. In an effort to promote Serb return, the US embassy in the late 1990s financed the building of new homes for some of the Janjevo Croats, in order to free up Serb-owned homes for returnees. There has also been some renovation of civic buildings in the town centre.
A brash new Catholic Church with a tall tower has been built in this formerly almost entirely Serb town. The tower reminded me of the tall tower on a new Catholic church in Mostar, close to the former frontline between Bosniac east and Croat west. Such a tower in an ethnically divided land makes a statement; that this town is Croat. Round the corner from the church in Kistanje sits an older, more serene Orthodox church. Some Serbs have returned, although there is precious little employment for them. And ruined buildings in the very centre of the town are testimony to the fact that the place is essentially still a wreck.
The walk to the monastery was tougher than I had expected. It was only the beginning of May, but the temperature was already baking hot, and the sparse, scrubby little bushes offered practically no protection against the sun. But as the road descends towards the Krka, the river appears, snaking between the tree-covered hills, and then the monastery, sitting close to the bank of the river on one side, and a large, green pond on another. It is an idyllic setting. The monastery dates to the 14th Century, when it was endowed by Jelena, sister of the Serbian Emperor Stefan Dušan, who was married to a local nobleman.
The monastery was in the Serb-held para-state of Krajina during the recent conflict. Following Operation Storm, by which Croatia reclaimed the Serb-controlled territory and drove out most of its Serb inhabitants, the monastery was ransacked. Important documents were lost, one of the monks told me. There has since been considerable renovation, mainly financed by the Serb diaspora, the monk told me, with contributions also from the Serbian government and, he somewhat grudgingly acknowledged, from the Croatian government. It is now in a fine state, although some renovation work remains to be undertaken. It also houses a school. The monk spoke sadly of the near-empty villages in the surrounding area, the burned houses, the lack of young people.
I mentioned the visit Gardner Wilkinson had made 150 years before. Among the graves in a little graveyard just outside the monastery walls were some from the decades after Gardner Wilkinson’s visit. I stood in front of one of them, wondering whether this was the archimandrite Gardner Wilkinson had met. I told how the Franciscans at Visovac and the Orthodox monks had cooperated to help Gardner Wilkinson on his journey, and noted the apparently friendly relations that had existed between the two religious houses at that time. The monk replied that up until the Second World War relations had indeed been ‘correct’. But since then they had been harmed by the genocide committed during that war against the Serb people under the Croatian fascist Ustaša regime, in which, he asserted, some Catholic priests had participated. They had never apologised, and they had never acknowledged what had happened, he said.
A young pupil from the monastery school interjected that every Serb in that region had relatives who had been killed during the Second World War. He claimed that one million had been murdered at the Ustaša death camp at Jasenovac. My heart sank as I listened to this. While the depredations of the murderous Ustaša were a fact, the massively inflated numbers that so many Serbs persist in claiming only detract from their case and alienate those Croats who would naturally be inclined to sympathise. The more usual claim had been 700,000, but why not round it up to a cool million, after all? The number of the dead at Jasenovac has been a matter of severe contention for years. Croatia’s late President, Franjo Tudjman, had been obsessed with the issue, and research he promoted suggested a figure closer to 50-60,000, including thousands of Romas, Jews and anti-Ustaša Croats. Tudjman’s insensitivity to the traumas of the Serbs in World War II, his rehabilitation of some Ustaša fellow travellers, and his generally fierce Croatian nationalism had a baleful influence in the conflict of the early 1990s, driving frightened Serbs into the hands of Milošević and his propagandists. But the numbers he came up with are almost certainly closer to the reality, and they constitute a damning enough indictment of the Ustaša regime.
My visits to the two monasteries on the Krka, both of them beautiful, historic institutions, brought home once again how miserably both the Catholic and Orthodox churches in this region, with honourable individual exceptions, have failed in their Christian mission. Both obsessed with their own nation’s rights and their own nation’s sufferings, wilfully blind to the pains of others, they have perverted and distorted the faith they both profess. It is surely a shame and a disgrace that these followers of Christ are the last people to look to in hope of reconciliation. Rather, they have persistently been at the forefront of the most uncompromisingly nationalist elements in their respective nations. They have been heralds of conflict and intolerance. The Balkans would have been better off without them.
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