A religious festival in Split

I arrived back in Split a couple of days before the feast of St. Domnius, St. Duje in Croatian, the patron saint of Split. St. Duje, who hailed from Antioch, was bishop of Salona, the capital of Roman Dalmatia, just inland from present day Split. He was martyred in AD 304, during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian was himself Dalmatian, and is believed to have come from near Salona. The only Roman Emperor to abdicate, he retired to Dalmatia, and his retirement palace later formed the nucleus of Split.

The ruins of Salona today are hemmed in by the encroachment of Split and the coastal highway. Sacked by Slav and Avar invaders in the early 7th century, some of the inhabitants sought refuge within the walls of Diocletian’s palace, and in time Split spread out from there. Among the ruins in Salona are graves of early Christian martyrs. While St. Duje fell victim to Diocletian’s persecution, the former Emperor’s mausoleum was later converted into the cathedral of St. Duje in Split.

For the feast of St. Duje on 7 May, the riva, the seafront in Split, was packed with stalls selling traditional crafts. In the evening there was a pop concert. The main event was supposed to be a religious service in the morning, although it was in fact not especially well attended. A few hundred people gathered in front of the stage, but many others just sat outside the cafés or milled around the stalls.

I listened to the sermon, which was given by one of the Dalmatian bishops. I was already used to the practice in Croatia of infusing religious observances with rabid nationalism, but I had not expected such an outpouring of nationalist fervour in a church feast more than 15 years after the end of the war. The bishop appeared to be carried away with euphoria and ecstasy as he spoke in Dalmatian dialect about the defence of the Croatian language and the Croat identity. His father was a Croat, his mother was a Croat, “and I am of their blood, a faithful Croatian son”. Any religious content was secondary, a mere afterthought. He concluded with a call to “love of God, love of man, love of homeland”. The content and the whole tone of his sermon was focused above all on the last of those three loves, and there was no doubt where the main stress lay. The bishop’s religion had little to do with Christianity. The universal nature of the Catholic religion was not present. Christianity was a mere veneer for his real religion, the religion in which he passionately believed, a pagan religion, centred on worship of the nation.

The bishop bewailed the fact that the feast day was not a state holiday, noting that in times gone by the calendar was stuffed with religious holidays, but that now a holiday for St. Duje could not be found in this “so-called progressive state”. There is the rub, of course. The Catholic Church in Croatia is thoroughly alienated from the modern, secular world. Still wedded to a world of yesteryear, when faithful sons and daughters of the nation flocked to village churches in traditional, national costumes, it frowns upon the very notion of progressiveness. In the evening, young people came out in much greater numbers to listen to the pop concert. Probably he would be appalled. For myself, I prefer progressive Croatia to his vision.

A visit to Imotski

From Sinj, I continued my journey southwards through the Dalmatian hinterland to Imotski, close to the border with Bosnia, tracing the footsteps of the 19th century British Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson. There being no direct bus route, I had to change buses at Split. Imotski is a small town, perched on a hill overlooking a large fertile plain, surrounded by the Dinaric mountains. The views are splendid, and the old town centre is attractive, built of the usual white limestone blocks.

Unlike Sinj, Imotski is rather isolated, with no highway linking it with the coast. It is rather a peripheral place. While the surrounding villages engage in agriculture, the town offers few opportunities. Young people sit around outside cafés. Many, no doubt, have left for more promising corners of the country. Imotski has had some famous sons, among them the poet Tin Ujević. But they didn’t stay there. I bought some locally-produced pršut (cured ham) from a shop in the town. The owner told me hopefully that a tunnel would be built through the mountains, linking Imotski to the coast, giving it a boost. For now, there was only one restaurant in the town, in the hotel where I stayed.

The Blue Lake, seen from the castle walls, Imotski

Imotski is famous for its two dramatic sink holes, the Blue Lake, and the Red Lake. These are typical features of limestone, karst regions. They were formed by the collapse of underground caves millions of years ago. The Blue Lake is in a wide, deep hole directly below the town castle. From one side of the castle, built atop a hill on the edge of the town, you look straight down into the lake, a considerable distance below. A zig-zag path leads down to the water’s edge. The lake is fed by several small streams, and the level of the water is said to vary considerably, sometimes disappearing altogether.

A short distance from the town, the Red Lake is named for the red colour of the cliffs that form the walls of the hole. It is one of the deepest sink holes in the world, a total of more than 500 metres. The nearly sheer cliffs make it impossible to descend to the water’s edge, but it is a spectacular sight. The lake is fed by an underground river whose origin and destination are unknown. It contains a unique type of fish which is also found in the rivers and streams in the plain below Imotski, hinting at the underground connections that link them.

The Red Lake, Imotski

Imotski was under Ottoman rule from the late 15th century until 1717, when it was captured by the Venetians. Gardner Wilkinson saw a stone in one of the walls recording that the castle had been restored by one Lubomir, said to have been a Bosnian prince before the Ottoman conquest. According to the local tradition, as related to Gardner Wilkinson, the castle had been captured by some 80 men, who had tricked the Ottoman garrison into believing they faced a much larger force by lighting numerous fires in the forests, prompting them to abandon the fort. Nothing remains of the town’s Muslim past.

Gardner Wilkinson was told how the Venetians, as a cruel form of sport, had offered condemned criminals the option of hurling themselves off the castle walls on to a ledge more than ten metres below. In the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would receive a pardon. Otherwise they plunged down the cliff into the Blue Lake.

Gardner Wilkinson found evidence of the former Muslim presence in the country around Imotski. In the village of Župa, he saw tombs with the crescent and star carved on them. At another village he saw tombs ‘apparently with the crescent and the cross rudely sculptured upon them…’. I had myself seen such a tomb with both cross and crescent in 1998, in a medieval graveyard near Stolac, across the border in Bosnia. The apparent confusion of Christian and Muslim symbols presumably dated from a period when people had publicly converted from one faith to the other, but were still hedging their bets. Several other tombs in the graveyard I visited near Stolac bore the typical markings of the Church of Bosnia, the heretical sect that took root in Bosnia in the Middle Ages, with their carved figures with outstretched, out-sized hands. Perhaps the ambiguity of the tomb with the cross and the crescent reflected the fact that this was a land of confused religious identities, where heresy had only briefly been supplanted by Catholic Orthodoxy before Islam appeared on the scene.

At Vrgorac, further south from Imotski, Gardner Wilkinson wrote of the ruined castle in terms that expressively reflected the attitude of his time to the drawn out conflict between Christianity and Islam in the region: ‘It was built in the days of terror, when the conquering Turks were spreading conquest and desolation over many Christian countries, and Dalmatia was trembling for its liberty and its faith…. It stands as a satisfactory memorial to the triumph of Christian over Moslem power; a still more singular proof of which is seen in the conversion of a minaret into the belfry of the church below.’ Yet under Ottoman rule Christianity had been tolerated, and although Christians were undoubtedly second-class subjects of the Sultan, they co-existed with Muslims. There were churches as well as mosques in Ottoman lands. As the Ottomans were rolled back in the 17th and 18th and most of the 19th centuries, Islam was simply effaced from the reconquered territories. Only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when Austria occupied Bosnia, did Christian Europe permit Muslims to remain in its midst.

Gardner Wilkinson was much interested in the Morlachs. He described at some length the manifold superstitions and folk beliefs of the Morlachs, including the measures they took to ward off vampires and witches. In Imotski, he witnessed a group of them, ‘simple-minded boors, with the usual long pigtails, loose brown jackets and blue tights’, claiming their rewards for killing wolves at the town hall, where they were ‘quizzed by the hat-wearing townsmen.’ At Župa, he was not altogether happy with the interest they showed in him: ‘Had it not been for the odious habit they have of making spitting part of their conversation, I might have been as much pleased with their visit as they seemed to be with mine… and their custom of abstaining from ablutions renders their near approach by no means desirable.’

Miracles and pageantry in Sinj

The town of Sinj is situated in the hinterland of the Dalmatian coast, among the hot white rocks of the Dinaric mountains. When the 19th century British travellers, J. Gardner Wilkinson and A.A. Paton visited Sinj, it was a remote and rather wild place. Nowadays it is a one-hour journey along the highway from Split.

Gardner Wilkinson made a round trip, travelling up the Krka river from Šibenik to Knin, then on to Sinj, and back to the coast at Split. He described the country around Sinj as highly primitive, noting the poor state of agriculture. He acknowledged, however, that the Austrians, who took over in Dalmatia following the Napoleonic Wars, had done something for the improvement of the region, notably through the founding of schools, in contrast to the neglect of the earlier Venetian rulers.

Gardner Wilkinson visited a market at Sinj, where he described seeing ‘blue-legged Morlacchi’ from the surrounding countryside, a reference to the leggings worn by the Morlachs. Visiting Sinj a few years later, Paton saw Morlachs dancing to a two-string gusla. There are different versions of the etymology of the name ‘Morlach’. One idea is that it comes from Greek, meaning ‘Black Vlachs’, while others suggest it comes from the Croatian ‘morski Vlasi’, ‘Sea Vlachs’. In either case, they were Vlachs.

In origin, the Vlachs were the Latinised, pre-Slav Illyrian population, who spoke a Romance language, akin to Romanian. While by the Middle Ages it seems that the Vlachs of Dalmatia had largely been linguistically assimilated by the Croats, they continued to be regarded as a quite distinct population almost until modern times. Their numbers were bolstered by waves of migration from the Ottoman lands in the 16th and 17th centuries. Complicating matters, the term was sometimes, in the twentieth century, used as a derogatory term for the primitive people of the Dalmatian hinterland, or for Serbs. Indeed, the Orthodox Vlachs of the Dalmatian interior, as well as north-west Bosnia, were assimilated by their co-religionists in the Serbian Orthodox Church from the 17th century. The Croatian political leader in the 1920s, Stjepan Radić, frequently blasted the Serbs as ‘Vlasi’. In 1993 I had an unpleasant meeting with a Croatian historian in Zagreb, a hard-line nationalist given a senior position by PresidentTudjman. He sought, by arguing that the Serbs of Croatia were not Serbs at all, but Vlachs, to demonstrate that there was no Serb minority in Croatia entitled to any rights as such.

Professor Sonia Bićanić told me how, having noticed that the olive groves on the island of Brać, where she had built a house, were being left un-harvested, was given as an explanation by a local woman, “there are no more Vlachs”. Apparently Vlachs had traditionally carried out such back-breaking seasonal labour. By the late 20th century Morlachs had virtually disappeared as a distinct group in Dalmatia. In the 1991 census, 22 people in Croatia declared themselves as Morlachs.

Statue of an Alkar, Sinj

Gardner Wilkinson attended the famous Sinjska Alka, an equestrian event held in the town each August to commemorate a victory over the Turks in 1715. Something between sporting event, pageant and national tradition, the Alka occupies a place in Croatia akin to the Oxbridge boat race in England. It is shown live on television, is attended by the highest state dignitaries, and has become a tourist attraction. Men in traditional, 18th century costumes, gallop down a narrow street through the town, wielding a lance with which they attempt to skewer a little metal ring, the ‘alka’, hanging overhead. The ring contains a central bull’s eye, which scores three points, and three outer segments, the top one of which scores two, and the lower two three points. Each rider makes three passes. Only men from the region of Sinj are allowed to take part. It is a great spectacle, although unlike Gardner Wilkinson, I have only watched it on a television set in Zagreb.

Sinj was part of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reverting to Venetian rule in the wars at the end of the seventeenth century. But that was not the end of the border wars with the Turks, and in 1715 there was an attempt by the Ottomans to retake the town. Credit for the victory in 1715 against the superior Ottoman force was given by the defenders to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Pride of place in the Franciscan church in Sinj is given to an icon of the Virgin of Sinj. Thought to have been painted at the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century, the icon was brought by the Franciscans as they fled from Rama, in nearby Turkish-ruled Herzegovina, in 1687. The icon was placed in the church that was completed in 1714. As the Ottoman force attacked the following year, the icon was carried up to the small fortress on the hill above the church, where the defenders drew confidence from their belief in its miraculous powers.

The icon draws pilgrims in their thousands, especially on 15 August each year, when it is paraded through the town, carried aloft by members of the Alkar society in their regalia. The heavy metal doors of the Franciscan church depict the battle below Sinj fortress, with the Virgin Mary hovering above – a strikingly martial image for the doors of a church. The memory of the victory over the Turks, of the favour attributed to the Virgin Mary, and the pageantry of the Alka have combined to make Sinj an important symbol for Croatian nationalists since the 1990s, even if some look down their noses at the wild people of the Dinaric mountains, as they are still regarded by many of the sophisticates of Zagreb and the coastal cities.

In more recent times, the Alka was politicised, as Sinj became a centre of hardline Croatian nationalism, opposed to the presidency of Stipe Mesić. Mesić was elected following the death of the country’s founding president, Franjo Tudjman, at the end of 1999. He had been a close collaborator of Tudjman’s. He was the first Croatian prime minister following the election victory of Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in 1990, and went on to be Croatia’s last representative on the collective Yugoslav presidency. But Mesić later fell out with Tudjman, especially over the latter’s de facto alliance with Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević in the attempted carve up of Bosnia. By the time of his election as President in 2000, opponents of Tudjman’s authoritarianism saw Mesić as a breath of fresh air. But for the nationalist faithful of the HDZ, and for the wartime veterans’ lobby, Mesić was anathema.

Perhaps Mesić’s most significant act as president, taken in his first year in office, was to retire a group of generals who had signed an open letter complaining at what they saw as the mistreatment of veterans and the criminalisation of the war of independence. At issue was cooperation with the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague (ICTY), as well as war crimes investigations being conducted in Croatia. In August 2000 a key war crimes witness was murdered, leading to a spate of arrests. Veterans’ groups responded with protests, and Mesić, as well as Prime Minister Ivica Račan, who had been Croatia’s last communist boss, received anonymous death threats.

In this context, the letter signed by 12 generals was seen as a challenge, and there was talk in the press that a coup was being planned. Although the atmosphere was tense, this seems unlikely. Nevertheless, Mesić’s resolute action in retiring the seven generals who were still serving sent a message that, in the post-Tudjman world, the country’s democratic institutions were sufficiently robust to withstand any such posturing.

Among the seven generals retired by Mesić was Ante Gotovina, widely lionised in Croatia as the hero of Operation Storm, by which swathes of Serb-controlled territory were recovered in 1995, and which included the widespread murder of Serb civilians, destruction of property, and the expulsion of most of the Serb population. Another was Mirko Norac, who had led a number of controversial military actions, including at Gospić early in the war, and the Medak Pocket in 1993, during which numerous atrocities against Serb civilians had been carried out. Norac was from a village near Sinj. He had attended school in Sinj. In 1994 he had been appointed Vojvoda, ‘Duke’, of the Sinj Alkars, a ceremonial title, and a great honour.

Norac was a local hero in Sinj. Despite clear evidence of his direct involvement in serious war crimes, he was repeatedly promoted during the war years. In Zagreb in 1998, a prominent Croatian journalist told me he and other journalists had seen a video recording which showed Norac personally murdering a Serb civilian at Gospić in 1991. This, he told me, had been brought to the attention of the ICTY. So why, he asked, did Norac remain at liberty? More than a hundred Serb civilians were murdered in cold blood at Gospić, in a planned and organised massacre in which Norac was one of the prime movers. Eventually Norac’s crimes caught up with him. Arrested in 2001 for his role at Gospić, he was in 2003 sentenced to 12 years in prison. In 2004 he was indicted, along with others, by the ICTY for the crimes committed in the Medak Pocket operation. He was transferred to The Hague, but the case was transferred back to the Croatian judicial system. Norac was sentenced to a further seven years. Some would say Norac was treated remarkably leniently given the seriousness of his crimes. In November 2011, he was released. The previous year President Ivo Josipović had stripped him of the rank of general.

In 1999 I met an elderly Serb gentleman from Gospić. He was one of those who had been taken from his home in 1991. He had escaped death, but, having moved away from Gospić for his and his family’s safety, his home had been taken over by somebody else. When I met him he was desperately trying to get his home back. As with all Serbs who had fled their homes, the Croatian authorities showed not a trace of sympathy. The plight of this entirely innocent man, whose flight was prompted by the murder of so many of his fellow Serb townsmen and women, was of no concern in a state which was at that point unwilling to allow any aspersion to be cast on the glorious Homeland War or its holy veterans. I don’t know what became of the man. I hope he was able to return and live out his last days in his own home.

In 2000 and subsequent years, as the net was beginning to close on Norac and some of his fellow wartime criminals, Mesić was an object of vilification for the veterans’ lobby. In Sinj there was a scandal, as the President was snubbed and whistled at at the Alka. Mesić condemned the politicisation of the event. After all, the Alka had been attended by earlier heads of whichever state Croatia had belonged to, from Austrian Emperors, to Tito, and latterly Tudjman. Things were patched up with the leaders of the Alkar society, but even at the last Alka of his presidency, in 2009, Mesić was again whistled at.

Staying in Sinj in the spring of 2012, I saw no outward sign of devotion to Norac. As everywhere in Dalmatia, there were posters proclaiming Gotovina as a hero. But there were none for Norac. Probably his crimes were simply too dreadful to be defended, the evidence of his guilt too conclusive. Unlike Gotovina, who had been convicted on the rather tenuous grounds of command responsibility, Norac’s involvement in war crimes was direct. And unlike Gotovina, who had been tried and sentenced in The Hague, Norac had been found guilty by a court in Croatia, lending his conviction a credibility that the ICTY has failed to acquire anywhere in ex-Yugoslavia.