Some Personal Notes...

Croatia knocked our socks off this past year. It was the tea dance in the park on Saturday morning that put the exclamation point on our feelings.

Just across the road from our hotel ( the same one we’re using this year while in Zagreb), was a bandstand in a wonderful park lined with fountains and massive plane trees.  After breakfast we decided to explore before the tour began the next day. It was bright and sunny. At the bandstand an orchestra was setting up and at 10 a.m. they started to play and people started to dance.

Some of the dancers were in early 20th century costume, but most came from off the street. Young couples, old couples, couples with their kids and couples pushing strollers. Even some on their own, gently twirling and swaying to the great old band music.

Others, whose dancing days were far behind them parked themselves on chairs under umbrellas which had appeared from locked storage beneath the bandstand. They chatted with their neighbors and anyone else who happened by.

It was magic and it felt that a bit of old Europe was alive and well and really not that old.

This was an introduction to a corner of the world that has to be seen in order to beat down the false assumptions, suppositions and  fears.

Not only had this place been ‘communist’, but it had been through the 90s mess of Balkan wars.  And to top it off, hadn’t the Balkans been the cause of so many wars, including World War I?

Yes, yes, and yes. But lurking behind these clouds of concern is a nation that was one of the great old Central European powers. It was, and is, a land of culture, of great architecture and of remarkable scenery.

It is old Europe with new ideas. Throughout the Balkans the people of the newly independent countries still have the optimism and hope that something good is going to come out of their long, dark recent past.

In larger centres, like Dubrovnik, the Jewel of the Adriatic, there are no visible signs of war - but it was here. The town was under siege for a couple of years with opposition artillery ranged on the surrounding hills.

But the impression, especially on a sunny day, is of an ancient walled town filled with tourists enjoying this remarkable corner of land and sea. In the harbour yachts bob about in the sun dappled water while nearby beaches are filled with people taking advantage of the waning days of summer and early autumn. Heck, this place was so popular that some hardy tourists still insisted on coming to Dubrovnik and the coastal beaches of Croatia throughout the war years.

Then there is Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife Sophia were shot dead near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo setting off the cataclysmic and utterly useless World War I which turned the world, and the Balkans into a massive killing ground.

A far happier occasion was 1984 when Sarajevo, then part of Yugoslavia, played host to the Winter Olympics. But then, in 1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina declared their independence from Yugoslavia and life changed forever.

Serb forces surrounded the capital of Sarajevo and on April 5 they began their siege of the city from the surrounding hills. When it ended February 29, 1996, somewhere between 10 and 15,000 residents of the city were dead and 56,000 injured. It was the longest siege of a city in modern warfare.

But in the midst of this terrible darkness, one light shone through. Vedran Smailovic, a cellist, happened to be looking out a window one day in central Sarajevo when a mortar shell exploded in a food line up killing 22 of his neighbors.

For the next 22 days, one day for each of the deaths, Smailovic appeared in the square, dressed as for the concert stage. He would sit on a camp stool and, tune his cello and then play while shells, mortars and sniper fire rained down from the hills.

That type of courage helped sustain Sarajevo and today the city has been proudly rebuilt.

That act by Smailovic, symbolizes the hope and dreams and attitudes of these hardy souls who are reaching forward to new beginnings.