There were cats everywhere. I loved that and also…they were all very young, cats do not live long there. Were I myself to live there, I would quickly become the cat lady. But still. It may be Kotor in Montenegro that has a reputation as the city of cats, but the places we stayed all seemed to give it a run for its money.
This post also must include the best picture I have taken in ages:
There are a number of Roman ruins along the Dalmatian coast. I love Roman ruins, frustrated archaeologist that I am. But some of the most beautiful things were the small things, these exquisite pieces of metal and ivory and glass.
These are from the museum in Split, look how wondrous this workmanship is.
This extraordinary hand, foregrounded against a collection of rings
stork battle!
fascinations of ancient melted glass (and dice)
Glass unmelted:
The old city of Split is built within the walls of Diocletian’s palace itself, pieces of Roman architecture knitted within its walls and cellars. The most amazing cellars lie beneath the city, matching the layout of the palace that once stood above.
An old olive press
The cathedral, once Diocletian’s mausoleum. I read this, about the fall of Salona:
The Latin inhabitants of these ruined cities fled for sanctuary to the Adriatic islands off the coast. As a peace of sorts returned, many of them made their way back to the mainland, where they laid the foundations of two new cities. In central Dalmatia, the refugees from Salona moved into the vast, ruined palace of the Emperor Diocletian, 6 located a few miles away from Salona at Spalato. In this giant hulk with its vast walls, sixteen towers, huge mausoleum, reception halls, libraries, cavernous underground cellars and hundreds of other rooms, the survivors of the barbarian onslaught created the city of Split. They converted the mausoleum of this notorious persecutor of Christians into a cathedral and dedicated it to St Duje, after Bishop Domnius of Salona, one of the victims of Diocletian’s purges. The watchtower over the main entrance was converted into small churches, two of which, St Martin’s and Our Lady of the Belfry, survive. The refugees from Epidaurum moved a short distance down the coast and founded another new city, which was to become known as Ragusa, or Dubrovnik (Tanner, M. (2001). Croatia : A Nation Forged in War).
My pics of the dome didn’t work somehow, but here’s the space.
The temple of Jupiter.
We got on a bus and traveled to the city of Salona. From the museum’s website:
Initially, Salona had been the coastal stronghold and the port of the Illyrian Delmats in the immediate vicinity of the ancient Greek colonies Tragurion and Epetion. Along with the local Illyrian population and the Greek settlers, Salona was at the time inhabited by a large Italic community. Following the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 48 B.C., Salona was granted the status of a Roman colony thus becoming the centre of Illyricum and later of the province of Dalmatia.
It is massive, the coliseum preserved as a memory of the violence just as central to their civilisation as the beauty and the warm baths.
One last note, there were griffons. There were a number of griffons. They were beautiful.
Kupari was an amazing place… luxury hotels built by Tito for the relaxation of military personnel. Shot up and burned out during the war. All four of them. Three are great modernist frames of still structurally-sound concrete. They have been stripped, remain full of rubble and broken glass and you can pick your way up and down stairs. Plants grow exuberant in the courtyards and into the lobbies and corridors. The four hotels sit on a cove, the beach full of local families and tourists. Occasionally some of them wandered up the concrete stairs in chanclas, sunburned bellies pouring over flowered bermuda shorts.
I didn’t blog over our trip, a terrible thing because there is so much we saw, so much that was amazing, so much that I learned. There were also so many cats.
We took a bus down the coast from Dubrovnik, terribly hot humid no windows open standing room only. We got off and walked through a bit of woods and found this. We approached through the trees and the long grass, it felt lonely and abandoned. Empty.
It used to look like this
Now inside it is uncanny and strange and beautiful.
We went on to the next, a great square building around a courtyard burgeoning with life. Through almost every window, an incredible view of the sea:
All Inclusive! My favourite piece of grafitti.
I think perhaps these two might have been enough, but there were more to see. We continued. The next building was older, riddled with bullet holes. This is the only place we went, I think, where the conflict felt real.
The last building, the most interesting perhaps but I already felt full.
Coming to them from the beach full of baked bodies and primary colours felt so much more unreal. We walked from shadows to bright sunlight to shadow again. We found a bar at the end of the sand blasting Beyoncé. It could almost be any beach, though sandy beaches were rare here, and perhaps it is the looming hotels that made these a bit less crowded.
We are going to Croatia today! Dubrovnik for a week and then Split, and a conference on… I’m not sure.
Gravity assist is a slingshot move, when one object uses the gravity of another to propel itself out of orbit. This concept from space travel, first used with the Mariner 10 probe in 1974, functions as a metaphor for escaping the constraints of the present to create change for the future. The conference, to be held by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia, 14-15 September, 2018, aims to examine strategies for challenging the limitations of the present in order to escape from them.
I’ve been at RGS all this week, I presented a paper on rural homelessness in Wales, I spoke about how austerity is tearing its way through people’s lives and concreting itself into the landscape and service provision. This is why I do not have a paper for Split, which is really Mark’s bag of course, but it would have been fun to think about this. I will enjoy being there and seeing old friends again, but mostly I look forward to exploring a new space and place and have, of course, been reading a great deal. I read a short book on the history as it was all I could find in our library, it was all right. I most loved the maps that trace this much-contested area over time, and they are presented in order here. 
From Tanner, M. (2001). Croatia : A Nation Forged in War. New Haven: Yale University Press.
