While we are having dinner in "Scuba" at the entrance to the old town in Rovinj, cheerful music comes from around the corner - a row of songs in Croatian, a row in Italian. While serving us his famous "pakera", Tadija Rakita, one of the two brothers who run this restaurant, explains how every song we hear is from this region and tells about some local custom, past event or toponym. By the way, we are talking about the local "Tuna Fest" where, in addition to the musical program, visitors are served local specialties from this fish. When the band played Bella Ciao, I got up from the table and went to record the song. Domestic and Italian tourists clapped with joy to the beats of this famous partisan melody. Somewhere near the end, a young man in a white T-shirt approached the band, took out 50 euros, whispered something to the singer, and I had a premonition exactly what the sequel could be. The musician said with an Italian accent Are you beautiful? and the rest of the orchestra began to follow the beats of Thompson's famous song from the time of the Homeland War. It is a "patriotic track", perhaps one of the least controversial from the aforementioned artist's oeuvre, a song that celebrates the beauty of certain regions of Croatia: Dalmatia, Istria and Primorje, Zagora, Slavonia, Lika... but also parts of neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina ("Herceg Bosno, srce ponosno...").
photo: r. shepherd...
Somehow it sounded unreal and yet so expected that this summer in Croatia, even the "Tuna Fest" in "red Istria", a few steps from the square that still bears the name of Marshal Tito, cannot pass without Thompson. The genie that was released from the bottle at the Zagreb Hippodrome almost two months ago, flew over Split's "Poljud", landed briefly in Sinj, where Thompson's second big concert was held, and arrived, admittedly somewhat weakened, at the Rovinj waterfront. It was 10. August, the last day of the recommendation of the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to travel to neighboring Croatia (from 1 to 10. August), certainly because of the events dedicated to the 30 anniversary of "Storm". Judging by the number of friends from Belgrade and Novi Sad that we met on those days on the streets of Rovinj and the beaches of Barbariga, there are many who did not follow this recommendation. It is interesting that the only serious incident in which Serbian tourists were involved took place at the end of June, in the town of Grabovac, not far from Plitvice Lakes, when two young men aged 17 and 19 insulted each other on a national basis ("What are you doing here? My grandfather fought against you!") attacked a bus with Serbian license plates, causing serious injuries to two passengers. Fortunately, there were no other incidents, and the entire Croatian coast from Cavtat in the south to Savudrija in the north is full of tourists from Serbia and cars with Serbian license plates. Ekavica is even more present in restaurants, cafes and beach bars where waitresses and waiters from Serbia have been among the most sought after staff for years. In Meneghetti Beach Club, except for the hostess who was a local girl and the Nepalese in charge of cleaning - all the employees were guys from Serbia. A barely adult young man from Negotin tells us how he earns a salary during the season that would have taken him two years at the same job in his hometown. One of the most shared visuals this summer is the one that reads: "Serbs in Croatia 1991" (the photo shows Vojislav Šešelj with his unbelted Chetniks) and "Serbs in Croatia 2025" (the photo shows a barrage of neatly dressed and neatly trimmed waiters). Although this visual in the context of "Storm" is politically incorrect, the fact is that it is painfully true. Serbs from Serbia neither all Thompson's concerts nor the vampirized Ustasha cries "Ready for home!" they did not discourage them from coming to Croatia again this summer - to work or to have fun and rest, whatever. While we were going to Rovinj, the driver of the "Bolt" received a message from his wife that their son-in-law had a traffic accident, fell off the motorcycle and broke his arm. From the conversation we learn that they have to drive him to the hospital in Pula, an hour away from Rovinj. I was wondering if there are no conditions in Rovinj for admitting patients who need emergency medical assistance. There is, but only for tourists, answers our driver. If you are a local during the season - they will direct you to Pula. To us, it was a completely incomprehensible apartheid practice that separates privileged tourists from disenfranchised locals for whom those 60 minutes can mean life or death. Our driver does not agree with that, but seems somehow reconciled, in a way incomprehensible to people from the interior and cities that do not live off tourism like Rovinj.
photo: r. shepherd…concert announcements
While we were walking along the Rovinj waterfront, a familiar voice could be heard from the stage at Marshal Tito Square - the Croatian singer Vanna was performing, whose song It's only 12 o'clock. Exactly 31 years ago, it became the first post-war hit in all countries of the former Yugoslavia. Posters inform that on that day there is a concert of Dirty Theater in Pula Arena, and the day before Grace Jones performed at the same place. I knew about all those concerts from numerous friends who bought houses or apartments in Pula in the past years. They say that although it is more expensive than Trieste, it is still much cheaper than Rovinj, it is well connected with Belgrade and by air (Air Serbia flies five times a week during the season) and highway. It seems that history repeats itself - only now "Belgrade on the sea" is no more Rovinj than Pula. On this site four years ago, I wrote about how in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, Belgraders massively bought apartments in Rovinj at low prices, which were plentiful after the departure of the Italians.
One of the first Rovinj residents from Belgrade was, in the 1950s still a boy, Miša Jovanović, a lawyer, who together with the older and more famous (Mića Popović, Mihiz, Antonije Isaković...) became a trademark of Rovinj. But, tormented by nostalgia for the city that was his second hometown for years, he wrote a book Old Rovinj, goodbye (Vecchia Rovigno, goodbye), which he published himself and distributed to his friends.
Already in the first story, when he describes the arrival in Rovinj by train and mentions the small town of Kanfanar to which the railway line led, everyone who has ever vacationed in Rovinj, which was the "obligatory" fashion of the sixties and seventies, must have the same feeling of nostalgia. "How to get off the train, which was standing there for only a few minutes on its way to the final station in Pula. Suitcases were often thrown out of the window, and people occasionally jumped from the high steps onto that large train that was littered with almost all railway stations in Yugoslavia," he writes. That's how that first encounter with Rovinj began. "Then you come to a city where there is no beach, where everything smells of cigarettes and fish ("Mirna" and TDR factories) and you can never visit it again!" Rovinj is no longer reached by train, the railway was removed a long time ago, so most travelers arrive by modern Croatian highways or by plane.
I stayed true to my maxim - "Think global, read local", so this summer I started my day with a cup of coffee and flipping through local daily newspapers. "Glas Istre" thus reports that during the past week, the Pula police recorded several cases of thefts from the beaches in which the owners were damaged for a total amount of several thousand euros. Namely, unknown perpetrators stole bags, mobile phones, personal documents, bank cards, money and technical devices from unwary owners. Another news item says that the Poreč police "completed the criminal investigation" of a 74-year-old German citizen and established suspicion that he committed the crime of unauthorized production and drug trafficking.
And so, in addition to the difficult topics that plague the rest of Croatia, the region and the world, Istria and the local media in the summer season still have the "mouse in a beer bottle" syndrome, and it seems that even fans of the works of the self-taught singer from Čavoglava cannot spoil that.
