Exploring a Roman Emperor's summer home and getting chased by a pack of wild dogs
making memories in the Balkans!
If you’ve read about Split, Croatia, the first thing you’ve probably learned about is Diocletian’s Palace. Diocletian, pronounced die-oh-clee-shun, was the Roman emperor until 306 AD. During a time when Roman emperors didn’t last more than a couple years on the throne, he enjoyed a good 20-year run as emperor-in part due to positioning himself as a God to the people. He was so successful at this act, that he was the first Roman emperor to retire- a huge success considering most of his predecessors were murdered! Now a mix of historical sites, private apartments, and shopping, his palace in Split was built as his vacation home in 305 AD and has been inhabited ever since.
Before coming to Split, it was hard for me to conceptualize Diocletian’s Palace. It’s a 1700 year old Roman emperor's palace… but it’s also… got a novelty souvenir t-shirt shop in it? Yup! Imagine buying ice cream inside an open air market, enclosed by the walls of the colosseum, and then walking to the right and eating dinner in the pulpit where you would have come to witness the emperor-parading as a god-give a speech. It’s challenging for the American mind to wrap itself around.
We got to the palace with our tour group and immediately remarked on how well preserved it was. The massive limestone blocks were bright white; apartments with restaurants on the ground floor, against the palace walls. The esplanade in front of the palace’s facade was dotted with picturesque palm trees; sail boats bobbing on the water. I was surprised to learn that ordinary people have lived in the palace for almost the entirety of its existence; our tour guide told us that just 20 years ago, it was considered a bad investment to own property inside the palace as it wasn’t “modern enough”. That sentiment has taken a hard left turn as tourism has become Croatia’s biggest sect of their economy.
As we entered through the “back door” of the palace, the massive arched opening that would have been used as the emperor's escape route should trouble ever come, we learned that the basement of the palace had a… pretty unsavory purpose up until 50 years ago. After the Roman Empire fell, and Split grew around the palace, garbage, and waste, became a big problem. The solution? To fill the dungeon of Diocletian’s palace with ancient trash and excrement alike. One of the first uses of the basement post clean-up was as a filming site for Game of Thrones. Grant recognized it right away as the dungeon that Daenerys keeps her dragons chained up in.
The old town of Split was picturesque. Italian style architecture dominates the area and butts up against a crystal blue-green, calm sea. From the esplanade, you can see the cruise ships dock, preparing for thousands to disembark and chaotically scatter through marble paved streets. But just a short walk from the old town, the architecture shifts to communist era buildings; cement squares, jutting out in interesting boxy shapes, oftentimes appearing like a set of stairs to the clouds. The large, geometric buildings, nestled tight to one another, were a stark and surprising contrast to the old town. We stayed in one of the apartments, just a 10 minute bus ride from the palace. It felt more authentic to be in a neighborhood with locals; kids running around playing on the jungle gyms attached to each apartment, dogs running in the parks between buildings.
Split was a quick visit but it was beautiful, historical, and interesting to see the difference between what the world sees of the town on social media and what the full picture of it is. It’s an obvious message on what people find interesting and desirable about their vacation destination. Despite the huge amounts of tourists Split-and really, the country- sees, the people have been welcoming and nice; their interactions with us void of any bitterness, only maybe slightly tinged with some weariness as the tourist season winds down.
Seeing the brutalist apartments was a good, and timely, reminder of Croatia’s communist past in the former Yugoslavia ahead of visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina- a nation that was also a part of the former Yugoslavia. Outside of talking to older people, who often longed for the old days, there wasn’t much that we had seen so far to indicate Croatia was very recently a part of the former communist nation and involved in the horrible Yugoslav Wars just 30 years ago.
We left Split on a 5 hour bus ride over the border to meet our friend, Anya, in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (we learned on our tour of the city that what westerners-like myself-know as Bosnia, is actually Bosnia and Herzegovina. One country with two names that was shortened during the media coverage of the Bosnian genocide but it’s important to them to use the full name. BiH is the official abbreviation)
Before we decided to go to Bosnia and Herzegovina, I felt drawn to the area. In the last six months, I’ve felt an anxious curiosity about how a people survive a modern day genocide and a civil war (which it turned out to be a little more complicated than being purely a civil war). I was alive when people in Mostar were being forced into concentration camps, when they were being shot in the street by snipers. It’s so easy to feel so distant from these horrors but as democracy in America takes a more rapid turn towards nationalism and fascism, I felt like maybe there was something we could learn here in Mostar. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
The old town of Mostar, the area in which we stayed and which is protected under UNESCO World Heritage status, was like something out of a fairytale. Everything, from the buildings to the streets to the roofs, was made out of stone. The famous Old Bridge connects two sides of the old town that are split by the milky blue-green river that runs from the Alps to the Adriatic. It’s a 600 year old tradition that divers jump from the impossibly high, rounded arch into the cold waters below. I nervously watched them, terrified of heights myself, squatting outside the bridge’s railing, asking for money in exchange for the dive.
The cobblestone streets are lined with restaurants and food stalls, artisans and trinket shops. The sound of men pounding impressions into decorative copper plates and the melodic call to prayer rang through the, sometimes, jam-packed alleys. Restaurants are staggered over the river, their terraces stacked over and under one another, dug into the side of the cliff face. Their cuisine was much lighter than a lot of the places’ we’ve been to so far, offering several grilled meats and fish dishes.
We mostly stuck to the dreamy old town in our 2 full days there, taking a taxi out of the town one night to see the beautiful Blagaj monastery and the cliff side it’s built into. In the evenings, after wandering around town, we delighted in binge watching Love is Blind in our stylish and comfortable Airbnb. What a normal, simple joy to laugh at messy reality tv with a friend 🥲.
In our strolls around town, we began to notice there were wild dogs also roaming around. While they were all big dogs, generally mutts or mixed with labs, they seemed to mostly stick to themselves. One afternoon, we waited at the river bank to see a diver jump into the river-we never saw the actual act, they’re such a tease- and as we abandoned the hope of seeing him dive and headed back to the town, a German shepherd mix followed us. I didn’t think much of it at first, the dog didn’t seem to want anything from us. As we got to the top of the stairs, surrounded by other tourists, the dog began to bite at my purse and then nipped my thigh. He didn’t break the skin, and the bite wasn’t a gnashing, gnarling one but it felt foreboding. More than anything, it shocked me. We got away from the dog and agreed to stay away from them for the rest of the weekend.
On our last night in town, we went out to a bar, just past the famous bridge, a 10 minute walk from where we were staying. After we sat down at one of the tables spilling out onto the cobblestone street, we noticed there were three dogs sleeping across from us on the stoops of closed up shops. We talked and sipped our drinks when we noticed a woman dragging her rolling luggage through the rocky streets. Out of nowhere, the German shepherd appeared and began tugging at her luggage, possibly playfully, but unrelenting. We watched, unsure of how to help, when to get involved, as the dog continued to harass her, biting at her things. I could feel the situation quickly escalating, the woman getting more scared, myself becoming more scared and feeling more unsure of how to help, as the tables around us looked on and laughed. In the end, she fished through her bag for a half pastry and threw it in the street, just before he bit her ass and she jumped in the air. The pastry distracted the dog long enough for her to get away.
We watched the dog harass more people as they passed by the bar, going so far as to lurch at a kid holding hands with his mother. A big group of Australians, very close to the dog at that point, yelled at the dog as the mother and kid scurried away, terrified. I made a mental note to leave the bar as another group was leaving. Suddenly, everyone was gone and we were the only ones remaining.
Just as we went to pay, the three sleeping dogs woke up. We went to leave the bar, already pretty nervous, and the german shepherd returned, leading the other dogs, following us toward our Airbnb.
Immediately we were stopped by the dogs. The German shepherd, rough housing with them in our path, instantly stopped to intimidate us if we tried to get around them. We tried to be still and wait it out; the dog had much more perseverance and patience than us. I went back to the bar, only 20 feet away, and asked if the bartender would whistle for them so we could get away. He laughed, not maliciously, at me and said, “they’re just dogs, just walk past them”.
Left to ourselves, I looked around for a stick, or anything to defend ourselves with, and found absolutely nothing. We didn’t see what other choice we had but to keep walking and hope they lost interest in us. Instinctually, I knew the only thing that was left to do was shout down the dog.
This German shepherd and I played this game of “who’s bigger?” for the rest of the longest walk home of my life. He would lunge at me and come dangerously close to biting my ass or my thighs and I’d lunge right back at him, screaming with my whole body “NO”. We walked 5 feet and repeated. Locals walked by us, unfazed by the dog but surely alarmed at me shouting “no” at the top of my lungs in the otherwise peaceful night. All I could think about was the rabies shots I would need, the severe inconvenience, the logistics of being bit by a wild dog in a developing nation. We stopped so often that I lost track of how long the ten minute walk took in the end. We kept looking at each other and saying, “they have to give up and leave us alone” and we were wrong, every time. Eventually, we took an alley out of the old town, onto a main street, hoping the dogs would be distracted and not follow us. Again, we were wrong. The first thing I found that I could hold onto was a plastic Coke crate. I positioned it as a barrier between me and the German shepherd, holding it level with his face against my backside, pushing it at him as I lunged back. Finally, in the moments before we made it to the apartment, the dogs scattered and we made it in safely.
There were a lot of things I worried about leading up to the trip, a lot I still worry about, but I definitely wasn’t expecting to be chased by a pack of wild dogs through a sleepy town. I’ve now out Alpha’d a pack of dogs and a charging bull, soooo I’m feeling pretty good about myself. In the end, we were all fine, and now we have this absolutely unhinged story to tell at parties.
Aside from being chased by dogs, laughing at reality TV, and wandering around a beautiful, fantastical town, we also tried to understand the Bosnian Genocide and war that destroyed more than 76% of Mostar, just 30 years ago. Mostar is now a bustling and beautiful tourist destination, but the city and the rest of the country continues to develop and rebuild, literally and figuratively, after the war.
Trying to learn about this war and genocide, whether at the source in Mostar with locals, or online, has felt slippery. It seems like I’m close to understanding something, and with the next line I read, my understanding is completely turned on its head. The language is complicated and loaded and the information available is told from so many involved view points, it’s hard to understand the biases, the implications, and find the most objective truth in what we were given. One possible explanation we found, given to us at the end of the War Museum we visited, is that a key pillar of genocide is for the perpetrators to deny the genocide itself-which Serbian leaders are still doing to this day.
I think attempting to understand the history of a place is a part of our responsibility as travelers, so even though this one was tough, I hope this is clear enough to help you understand while also doing the history some justice. I am not a historian and it’s hard to be brief, so please forgive me if I err. This is the most simplified version of what I have been able to learn: The Balkan states have had complicated relationships with one another for a very long time. Since the late 1800’s, Serbia has been interested in expanding its territory and creating a “Greater Serbia”. World War I officially began when a Serbian National assassinated the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne after the empire annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina into its territory; Serbia wanted to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina into Serbia to form Greater Serbia. Yugoslavia, the communist nation made up of 7 Balkan states, was formed (for the second time) after World War II. Yugoslavia began to fall apart after their beloved dictator, Tito, died in the 1980s and was weakened further as the Soviet Union broke up. In the early 1990s, ethnic and economic tensions between the countries were high. Croatia and Slovenia thought they were financially contributing more than their fair share and wished to be independent. When Yugoslavia dissolved, the present day nation’s borders were drawn and mismatched ethnic groups ended up in the wrong countries. Things came to a boil in 1992 as fighting began in Bosnia and Herzegovina as the Bosnian Serbs (ethnic Serbians living in Bosnia) began a war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a genocidal campaign to remove Bosniaks from their land in an effort to expand Serbia. The war ended in 1995. Estimates vary but at least 100,000 people died in the war and genocide and more than 2 million were displaced.
While the war is not the primary focus of Mostar, it was hard to forget about it while we were there. On almost every building you could see some degree of shelling holes, head sized craters in the thick cement; almost every block outside the old town had the skeleton of a once-building on it, falling into ruin, staring ominously at me. As a UNESCO World Heritage site, the old town had been meticulously rebuilt to the standards from its original conception in the 1400s. If I would let myself, I could easily imagine the fighting that took place-when I was two-years old-on the very street we were staying on now. I had to shut out the thoughts of “who died here”. It’s the first time I’ve ever been confronted with something like that, something so close, and it was haunting if I dwelled on it too long.
We talked to our local guide about the war and how things are now. I think I was hoping for a happy ending after so much suffering, but that wasn’t the case. He said some people view it as the worst mistake they ever made. But there are still ethnic tensions in the area between Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs and wounds still festering. There are still people who downplay how horrific the genocide was; there are mothers still searching for the bodies of their sons. And sometimes they live next door to one another. In short, it’s a complicated, painful, and beautiful place.
On our last day in town, we went to a coffee shop that was built above the famous bridge. It was homey and warm inside, a man sat in the corner making coffee over the stove, and trays of delicious baklava. We didn’t speak too much of a common language with the man inside, but he still tried to communicate with us, to tell us the correct way to drink their coffee and to show us old pictures of the coffee shop, and how it survived the war. Pictures of a diver from the 50s jumping off the bridge. The bridge blown apart in the fighting. The building below us in ruins, unrecognizable. I could tell he was proud to be there, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the coffee shop, alive after the war.
I don’t know what message to take from Mostar besides to keep carrying on. To keep working at things that are important to us, like peace and understanding. To keep going when the asshole dog is chasing you. I don’t mean to be a bummer in sharing our sad and profound experiences with you, but this is the truth. This is how we’re experiencing the world and what we’re learning about it. I’ve learned, in much more depth, that our collective history is a violent, sometimes depressing one. But I’ve yet to change my opinion that people are mostly good or lose my hope in good people and our beautiful world.
After reflecting on what we’ve learned in the last few weeks about genocide, fascism, and the fall of democracy and the unavoidable connections between their origins and the current climate back home, I’ve decided to phone-bank this week for Kamala Harris. All the way from Croatia! There’s a lot of things about Harris that I do not support, but I believe with her as president, we will have the strongest chance to push for the positive change in America that we want to see. The distance from America has made me realize how deeply I love it, and the people in it, and how dangerously close we are to going down a road we cannot come back from. I believe that a Harris presidency is our best hope for a brighter future for everyone, and our best chance at avoiding a huge, painful far-reaching mistake. This is a small thing I can do that may have an impact on someone, and who knows, maybe the whole damn election outcome. If you want to do it with me, or have other ways that you’re cultivating hope in these scary times, please let me know.
We’ve been holed up in Zagreb for a while now and I’m excited to share this interesting, and surprising, city with you all next week. And I’m excited to see everyones Halloween costumes back home!
Ciao! Happy Halloween!
-Amelia
Stay hopeful Amelia. The world holds a lot of beauty and joy!