Split, Croatia

Up on deck at five o’clock, on board the ferry to Split. It’s called the ‘Marko Polo’, which sounds like a good omen at the start of a very long journey. Visibility clear.

What I’m looking out on now is Dalmatia, home to the Illyrians, who settled 5,000 years before the Greeks and Romans. This is not new Europe, this is very old Europe.

When I reach Split, I’m struck by how much it resembles Nice, and the arcades of the long, stone-flagged Republic Square only accentuate the neo-classical feeling. It’s all down to pedigree.

Split became part of the Venetian empire in the 15th century and went through a period of French occupation at the time of Napoleon’s conquest.

Later, in a bar by the sea, I watch the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Croatia’s hopes lie with Severina, a local girl. Unfortunately, they are not the only things to have lain with Severina.

She had previously featured in a pornographic video that was broadcast on the internet. Her song, Moja Stikla (High Heels), is loud and frenetic and her skirt, slit to the crotch, is whipped off early.

Even so, she comes 13th. Worse still, she is beaten by the only two other ex-Yugoslav entrants, Macedonia and Bosnia.

Hvar, Croatia

I leave Split on the ferry to the island of Hvar. It’s Sunday night and all seats on deck are taken by tourists and Hvarians returning from a weekend in Split. A bright, intelligent girl who lives there tells me that Hvar is, quite simply, paradise.

What catches my fancy most is the smell of the place. Like a slice of Provence cut loose and floated down the Mediterranean, Hvar is famous for its lavender fields. This is not even the lavender season, and yet the aromas around me are intense.

But Hvar is deserted. Only 10,000 people live here, the rest having moved away to cities such as Split or even as far as Australia.

My companion and guide, Igor Zivanovic, loves the island and its beauty, yet sees that it offered only hard work and low rewards.

Igor, a Croatian, is 51 and has lived here since 1961. He has a long, greying ponytail and a shirt that pops open to reveal a bulging stomach. With some difficulty, he has found two donkeys (one is lame) to take us around. Once the staple form of transport here, they have been superseded by cars.

In the sleepy little port of Starigrad, Igor has a bar-restaurant that seems to embody his highly individual lifestyle. He is already at work hunting down a bottle of wine.

From the ceiling hangs a mobile sculpture, a mannequin’s leg is stretched out in a cooler cabinet and there are clocks everywhere, all stopped at 3.04.

“The time Tito died!” shouts Igor from the kitchen. “He was the greatest hedonist of all time. Me, I have to go to the cinema to see Gina Lollobrigida. Tito, he just ring her up.” Igor points out a bumper sticker from Alaska that reads, “If It’s Tourist Season, Why Can’t We Shoot Them?”

An hour or so later we eat an excellent meal of freshly caught sardines and spicy lamb stew served on red tablemats with hammers and sickles in the corner.

“This is the food of my grandparents,” Igor announces with deep satisfaction, before a familiar theme refuels, his anger. “Tourists! They breed unscrupulous people who take their money without any locals involved.”

He tips another glass down.

“When McDonald’s open here...” Igor stops, grabs at an imaginary rope round his neck and yanks it upwards.
Dubrovnik, Croatia

As the crow flies, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik are less than 150km apart. While in Sarajevo the scars of war are plain to see, her southern neighbour gleams and glitters as if freshly polished. Yet ‘the jewel of the Adriatic’ was not spared the violence.

In the eyes of the West, the two great outrages of the war were the destruction of the bridge at Mostar and the shelling of Dubrovnik.

Branka, my guide, remembers the morning of the very first hit. “I believed that nobody normal, at the end of the 20th century, could shell a town like Dubrovnik.”

Yet within months of the end of fighting in 1995, Dubrovnik was patched up and back in business. As if to illustrate the point, a tidal wave of tourists pours from one of the cruise ships that many locals feel are overwhelming the old town.

I escape to the tranquillity of a Franciscan priory, where I find Edin Karamazov, a Bosnian-born lute player. So expert is he at his craft that he has just been working with Sting on a recording of the work of the English lutenist, John Dowland.

Edin tests himself with an adaptation of Bach’s Toccata And Fugue. The result is lovely and technically dazzling, and even when one of the strings snaps, it seems to snap in time with the music.

“Is there anything you can play without the string?” I ask.

Edin frowns, nods and goes into a perfect rendition of Over The Rainbow.