We had our longest bike ride of the trip so far today, and it was an extraordinary experience. We were on Dugi Otok, “Long Island” in Croatian. It is about 25 miles in length and perhaps only a couple miles wide at most. Our route began in the small town of Sali, where we spent the night, and ended up in the even smaller hamlet of Božava in the north. Along the way we saw some of the Adriatic’s most breathtakingly beautiful scenery.
After we had ridden our bikes for a couple of miles, Marin told us to stop by a small church. I was a little surprised because there seemed to be nothing particularly interesting about this small country parish.
Once we were off our bikes he had us walk around the church
and showed us this inscription.
The tablet is written in the Galgolithic script. I will not go into great detail here, but it was the first writing system developed for the Slavic languages, and was the ancestor of the current Cyrillic alphabet. The Croatians retained this script until the fifteenth century.
The church also featured some examples of early Christian stone work from the area.
After this we rode through miles and miles of empty countryside. We saw reminders of how little parts of Croatia have changed in the last twenty years.
But mostly we saw glorious landscapes. There is really only one road on Dugi Otok, and it is atop a ridge with views of the Adriatic on both sides. It is so hard to capture in photographs just how magnificently open and beautiful this countryside truly is.
And just how empty the road was. We saw at most nine or ten cars on the entire ride.
The landscape is so similar to Southern California, even if the plants are not exactly the same. Croatia explodes with wildflowers after the winter rains, and some of those plants were still surviving the early summer heat and drought.
Our ride covered 40 kilometers and took over three hours, but I wished it could have gone on and on. But when we made it to Božava our ship was waiting for us, and I have to admit that I was also ready for a shower as well.
We had the usual very filling dinner as the boat pulled out. We had a fairly long passage across the sea to the mainland. Our destination was the city of Zadar. I napped and read for a bit; I chatted in simple English with our German passengers. I try to recapture some of the goodwill towards America that our current leadership seems to have lost. A little bit of it, at least….
We had a guided tour of Zadar. This is a fairly large city: it seems bigger than the 75,000 or so given as the official population. Most of the things of interest to tourists are in the walled old city. As we did in Šibenik, we had a guided walking tour here.
Our tour guide could have been better. She spoke reasonably good English — we were paired with the English-speaking passengers from another ship — but she had rather little sense of how to speak to a group. She continued speaking while we were walking from place to place, often did not face us while we were speaking, and seemed to not notice who exactly was in here group and who was not. She knew a lot about her home city and had some enthusiasm. She just needed a refresher course on how to be a tour guide.
Zadar was once the gem of the Adriatic. A few buildings from the medieval and Renaissance city still survive as do some remnants of its rich Roman history.
But the past century has not been kind to Zadar. For most of its history, the city was under the control of the Italians, first the Venetian Republic, later Kingdom of Italy, and finally, Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Perhaps because of this, Tito and the anti-Fascist Yugoslav forces mercilessly shelled Zadar. The later socialist government then replaced the lost buildings of centuries past with cheap, hideous, Bauhaus-inspired structures. Still, a few interesting things are left. There are bits of the old Roman Forum.
One of the columns was left intact
because it served as a whipping post during later periods.
Today, of course, we have moved beyond humiliating people and publicly punishing them like this. We use Facebook and Instagram instead….
The ninth-century church of Saint Donatus still remains
though this has not been used for religious services for hundreds of years.
Another early church is partially survives in the back of a building currently used as a restaurant. It was strange to walk through the bar to look at what was apparently the baldacchino of a Romanesque basilica.
Zadar claims one of the oldest Benedictine foundations for women, Saint Mary’s Abbey. It still has about 20 professed sisters.
Dating from the Renaissance is the old town hall.
We did not get a chance to enter the cathedral, though it looked interesting.
Nor did I get a chance to walk up the bell tower here.
We did make it to the new quay which features a rather bizarre navigation map embedded in the pavement and a wave organ.
It was a lively place in the early evening.
On our way back to the ship John and I stopped at a place which advertised “smoothies.” I am not sure that they had the faintest idea of what these were: it was the nastiest-tasting milkshake I ever had. But at least we did not order the quinoa salad. The English translation of the menu listed one of the ingredients as “smallpox”!
Now that’s a meal I can happily miss!
