Day 12 – A glimpse of the Balkan Wars (Wednesday 24th April 2024)

By the end of today we’ll be in Novi Sad in Serbia, the country’s second largest city with a population of about 300,000. But before we get there we’ll get a chance to learn a little about the Croatian War of Independence.

Very briefly, the country known as Yugoslavia was the amalgamation of lands on the Balkan peninsula upon which mixed ethnic and religious groups of people had lived for centuries. The one thing they had in common was that they were all “southern Slavs” – which is what Yugo-slavia literally means. The countries today that once comprised Yugoslavia are Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzogovenia, North Macedonia and Montenegro. By 1963 the country had changed its name to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Its President (for life) was Marshal Josip Tito. Tito had the ability to somehow keep this group of different (but somewhat the same) people in line and functioning as a single entity. But in 1980 he died and the wheels began to wobble. By 1991 the Croatian people had decided they wanted “out “ of Yugoslavia but the Serbian people and the Yugoslav army had other ideas. Thus began the Croatian War of Independence.

After four long and bloody years Croatia finally won it’s independence from Yugoslavia. Following Croatia’s 1991 declaration of independence, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia were emboldened to do the same so the theatre of war broadened on the Balkan peninsula with substantial loss of blood and the displacement of millions of people. There are lots of gaps in my very brief description above so I’d recommend further reading on this complex and terrible time in human history to get the full picture.

Although Osijek was under siege during the Croatian War of Independence it never fell. However, its neighbour Vukovar just 35 minutes down the road did not fair so well. The Siege of Vukovar lasted 87 days and the city eventually fell to the invading forces. We heard the story through our visit to the Vukovar hospital which was a target the Serbian and Yugoslav forces during the siege, despite the international illegality of attacking a hospital during wartime. We toured the basement of the hospital which became the last place of refuge for the medical teams who were trying valiantly to save lives in the worst imaginable conditions. The siege ended with victory to the invading forces in November 1991. Having worked so hard to save lives the medical teams were captured, taken to a nearby farm and murdered in cold blood.

 

 

It’s hard to image that all this transpired on the same streets we walked today. We did pass one building which still stands, riddled with bullet holes. The water tower in Vukovar was the constant target of the enemy but it was never toppled so stands today as an important symbol for the people of this town.

 

Since leaving Osijek we’ve been, more or less, following the Danube so were as far east in Croatia as we can go. Serbia is on the other bank. After a further 40-odd kilometres we came ti the town of Ilok. This town is at the heart of Croatia’s wine growing region with a history (and a cellar) dating back to the 15^th century. Here we visited the Stari Podrum cellars for a wine degustation. Following a brief tour of the cellars we took our places at a long table and sampled a few of their fine wines. The region is most famous for making Traminac, a dry-ish white wine. It also makes red wine, some of which I’m sampling while writing tonight. This cellar’s Traminac is the white wine of choice of the House of Windsor. They’ve been providing it to the British Royal Family since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1952, not just for special occasions like that but for daily consumption as well.

On we drove, through the Croatia/Serbia border control. We even got a stamp in our passports as Serbia is not in the EU so border control is done the way it was in the olden days pre-Scheng

en. By mid-afternoon our little bus arrived in Novi Sad. Once again the hotel is in a really good location right in the heart of town, literally a two minute walk from the large pedestrian mall that runs through there. After a visit to a bar with Rob and Guido Kerry and I wandered around the central precinct visiting an eastern orthodox church at one end of the street and a Roman Catholic church at the other. We were in the latter a 6:00pm when the bell in the tower tolled, the lights in the church came on and a team of clergy appeared on the altar. Evening Mass had begun! We stayed until the sermon was delivered then quietly snuck out through the front door to make our rendezvous with the others for dinner.