A road more travelled

It wasn’t just fun to visit our friend Ana in Zagreb over the weekend. It was also highly entertaining. I particularly enjoyed learning a little of her history. And felt one bit of it at least deserved to be shared here.

Ana was born in Podbila, Herzegovina, now a constituent part of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Podbila was a mountain village which had one shop, a church and a primary school.

Podbila, nestling in the mountains

‘Sometimes you’d see the men outside the grocery having a beer.’

‘Because there was no bar or café?’

‘Oh, no. There was no bar or café. Just the shop.’

Most of the men worked holdings that took the form of patches of land scattered across wide distances, sometimes as much as a kilometre apart.

In such villages, intellectual society consisted of the teacher, the doctor and the priest. But Podbila was too small even for that: the doctor was in the next town and the priest only came to hold services.

‘In a little church surrounded by a cemetery. You have the same in England. I saw one in the middle of Birmingham, right in the centre of the city. It looked very strange. We had the same, but it was in the country.’

Ana’s father Jakov was a joiner and building worker. He moved to Germany to make a better living. It was a temporary arrangement but, as Ana pointed out, most of those who went abroad stayed there. Jakov was no exception, living out his life in Frankfurt.

There came a time, however, when Jakov and Ana’s mother Mara decided that Podbila might not offer the most glittering opportunities for a truly world-class education. Which was what they wanted for their two daughters and their son. So Jakov set out to find them a new home.

Ana (left) with Mara and Jakov and her siblings
A little while before she became an eminent research scientist

Mara was clear. She wasn’t prepared to give up growing her own vegetables. She made it clear he was to look for a place in one of the villages outside Osijek, in eastern Croatia, an area known as Slavonia, which was then quite wealthy.

Jakov caught the local bus to the small town of Posusje, where the farmers of the outlying villages used to bring their produce to market. There he mounted the intercity coach travelling to Osijek.

Everything went to plan until the coach reached the town of Okučani. Here it was to turn right, eastwards, and head for Osijek. And here Jakov was seized by doubt.

‘Osijek?’ he thought. ‘We want to educate our children? Osijek’s a great university city, but it isn’t the capital, is it?’

Now in those days there was no such state as Croatia, but there was a nation. Croats, even the ones in Herzegovina, felt a bond to it. And Zagreb was its capital. True, it was only the capital of a constituent republic of the uneasy federation of Yugoslavia, but the Croat capital it nonetheless was.

It was the work of a moment. Jakov changed his ticket. He made for Zagreb. Not a village nearby, but the city itself, as close as possible to the schools and universities.

Except for several visits abroad, Ana has been living in the capital ever since 1979. Now a research chemist and a professor at the University of Zagreb, she’s living proof that her father’s strategy worked out.

The eminent chemist today

On the other hand, Mara never got a proper field to cultivate. Jakov ultimately built the apartment block in which we stayed with Ana, and in which Mara has had a flat ever since she returned from Frankfurt. True, she has a back garden which she can cultivate; true, too, that her brother living in another house Jakov built has a garden and her son-in-law has an allotment both of which Mara has taken over; but it’s urban market gardening rather than anything like real farming as she’d hoped.

As for Jakov, he bought himself a plot in a Zagreb cemetery.

‘This will be my apartment when I return,’ he told his family.

When they asked whether he wouldn’t prefer to be buried back in Herzegovina, he couldn’t see the point.

‘Why? Zagreb’s our home now. This is where my coffin will go.’

And it has.

Jakov a little while later than the previous photo

How might things have been if Jakov had stayed on the bus to Osijek? It’s hard not to believe that they would have been different. But we shall never know.

That puts me in mind of the Robert Frost poem The Road Less Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Just like Jakov. Though he took the road more travelled. And, because we could visit Ana, we – like chemistry – have profited by his decision.

A lovely city. An excellent meal. Great conversation. And some invaluable insights

The soft glow of gaslights in Zagreb's Upper Town

It’s curious being back in a country I haven’t visited for over half a century. 

A lot has changed. Starting with its name. Back then, it was just a constituent republic of a state called Yugoslavia. Today, it’s the independent republic of Croatia.

My first visit was in 1964. Among the few memories that have remained with me was the port of Dubrovnik, with three US warships docked in it. Even at eleven years old, it struck me as fascinating to see a ‘Communist’ nation hosting the US navy. It was testament to Tito’s wit in playing off the great powers against each other, as it was to a more intelligent side of US foreign policy, cultivating better relations with a supposedly enemy power, rather than going to war with it as in Vietnam.

After all, the US won the game in Yugoslavia. Vietnam inflicted their first ever defeat on them.

Flower market in Zagreb's old centre

We did get to Zagreb in 1964, but only to the suburbs. I remember a good lunch and little else. That made it all the more pleasurable to discover how much the city has to offer, as our friend Ana showed us around it on this visit. A beautiful old centre with a huge market offering every imaginable ware, streets offering fine prospects at every turn and glorious views from an upper town whose streets are still lit by gas in the evenings.

Roofs and spires, seen from the Upper Town

It’s a fine, and above all European, city. And the lunch was as good as back then.

With Danielle (left) and Ana
And Marija Juric Zagorka, Croatia's first female journalist

But our conversation was even more interesting than the city.

I’d already discovered in Valencia than when people talk about ‘the war’ they don’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Britain, France or Germany, it generally means the Second World War. In Spain, it’s the war against Franco’s Fascists in the late 1930s. But with a chill up my spine, I realised that when Ana speaks of ‘the war’ she means something that she suffered directly herself, where she saw and heard air raids coming in over the city in which she lives.

She’s talking of the war the Serb-led Yugoslav army waged against Croatia to prevent its becoming independent.

‘Not a civil war,’ she assures us, ‘because Croatian forces never set a foot on Serbian territory. It was a war started by the Serbs and fought in self-defence by the Croatians.’

We first met Ana in Strasbourg. She reminded us of the quaint habit there of sounding air raid warnings at noon on the first Wednesday of every month, as a test of their civil defence readiness. The first time she heard it, she froze with terror at hearing the familiar wail with its blood-curdling associations. Only when a colleague realised what was happening to her and explained that it was only a test of equipment, was she able to regain her composure.

To me, such memories belong to my parents’ generation, not mine. And certainly not to Ana’s: she’s significantly younger than we are.

‘For years,’ she told us, ‘I wasn’t allowed to be Croatian. The state tried to force us all to be Yugoslavs, but we never were and never wanted to be.’

The right to self-determination was asserted for all peoples after the First World War. In Yugoslavia, as in Czechoslovakia and other nations, it was never truly applied. Only now can Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and even Kosovans at last begin to live their own lives, free of the authoritarian tutelage of Belgrade.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a mess, of course. Something Ana feels particularly strongly, as she was born there – only 200 metres from the Croatian border, but still inside Herzegovina. For now, there’s a fragile peace, but it’s hard to know whether it will strengthen in the future or break down into renewed conflict.

And what about Croatia itself? Doesn’t Ana fear a new outbreak of hostilities?

‘I don’t think so. After all, we’re members of NATO now.’

At a time when it’s fashionable to write NATO off as the work of the devil – a position shared by Donald Trump and the far left – it’s a salutary reminder that there are people who rely on it for the defence of their freedoms. Maybe the organisation, for its many faults, isn’t entirely without redeeming features.

Nor is it the only international organisation to which Croatia belongs. Another, as important as NATO, is the EU. Coming here is a useful reminder that one of the major purposes of the EU, far greater than its economic role, is to begin to put an end to violence between states, at least in Europe. That’s a continent that has seen more than enough blood flowing from its internal strife down the centuries.

Right up to as recently as the 1990s in former Yugoslavia.

Croexit? No thanks
The Croatian flag flies with pride next to the EU’s

Croatia’s proud of being in the EU. I wish more people in the UK could understand that. Before they undermine the organisation and deprive themselves of its benefits by an intemperate, ill-thought out and self-harming Brexit.