Preface

Quite a few years ago, this book started as an ambitious scholarly project on cold- and warm-water islands, around a dozen of them, which in time got chiselled down to a book of travels to the Croatian islands.

Although I went on to finish a manuscript, some comments by an early reader, Pamela Holway, made me see that my book hadn’t yet emerged into its final form. I realized I had much to say about my half century in the north of Croatia, especially about the village and the surrounding valleys where I spent my formative years in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. My story about the islands, I saw, was always folded into my life in the north, from where every journey to the sea began.

Two worlds—the continental interior of green valleys and plum orchards on the one hand, and the austere and skeletal karst coast on the other—were the two halves of my Croatian life. Each world wasn’t just a different geographical landscape, but a different emotional and psychological one. The first felt like home; the other always seemed unfamiliar and new. In the north were family and friends who helped shape the social part of my character, but in the south I was an anonymous stranger, and while one was steeped with my own history and freighted with time, the other existed mainly in the present of my travelling. Yet both halves of my Croatia were connected also. In both, I had physical adventures, tests of the body. In each, I was always on the move, always travelling, exhibiting the restless instincts of my migratory family. In writing, I used similar techniques throughout. I balanced the open confessional nature of memoir with the reticence and mystery of literary fiction (because I felt that readers should sometimes be invited to make up their own minds). I adopted both a relaxed, conversational, digressive register that was in keeping with all those conversations in kitchens over gemišt and a tighter, journalistic, less demotic one. The result is a memoir, not a comprehensive historical, sociological, political or anthropological analysis of Yugoslavia and Croatia.

The village of Srebrnjak is a string of houses fifteen kilometres southwest of Zagreb. More hamlet than village, it was a community of peasants in the early 1970s, which turned into a white-collar weekend retreat and country “suburbia” where most of the vineyards had disappeared and no one farmed anymore. With these larger societal changes came my own—from childhood, youth, and young manhood to middle age and after. I got to know many villagers very well. I learned about their stories, the practices of their working days, and the often haunting, all-too-human saga of their lives. I knew the seasons in Srebrnjak too, the profusions of spring and summer, and the cold, spectral fall and winter.

By contrast, in all my years travelling to the Croatian islands it was always summer; a cold bura didn’t blow from the mountainous hinterland and the towns weren’t silent and desolate as they are in the winter. I walked in the hottest conditions, swam off remote beaches and islets in hidden coves. And even though I had set routines at work and at home, on the islands I broke free, shrugged off the prim atmosphere and little orthodoxies of academia and shed my former self the farther south I travelled and the farther offshore I went. Like so many Croatians every summer, like the millions of others who left behind their own drizzly north for the sun and blue sea, I too escaped to the islands in the south. Yes, the Croatian islands have a long history, and are long inhabited, but to me they were always places of discovery and liberation, of new beginnings.