Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cent take, Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakuli
ć
has written a quartet of insightful essay
collections from a woman's perspective:
Café Europa: Life After Communism; The Balkan
Express; How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed;
and
A Guided Tour Through
the Museum of Communism.
Drakuli
ć
's
They Would Never Hurt a Fly
profiles Yugoslav
war criminals. For a thorough explanation of how and why Yugoslavia broke apart, read
Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation
(by Laura Silber and Allan Little). Joe Sacco's powerful
graphic novel,
Safe Area Goražde,
describes the author's actual experience living in a
mostly Muslim town in Bosnia-Herzegovina while it was surrounded by Serb forces during
the wars of the 1990s. Sacco's follow-up,
The Fixer and Other Stories,
focuses on real-life
characters he met in siege-time Sarajevo.
Films:
To grasp the wars that shook this region in the early 1990s, there's no better film
than the Slovene-produced
No Man's Land,
which won the 2002 Oscar for Best Foreign
Film. The BBC produced a remarkable six-hour documentary series called
The Death of
Yugoslavia,
featuring actual interviews with all of the key players (it's difficult to find on
homevideo,buttrysearchingfor“DeathofYugoslavia” onYouTube;thebook
Yugoslavia:
Death of a Nation,
noted above, was a companion piece to this film). BBC also produced a
harrowing documentary about the infamous Bosnian massacre,
Srebrenica: A Cry From the
Grave
(also available on YouTube). Angelina Jolie wrote and directed (but did not appear
in) 2011's wrenching, difficult-to-watch
In the Land of Blood and Honey,
a love story set
against the grotesque backdrop of the war in Bosnia.
On a lighter note, a classic from Tito-era Yugoslavia,
The Battle of Neretva
(1969), im-
ported Hollywood talent in the form of Yul Brynner and Orson Welles to tell the story of a
pivotal and inspiring battle in the fight against the Nazis. More recent Croatian films worth
watchinginclude
Border Post
(
Karaula,
2006),aboutvariousYugoslavsoldiersworkingto-
gether just before the warbrokeout,and
When Father Was Away on Business
(1985),about
a prisoner on the Tito-era gulag island of Goli Otok, near Rab. Other local movies include
Armin
(2007),
How the War Started on My Island
(1996),
Underground
(1995), and
Tito
and Me
(1992).
Fans of HBO's
Game of Thrones
may recognize locations in Dubrovnik and other Croa-
This list includes selected festivals in this region, plus national holidays. Many sights and
banksclosedownonnationalholidays—keepthisinmindwhenplanningyouritinerary.As
both Croatia and Slovenia are Catholic, religious holidays—Easter, Ascension Day, Whit-
sunday,andWhitmonday—areabigdeal,andfrequent.Muslims(mostpredominantinBos-
nia)observethemonthofRamadan.Beforeplanningatriparoundafestival,verifyitsdates
