Return to Dubrovnik

Thirty-four years ago, I put my bicycle together in a small airport and rode out through what seemed a wild garden, then a dozen miles of sunny upland until I looked down on a gem of a city beside the sea.

My lyrical description of “Bivalve Dubrovnik was based on that visit, and ended on a note of despair, because a few years later the former Yugoslavia broke up in savage wars between its closely related peoples, and from the mountain that overhangs it the city was bombarded for a forty-four days.  If men are willing to destroy a delicacy of sculptured limestone, is anything permanent?

What has happened since?

The old city was repaired entirely, with United Nations funding.  I think the romance of this may have given Dubrovnik an extra a fillip into the Age of Tourism.  At the airport, no longer small, three planes line up for take-off in less than a minute.  There was no trace of my wild garden in the rocks.  A throbbing highway gouges through a landscape littered with gas stations and commercial blocks.  There were always hotels out along the western peninsula; now villas and apartments and hundred-windowed hotels stretch to the east as well and along the slopes above.  For the cruise ships Dubrovnik is an obvious target; a modest four-storey one lay off the old harbor, and two of the city-sized kind loomed over the newer port.

At the main gate there has to be a two-way system of ropes dividing the pedestrians swarming in and out.  Along the Stradun, the central promenade, crowds ramble at least as thick as ever, but few are natives.  Regiments of tourists, predominantly Asian, follow their guides’ flags.  This was October; what’s it like in August?

It would be impossible now for me to spend a week loitering on the rampart, the encircling city wall, sketching its twists and steps and battlements and ledges and apertures and turrets.  You have to pay the equivalent of twenty-three dollars for one visit, go up a long zigzag of steps near the main gate, and go around in one direction, with other tourists on your heels.  No longer is the path on the wall involved with the upper ends of little streets in the town’s neighborhoods; they are sealed off; the wall has become a separate tourist facility, like a roller-coaster.  There are no natives up there, except those behind the counters at three or four drinks stands.

You can ride a ferry to Lokrum, a wooded island that is supposedly s nature reserve, and follow other tourists along a network of cement or cobbled paths, and see plenty of peacocks and very tame black rabbits, who account for the sparse vegetation under the trees.

Back when I was rambling and sketching on the ramparts, I think I was at a height of deftness with the technique I used, a sort of false pen-and-wash.  I had a cheap American pen called something like Razorpoint (which I haven’t been able to find again).  I drew with it and then was able to touch the drawing with a wet brush and spread or merge some of the lines into bluish gradients.  In the rendering of the angled passage by which I entered through the city wall, I let the water pool in the masonry blocks so that the small unwetted spaces suggest the chinks.  In the view down into the square inside the main gate, the whole front of a building is covered by a pooling enough to contrast with sunshine on the tiled roof above, but light enough to suggest reflected sun-glow.

I can’t lay my hands on the many other sketches I did; they are somewhere in the confusion of boxes caused by moving from place to place.

But where is the little passage, which I remembered as being “into the left side” of one of the gates?  I’ve searched for it in some puzzlement.  Dubrovnik has three gates, the main western one called Pile, Buzu on the north, and Ploce to the harbor (there should be accents on some of those letters).  At length I found it, a detail of the Pile gate, which now includes a wooden drawbridge across a moat, a downward ramp folded into two slopes, and the great gateway itself.  At the corner made by the two slopes is a small hole, and that is my gateway.  It now connects only to an enclosed part of the bottom of the moat; no more a route for a bicycle into the city.

Here are two more picturesas we returned along the Adriatic coast: the Turkish bridge at Mostar (shown in my Think Like a Mother because once a symbol of amity between Croatians and Serbs, also destroyed in the wars, also rebuilt by the world community); and a granite sphinx that was already sixteen centuries old when it was brought to the Roman emperor Diocletian’s palace in what is now Split; its face was defaced by Christian fanatics.