Kissed by the first orange-hued rays of sunrise, Zagreb’s Brutalist skyscrapers faded away as we drove through the morning mist heading for the Petrova Gora mountain, where the leaves were blushing scarlet and gold.
There the air was chilly, and the valley’s autumn colours jumped out at every turn.
The journey from Stinica port to Rab island was a short one, but then we had to take one more boat to get to Goli Otok, the island that was the site of the only gulag in Europe, a top-secret political prison in use from 1949 to 1989 and where Tito sent all those who sided with URSS after the break-up between himself and Stalin. In nearly forty years, thousands of Croatian were killed on the false assumption of ‘Stalinism’.
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| Split, Croatia |
On the next morning, after another burek-based breakfast, we were ready to start our tour of Split and we went straight to the Palace of Diocletian (UNESCO World Heritage site). The historic centre of Split is built on the remains of this Roman palace, which nowadays appears as yet another Hell’s circle.
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| Greeting to the Sun | Zadar, Croatia |
I left you wondering why we had to be in Zadar before the sunset, so let’s start from there, i.e. from the top of my Zadar must-see list: the Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun, a.k.a. the complementary sound and light effects of a beautiful sunset on the sea.
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| Zagreb, Croatia |
Our Zagreb sightseeing tour started from the Mirogoj Cemetery, the memorial park where members of many different religious groups rest among ivy-covered marble arcades since the end of the 19th century.