Dubrovnik, Croatia
Today we visited the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia. I’m seeing a pattern to the historical cities in this region…they all have walls around them, narrow crooked streets that don’t line up and lots of churches. Dubrovnik is fairly large as I saw its lights reflecting off the haze last night while we were on our way here. The old walled city sits to the left and in front of the rows and rows of newer buildings. On the hill above the city is a very large cross, which was cool. Detracting from the cross was a large, modern looking building next door to it.
After doing some work this morning, JR and I took some time to go water skiing. It’s been almost twenty years since I’ve given that a try, but I got up after just a couple of attempts. Being that I have significantly more mass than I did when I was 18 it took a little longer to get on top of the water. I made it though, but it was exhausting. At 18 I didn’t realize how athletic water skiing really is. After drying off in the sun we took the boat to town.
Old Dubrovnik is very similar to Kotor in look and feel, but probably two or three times as large. We entered and wondered for a while trying to figure out how to access the top of the city wall. A common tourist activity is to circle the city on the top of the wall (about 2km, I think I read). However every place we found with stairs running up to the parapet was gated shut. This got me to thinking, correctly that when we found the entrance we would have to pay. It was 70 kn. to get in, which conveniently converted to 10 Euros. (When we first got into town we were a little freaked out that one of the outdoor restaurants was charging 70 for a pasta dish! Fortunately, we were able to pay in Euros for everything we needed.)
It was really hot on top of the wall, as it is everywhere here, but it was fun to walk around. There were towers at intervals and different features common to castles, like gate houses and holes to shoot through. This one had been clearly built for canons to be the main defensive weapon. There were small domed rooms with small windows periodically, and eventually I figured that these must have been where they did the sighting for the guns. One thing that surprised me was that the wall was really thick on the land side, in places probably 20 feet or more, but on the seaward side it was usually not much wider than about 5 feet. They were doing repair work on the highest tower on the wall, so I picked up a couple of chips of stone that had fallen on the stairs for souvenirs. We actually saw repair work going on all over this city, although there were several buildings still in ruins, but I don’t know if this is from recent damage or if they’ve been like that for centuries. That’s the thing about being some place with as much history as this…it’s hard to tell what’s old, what’s restored and what’s newer. Weathered stone that’s 20 years old doesn’t look that different than when it’s 400 years old.
As we worked our way around the city the view was constantly changing. One thing I noticed is that the churches all had fine wire mesh over the stained glass windows, and I’m betting that was installed either before or after the fighting here in 1991-1992, to protect them from exploding artillery shells. Many of the buildings were destroyed or damaged during that time. The churches here are much larger than in the other cities we’ve been to and really inspirational in their construction and decoration. Later we checked out the interiors of a few, and I couldn’t believe how ornate the sculptures and paintings were. I realized at some point that the reason these little towns have so many churches is that attendance was probably near 100% in the past, so you needed plenty of churches to make room for all those worshipers.
When we finished our tour JR wanted to get lunch in town, so we found a place by the water. Afterwards we headed back into the city for a few minutes before we went back to the pier to wait for the tender to bring us back to the ship. I was seriously saturated from the heat and humidity, so I went straight to the back of the ship where the “sports platform” was lowered. This is like a little dock at the back of the ship that they use for water skiing, tubing and swimming. The water was deep blue and much cooler than in Monemvassía, but it was very refreshing. Once again, we got back to work before dinner. I think I must have washed off my sun screen while water skiing this morning, as I’ve got a little burn today, especially on the parts that weren’t covered by the life vest while I was skiing. I don’t expect to be outside much more on this trip, except for meals, unless we get done on board early enough to get out and see Venice on Saturday. We’re at sea tomorrow, so we will do our very best to wrap everything up and make sure things are in as good of shape as possible.
