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Visiting Šibenik in November 2011, I had hoped to follow in the footsteps of the 19th century English Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson, on a journey up the river Krka to the Visovac and Krka monasteries. Alas, how times had changed since his visit more than 150 years earlier. Gardner Wilkinson travelled by boat, and was treated as an honoured guest at the Franciscan friary at Visovac. Today, the area around the Krka is a national park, preserved and developed for tourism. Travel up and down the river depends on the timetable of tourist boats, and in November, out of the tourist season, they were not running.

The autumn was nonetheless a wonderful time to visit the falls at Skradinski buk, reachable by bus from Šibenik, and a short walk down to the river. With very few tourists, I could stroll peacefully around the walkways, enjoying the spectacular cascades, framed by the autumnal colours of the surrounding trees. But I wanted to make the full trip, and to do it by boat.

So back again in the spring, this time I took the boat from the park entrance at the little town of Skradin, up to the falls at Skradinski buk. The English architect, T.G. Jackson, made this journey in the 1880s. He described passing through a gorge “if possible still more sterile and white than any we had seen.” It is true that Dalmatia is notable for its barren landscape of bleached limestone mountains, and expanses of scrubby little bushes. Behind the exquisite towns of the coast, built from the same limestone rock, it is a hard, hot, unforgiving land. But the gorge to which Jackson referred is no longer sterile. The hills on either side are a mass of green trees, the river banks trimmed with reed beds, an occasional swan gliding among them. I had more than once heard Dalmatians complain that their region had been stripped of its trees during centuries of Venetian rule, the timber used for the Republic’s ships and the piles that formed the foundations of the city’s buildings, an early example of human-induced environmental degradation. If this were so, perhaps the forests along the banks of the Krka had had time to recover since the end of Venetian exploitation.

Skradinski buk had a heavier flow of water than the previous autumn, the normal spring swell. This was despite the drought I had been told was afflicting much of Croatia. Another 19th century visitor to the falls was the Emperor Franz Josef, in 1875. His visit is commemorated by a notice next to a viewing point built out over the river by local people for the Emperor to view the falls. According to the notice, people thronged the surrounding hills, and greeted the Emperor by shooting their pistols in the air, with shouts of “Živio” – “Long life”!


Visovac Franciscan Friary

I took the tourist boat up to Visovac. The friary, on an island in the middle of the river, surrounded by cypress trees, is an idyllic scene. Unlike in Gardner Wilkinson’s day, when a foreign visitor was rare and feted, nowadays the friars generally stay out of the way of the tourists and pilgrims that pour over the island. Founded in the 14th century as an Augustinian monastery, the monks fled the encroaching Turks. In the 15th century, Franciscans moved in from Bosnia, where the order was specially favoured by the Ottoman rulers, and licensed by them to minister to their Catholic subjects.

Today, the friary serves as a seminary, housing three friars and nine seminarians at the time of my visit. During the 1990s conflict, the friary was close to the front line. Our guide told us that shells fell in the surrounding area, and even on the friary itself, and that the seminarians were removed to a safer place, on the coast.

Housed in the friary is a small museum. The walls of one room are covered with photographs of Catholic churches damaged and ruined during the war. The guide gave us his potted history of the war: in 1991 the Serbs attacked Slovenia and then Croatia; in 1992 they attacked Bosnia; and half of Bosnia is still occupied by the Serbs. It is a partial description. The walls contain no pictures of ruined Orthodox churches or mosques. There is nothing about the Serbs from the Dalmatian hinterland driven out in 1995, their homes destroyed or occupied by Croats to prevent them from ever returning. Nor about the hundreds of Serb civilians murdered in the aftermath of the Croat reconquest of Serb-controlled territory. The mention of Serb ‘occupation’ of half of Bosnia omits reference to Croatia’s participation in the attempted carve-up of Bosnia with the Serbs, in which some Herzegovinian Franciscans were implicated. Nothing about the wanton destruction of the old town of Stolac in southern Herzegovina, its Muslim population expelled, the town wrecked, not in any fighting, for there was none in Stolac, but in an attempt by its wartime Croat occupiers to expunge all evidence of its Ottoman, oriental past, and of its Muslim population.

This is so typical of Catholic Croats, as well as of Orthodox Serbs, all of their focus on the sufferings of their own people, the damage to their churches, the Golgotha of their nation, and no acknowledgement of the sufferings, the injustices against others. In all their Christian charity, there is no time or space for others.

Yet the Visovac museum also contains an exhibit which hints at a time when relations among Catholics and Orthodox in the Dalmatian hinterland were not as fraught as they became in the 20th century. The exhibit in question is the sword of Vuk Mandušić, a local 17th century hero who fought against the Turks. Mandušić is one of the characters in the epic poem, The Mountain Wreath, by the Montenegrin poet and Prince-Bishop, Petar Petrušić Njegoš, and is a favourite of Serb epic poetry. Mandušić was Orthodox, which in 20th century Dalmatia would make him a Serb. Indeed, today his legacy is celebrated by wild-eyed Serb nationalist guslar players, wailing out their violent diatribes accompanied by the tuneless one-string instrument. Yet in the 17th century he could be a hero to Catholics and Orthodox believers alike. Was a he a Serb or a Croat hero? In his day the question would have been irrelevant. For the more sophisticated population of the coast, he would have been a Vlach, or Morlach, as most of the population of the wild interior were identified. Yet the sword, and the memory, of this Orthodox slayer of Turks has been preserved in a Catholic friary.

Gardner Wilkinson continued his journey by boat up the Krka. From Visovac, boats could only go as far as the Roski slap waterfalls, and in order for him to continue from there it was necessary to send ahead to the Orthodox monastery of Michael the Archangel to ask them to send a boat to the other side of the falls. According to Gardner Wilkinson’s account, this presented the Visovac friars with a dilemma. They were not in the habit of communicating with the Orthodox monastery, and were concerned not to open themselves to the possibility of an affront. But one of the friars recalled that the ‘Greeks’ had been very civil on a past occasion, and that a letter to them might initiate friendly relations. So Gardner Wilkinson was able to proceed on his journey.

He found the Orthodox monks to be as hospitable as the Franciscans, and described the archimandrite as having the ‘manners of a gentleman educated in Europe.’ He noted that, whereas in the Catholic religious houses there were pictures of the Austrian emperor, the pope etc., in the Orthodox monastery it was the Russian emperor who adorned the walls. As the Ottoman Empire retreated, Austria set itself up as the protector of the Catholics of the Balkans, whereas Russia played the same role for the Orthodox. Thus political and national identities were drawn on religious lines, between Serbs and Croats, and wider conflicts between the empires of Europe imprinted themselves on the Balkan region.

For the modern traveller there was no possibility of staying at either monastery, as Gardner Wilkinson had done. And the timetable of the tourist boats did not permit a continuation by boat up to the Orthodox monastery. So I took the bus from Šibenik to Knin, and from there travelled by train to the little town of Kistanje, a couple of miles walk from the monastery.


a railway station near Kistanje

The journey to Kistanje was a sad affair. Twelve years after the war, and the flight or expulsion of most of the Serbs of the region, it had still not recovered. When I first travelled through the Knin region, not long after the end of the conflict, it was a desolate landscape, scarred with ruined houses, burnt out by people determined to empty the territory of Serbs forever. Knin itself had to some extent come back to life, its departed Serbs partially replaced by incoming Bosnian Croats. An American international official who had worked in Knin for the UN during the war, and returned there a few years later with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the experience of returning reminded her of the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The town was the same, but the people were different. But the surrounding villages have been left half-empty, bereft, some elderly Serbs returning to live out their last days on their own land, but few young. Railway stations along the line to Kistanje were gutted, fallen down, still in use – trains still stopped there, but apparently not worth repairing.

Kistanje had seen some redevelopment. After the conflict, the Croatian authorities settled Croats from Janjevo, in Kosovo, in Kistanje, occupying Serb-owned houses. In an effort to promote Serb return, the US embassy in the late 1990s financed the building of new homes for some of the Janjevo Croats, in order to free up Serb-owned homes for returnees. There has also been some renovation of civic buildings in the town centre.

A brash new Catholic Church with a tall tower has been built in this formerly almost entirely Serb town. The tower reminded me of the tall tower on a new Catholic church in Mostar, close to the former frontline between Bosniac east and Croat west. Such a tower in an ethnically divided land makes a statement; that this town is Croat. Round the corner from the church in Kistanje sits an older, more serene Orthodox church. Some Serbs have returned, although there is precious little employment for them. And ruined buildings in the very centre of the town are testimony to the fact that the place is essentially still a wreck.


Orthodox Monastery of Michael the Archangel, Krka

The walk to the monastery was tougher than I had expected. It was only the beginning of May, but the temperature was already baking hot, and the sparse, scrubby little bushes offered practically no protection against the sun. But as the road descends towards the Krka, the river appears, snaking between the tree-covered hills, and then the monastery, sitting close to the bank of the river on one side, and a large, green pond on another. It is an idyllic setting. The monastery dates to the 14th Century, when it was endowed by Jelena, sister of the Serbian Emperor Stefan Dušan, who was married to a local nobleman.

The monastery was in the Serb-held para-state of Krajina during the recent conflict. Following Operation Storm, by which Croatia reclaimed the Serb-controlled territory and drove out most of its Serb inhabitants, the monastery was ransacked. Important documents were lost, one of the monks told me. There has since been considerable renovation, mainly financed by the Serb diaspora, the monk told me, with contributions also from the Serbian government and, he somewhat grudgingly acknowledged, from the Croatian government. It is now in a fine state, although some renovation work remains to be undertaken. It also houses a school. The monk spoke sadly of the near-empty villages in the surrounding area, the burned houses, the lack of young people.

I mentioned the visit Gardner Wilkinson had made 150 years before. Among the graves in a little graveyard just outside the monastery walls were some from the decades after Gardner Wilkinson’s visit. I stood in front of one of them, wondering whether this was the archimandrite Gardner Wilkinson had met. I told how the Franciscans at Visovac and the Orthodox monks had cooperated to help Gardner Wilkinson on his journey, and noted the apparently friendly relations that had existed between the two religious houses at that time. The monk replied that up until the Second World War relations had indeed been ‘correct’. But since then they had been harmed by the genocide committed during that war against the Serb people under the Croatian fascist Ustaša regime, in which, he asserted, some Catholic priests had participated. They had never apologised, and they had never acknowledged what had happened, he said.

A young pupil from the monastery school interjected that every Serb in that region had relatives who had been killed during the Second World War. He claimed that one million had been murdered at the Ustaša death camp at Jasenovac. My heart sank as I listened to this. While the depredations of the murderous Ustaša were a fact, the massively inflated numbers that so many Serbs persist in claiming only detract from their case and alienate those Croats who would naturally be inclined to sympathise. The more usual claim had been 700,000, but why not round it up to a cool million, after all? The number of the dead at Jasenovac has been a matter of severe contention for years. Croatia’s late President, Franjo Tudjman, had been obsessed with the issue, and research he promoted suggested a figure closer to 50-60,000, including thousands of Romas, Jews and anti-Ustaša Croats. Tudjman’s insensitivity to the traumas of the Serbs in World War II, his rehabilitation of some Ustaša fellow travellers, and his generally fierce Croatian nationalism had a baleful influence in the conflict of the early 1990s, driving frightened Serbs into the hands of Milošević and his propagandists. But the numbers he came up with are almost certainly closer to the reality, and they constitute a damning enough indictment of the Ustaša regime.

My visits to the two monasteries on the Krka, both of them beautiful, historic institutions, brought home once again how miserably both the Catholic and Orthodox churches in this region, with honourable individual exceptions, have failed in their Christian mission. Both obsessed with their own nation’s rights and their own nation’s sufferings, wilfully blind to the pains of others, they have perverted and distorted the faith they both profess. It is surely a shame and a disgrace that these followers of Christ are the last people to look to in hope of reconciliation. Rather, they have persistently been at the forefront of the most uncompromisingly nationalist elements in their respective nations. They have been heralds of conflict and intolerance. The Balkans would have been better off without them.

One of the extraordinary things about visiting Sicily is the rich medley of diverse influences that make up its heritage: Roman; Byzantine; Norman; Baroque; and, perhaps most remarkable of all, Arab. For Sicily in the 9th to 11th centuries was ruled by Saracens, who for 120 years controlled the whole island, the Emirate of Sicily. Under Arab rule, Palermo became one of the great Muslim cities of the Mediterranean region, vying with Cordoba and Cairo. It was the second-largest city in Europe, after Cordoba, in Spain. At that time the two biggest cities in Europe were both Muslim. It is said that Palermo boasted some 300 mosques. The mosques are gone, and the Muslims there now are recent arrivals. But the older Arab influence is still discernible, for example in the cooking, in which couscous is a staple. And it can be seen in architecture of buildings commissioned by Christian rulers in the century or so after the end of Muslim rule, who admired the Arab culture they found there.

Arab rule in Sicily was brought to an end by a Norman conquest in the 1060s and 1070s, which returned the island to Christian control. But the Muslim presence remained for more than a century under Norman rule, and continued to exert a powerful influence on the island. The Normans adopted a policy of religious tolerance, allowing eastern-rite Christians, Muslims and Jews to practice their faith alongside the western, Roman variant of Christianity that they themselves professed. For a few decades, Sicily was a remarkable multi-ethnic, multi-faith land. The interaction of its different peoples spawned a unique architectural and artistic style known as Norman-Arab, combining Norman, Arab and Byzantine flavours.


Church of St. John of the Hermits, Palermo

The Arab influence is evident in many medieval buildings in Palermo. The exterior of the 12th Century church of St. John of the Hermits, close by the Palazzo dei Normanni, with its ochre domes looks thoroughly middle-eastern, although the arches in the interior are unmistakably Norman. The austere little church of San Cataldo, on the central Piazza Bellini, is also topped by trademark Saracen domes.


La Zisa Palace, Palermo

I was particularly struck by the former royal palace of La Zisa, now situated a short distance from the city centre, but in its day the centre of a park outside the city. The very name of the palace is derived from the Arabic, al aziz, ‘magnificent’. The interior decoration includes typically Arab features, with ornately carved niches familiar in Islamic architecture in North Africa and Spain. Down the middle of the central hall runs one of the gentle little fountains (not working when I visited) that lend such an ambiance of peacefulness in Arab architecture. Later Baroque flourishes jar a little, but do not destroy the effect, and seem in a way in keeping with the spirit of amalgamation of different styles that is at the heart of Sicily’s heritage. A short distance away is the La Cuba building, as it name implies, a large square edifice, that once formed part of the same park as La Zisa. It is in less good condition, and is open to the sky. But along the top of the walls can be seen the same ornate Arabic stone carving, in another example of the fusion of Norman and Arab styles.


Palatine Chapel, Palermo

Palermo’s greatest medieval jewel is surely the Palatine Chapel, in the Palazzo dei Normanni. The palace was the seat of the medieval Norman rulers and, much rebuilt, today houses Sicily’s regional government. The chapel itself, once the private chapel of Sicily’s rulers, remains as it was, an exquisite blend of Norman architectural forms, Byzantine frescoes, and typically Islamic motifs. Before the Arab conquest, Sicily had come under the eastern half of the Roman Emperor, its strongest links were with Constantinople, many of its people were Greek, and it followed the eastern variant of Christianity. This Byzantine influence remained strong, and the frescoes of the Palatine chapel are among the finest to be seen. As remarkable are the typically Islamic designs, most notably in the beautifully ornate ceiling which, if not for the crosses incorporated into it, could have adorned an Islamic building in North Africa. Yet with this fusion of diverse influences, the overall effect is harmonious. Another marvellous example of this harmonious fusion is the magnificent cathedral at Monreale, in the hills above Palermo.

Not only did Sicily’s Norman rulers employ Arab architects, but they had Arab poets at their court, and Arab soldiers in their armies. And while the court language was French, they spoke Arabic, and used Arabic as well as Latin, Greek and Hebrew in their communications with their diverse subjects. The royal coronation mantel included an inscription in Arabic. The Arab traveller Ibn Jubair, who visited Sicily a century after the Norman conquest, described the splendor of Palermo, and remarked that there were too many mosques to be counted. He was struck by how well Muslims were treated, that many government officials were Muslim and that they enjoyed the full confidence of the ruler.


12th Century Plaque in Hebrew, Latin, Greeek and Arabic, La Zisa Palace, Palermo

On the wall outside the Palatine Chapel is a carved inscription in Latin, Greek and Arabic. Originally, it would have come from a bell tower that once stood outside the chapel. The inscription celebrates a 12-Century water clock that was once there. The La Ziza palace contains an exhibition of medieval artefacts. Among them is a 12th Century plaque commemorating a notable lady, written in Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Arabic.

But sadly this remarkable example of medieval multi-culturism was not destined to survive. Even during the Norman period, many Muslims converted to Christianity, the religion of the rulers, just as many Christians had earlier converted to Islam under Arab rule. Muslims may have been tolerated under the Normans, but their position was always subordinate and dependent on royal protection. Following the end of Norman rule at the end of the 12th Century, Sicily became part of the Holy Roman Empire, and that protection was withdrawn. As the island was torn apart by fighting over the succession at the end of the 12th Century and the first years of the 13th, a Muslim rebellion took control of much its territory. In 1224 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, having defeated the Muslim rebels, decided to deport them to the Italian mainland, where a Muslim colony survived at Lucera until the end of the century.

As modern Europeans debate the merits or otherwise of globalisation and multiculturism, and question whether the Christian and secular West can co-exist with Islam, it is worth recalling that these questions are not new, and that a thousand years ago cooperation and synthesis between different cultural traditions fostered things of beauty that continue to attest to the fact that antagonism between diverse cultures is not inevitable. Through tolerance and exchange in medieval Sicily there flowered a unique culture based on respect, sharing and the blending of different traditions. Medieval Sicily was an important junction for interaction and exchange between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and in its way, a kind of beacon. In the marvellous architecture it has bequeathed, it could also serve as an example today.

“Purge”, a novel by Sofi Oksanen, a Finnish-Estonian author, spans three generations of Estonian women caught up in the traumas of world war, occupation and the break-up of the Soviet Union half a century later. It follows the story of Aliide Truu, an elderly lady who, in recently independent Estonia in 1992, takes in a dishevelled young girl she finds lying in the yard of her farmhouse. As the two women circle each other mistrustfully, we read of Aliide’s jealousy in her youth for her elder sister, Ingel, who found happiness in her marriage to Hans, a local peasant boy with whom she, Aliide, was infatuated. The family is broken apart by Soviet occupation during and after the Second World War. The girls’ parents are arrested and disappear, never to be seen again. Hans, having enlisted with the Germans fighting on the eastern front, returns to join the resistance to the Soviet occupiers in the forests, and is hidden by the sisters in the family home. Suspecting them of being in contact with Hans, the local communists interrogate, humiliate and sexually abuse the sisters, as well as the little daughter of Ingel and Hans.

Traumatised, Aliide marries an Estonian communist, Martin, in order to protect herself. Ingel and her daughter are deported to the far corners of the Soviet Empire, leaving Aliide, with Martin, to take over the family home. Unbeknownst to Martin, Hans, overwrought with grief for his wife and daughter, is still hidden in the house. Now Aliide has Hans to herself. She will look after him and, without Ingel to eclipse her, surely, she hopes, he will at last see her own virtues…

The young girl, Zara, a Russian who speaks Estonian, as Aliide observes, has also been a victim of political upheaval in the lawlessness of the breakup of the Soviet Union; trafficked, forced into prostitution and sexual slavery by men much like those who had abused Aliide decades earlier. Now they are gangsters, but one of them is ex-KGB. The times change; the men don’t. Zara’s experiences shock us with the appalling human degradation suffered by some amid the euphoria of the collapse of communism. Zara has fled their clutches, and now is desperate to make her escape complete before they catch up with her. As we guess from an early stage, and as Aliide eventually discovers, Zara is in fact the granddaughter of Ingel, who, in her desperation, has come to the only address she knows in Estonia, written by her grandmother on the back of a photo of a young Ingel and Aliide.

It is a powerful story about how lives are wrecked in the upheavals of their times; about how fraught times throw up pitiless people for whom no amount of cruelty is too much. And about the compromises and ambiguities that some are forced into. Aliide is abused. But in her fear and in her consuming jealousy of Ingel, she commits acts of great evil.

As to the men, they are less finely drawn than the main female characters, to some extent caricatures. Hans appears to be everything wholesome and noble in a man, the simple peasant, handsome, strong, devoted and loyal, who defends his country. The portrayal of Martin, by contrast, elicits not only moral disapproval, but physical revulsion. Oksanen dwells on his fetid armpits, the hair in them matted with sweat. The smell of his armpits sticks to Aliide’s hair and skin, and stays in her nostrils all day. Ingel comments that Aliide is starting to smell like a Russian, like the hordes of Russians pouring in to work in the new factories in Estonia. There are repeated references to the Russian habit of wiping their mouths on their sleeves, which Martin, and eventually Aliide adopt. The inference seems plain: the Russians are not just brutal occupiers; they are uncivilised barbarians. Without downplaying the terrible Estonian experience under Soviet rule, such images read like racial slurs. It is all a bit much.

The German soldiers who visit the family home during their turn at occupying Estonia are, by contrast, nice, wholesome, polite young boys. This is a not uncommon perspective in the Baltic states, where the experience of Soviet occupation is generally remembered as having been much worse than that of the relatively benign Germans. It is, of course, a view which can be sustained only if one forgets the slaughter of the Baltic Jews, in which some Baltic people participated. Oksanen makes only a passing reference to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Germans; a brief mention of a Jewish family that fled to Soviet territory before the German advance. The only other reference to Jews is that the man of the family, having returned with the Soviets, is present at one of the sessions of interrogation and abuse of the sisters at the town hall. This appears gratuitous. Only two references to a Jewish family, and they were after all collaborators in the brutality of Russian occupation.

Oksanen acknowledges the ambiguities and difficult choices that many had to make. Most notably Aliide, who accommodates herself to the regime that had abused her in order to survive, although her jealousy and spitefulness towards Ingel takes her well beyond the collaboration required for survival. Revulsion towards Martin is perhaps slightly mitigated by the fact that he is no hypocrite or cynic in his devotion to the communist ideal. A true and enthusiastic believer in the communist dream, and all its promises of a better world, in later life he struggles to come to terms with the emptiness of the dream brought home by the Chernobyl disaster.

It is a fine novel. But the unremitting negative stereotyping of Russians, even down to personal hygiene, mars the book. And it sits uneasily with the much more skimpy and positive portrayal of the German occupiers.

Sitting atop Cairo’s citadel, the hill that had been fortified in the 12th Century by Saladin as a key highpoint dominating the city, is the large Alabaster Mosque. Apart from its commanding position, it stands out due to its architectural style, which differs significantly from the numerous older mosques around it. Commissioned in the first half of the 19th Century, the mosque’s architect was an Ottoman Turk. Its design, with its large central dome, surrounded by smaller domes, and thin, pointed minarets, consciously imitated that of the great mosques of Istanbul. Egypt had been under nominal Ottoman sovereignty since the 16th Century, but its Mamluk rulers had retained considerable autonomy, and continued to build mosques in their own style, quite distinct from that of the Ottomans.


Tha Alabaster Mosque, Cairo

The mosque was commissioned by Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Egypt for most of the first half of the 19th Century, who is feted by some as the father of modern Egypt. And Muhammad Ali was Albanian. Under his rule, the beginnings of a modern state were built, and a modern army. At its height, he extended Egypt’s dominion to include Sudan, western Arabia and Syria, his armies marching even into Anatolia, where they inflicted a crushing defeat on the army of the Sultan in 1832. His power far outreached that of his nominal sovereign, and Istanbul itself lay at his feet before the European powers intervened to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

How did an Albanian come to wield such power in a foreign land? Muhammad Ali was born in what is today Greek Macedonia. He went to Egypt as second-in-command of an Albanian contingent in the Ottoman army that was sent to restore Ottoman control in the power vacuum that followed the withdrawal of the French, who occupied the country from 1798-1801. By a mixture of military campaigning and deft political intrigue, Muhammad Ali established himself as the new Wali (Governor) of Egypt. Still nominally beholden to the Sultan, he was in practice an independent ruler, who founded a dynasty that reined until 1953, when Gamal Abdel Nasser declared a republic.


Muhammad Ali Pasha

Like many great rulers in the Middle East’s history, his strength was also bolstered by a capacity for ruthlessness and cruelty. Notably, early in his rule he eliminated the power of the Mamluks when he invited them to a festive celebration in Cairo, following which they were slaughtered. Standing on the citadel, with its hazy views across Cairo to the pyramids at Giza, you can see the spot where it happened, below the walls, in the narrow road leading down from the hill to the citadel gate. As they processed down to the gate, it was slammed shut by some of Muhammad Ali’s loyal Albanians, who then proceeded to kill them.

I found mixed feelings among the Egyptians I spoke to about Muhammad Ali. Some were prepared to acknowledge his importance for Egypt. For the taxi driver who brought me into the city from the airport, he was just one in a long succession of foreign rulers stretching back more than two millennia, before the takeover by Nasser, in his view the first truly Egyptian ruler since ancient times. Nasser was my driver’s hero. King Farouk, who was overthrown by Nasser’s revolution in 1952, he excoriated as a corrupt foreigner. The recently ousted Hosni Mubarak he considered even worse.

For many, Muhammad Ali was interested more in his personal aggrandisement than that of Egypt. Indeed, he milked Egypt for the funds needed for his reforms, and appropriated nearly all Egyptian land. And his foreignness was evident in more ways than the design of the mosque he commissioned. Throughout his rein, Turkish, not Arabic, was the official language of his court. And contemporaries who met him attested that, while he spoke Turkish competently, the only language he was really fluent in was Albanian. Yet his is a remarkable story. That an Albanian, a man from a small nation in what for many is an obscure corner of the Balkans, came to dominate and rule a large swathe of the Middle East, and laid the foundations of the modern Egyptian state.

Walking through the Doge’s Palace in Venice, one marvels not only at the splendour of the Most Serene Republic, but at the sense of timelessness of a city whose greatness evaporated so suddenly, but left its monuments, its grandeur, its buildings in place, frozen in time, like an entire city transformed into a museum. Venice was not just an architectural, artistic and cultural marvel. It was the capital of an empire, at its height the greatest trading and naval power in the Mediterranean. It was well past the prime of its political power when revolutionary France kicked down the door in 1797. The republic which had survived untrammelled through a millennium of turmoil in Europe was gone, just like that. Perhaps the most poignant reminder of the suddenness of its demise is the coat of arms of the last Doge, the head of state of the republic, in the Shield Room, where the Doge held official receptions. On the wall in that room had been displayed the coat of arms of each Doge for the duration of his office. Since his exit, the arms of the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, have remained there, a sad memorial to a lost world, preserved now only as empty rooms, filled with fine artworks, but dead and gone.


Great Council chamber, Doge's Palace

I was especially struck by a series of paintings along one wall in the Great Council chamber, where the nobles of Venice once met to discuss the affairs of the republic. The paintings portray key events of the Fourth Crusade, at the beginning of the 13th Century, one of the most notable and most controversial episodes for the Republic. One of the paintings shows the conquest of Zadar, then the most important city on the Dalmatian coast. Zadar (Zara in Italian) had passed to Hungarian control a few years earlier, and Venice was determined to get it back. The Fourth Crusade presented an opportunity for the elderly Doge Enrico Dandolo. Venice had agreed to hire out ships to transport the Frankish Crusaders to the Holy Land. However, the Franks could not afford to pay. So the wily Venetians proposed that, in lieu of payment, the Franks could help them capture Zadar. The result was the sacking of the city in 1202. In Zadar, this is still seen as an infamous event. When he heard of it, Pope Innocent III excommunicated the Crusade’s participants, although he later partially relented, restricting the ban to the Venetians only. Yet here, in the Doge’s Palace, the conquest of Zadar is presented as a heroic and glorious event.

Other paintings celebrate the conquest of Constantinople and the coronation of a Venetian puppet, Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, as the new eastern Emperor. The rapaciousness of the crusaders as they smashed, looted and murdered their way through the city in 1204 made this one of the most notorious events in European history. Its legacy is still felt in the bitterness of many Orthodox Christians towards the West. The Venetian army fully participated in the capture of the town, and they shared in its plunder. Among numerous artistic works carted off back to Venice were the four great bronze horses (actually almost pure copper), which dated from antiquity and had stood in the hippodrome for centuries, which were placed above the entrance to St. Mark’s Basilica (they were replaced by replicas in the 1980s). Crusaders, who had taken an oath on the cross, desecrated the great Basilica of Hagia Sophia, raped nuns, and smashed holy icons and relics in a wanton frenzy of destruction.


The original bronze horses that once stood above the entrance to St. Mark's

The destruction wrought by the Crusaders in Constantinople had longer term consequences than the devastation of the great city. Byzantium was left withered and territorially truncated, an enfeeblement that left it unable to withstand the later Ottoman onslaught. But from the battering of Constantinople it was Venice that emerged as the greatest immediate winner. With the help of the Crusaders, Venice recaptured Zadar; humbled Byzantium; acquired key strategic territories in the eastern Mediterranean; excluded rivals Genoa and Pisa from trade in the reduced Byzantine Empire; and deflected the Crusaders from their initial goal of attacking Egypt, with which Venice was negotiating a trade deal. As depicted in the painting in the Great Council chamber, for Venice it was a triumph. And yet as I looked at the paintings, I was most struck by how such events, regarded in the Eastern Orthodox world as infamous and shameful, were here celebrated as glorious.

Visiting the island Hvar in November, there was little to see. Out of the tourist season, the little town of Hvar seemed rather empty, and the important sites were closed. Even the coming parliamentary election did not elicit much excitement. I observed a rally of the ruling HDZ party, attended by a crowd of mainly elderly supporters, whose mechanical applause for the dull speeches of party figures appeared no more than dutiful. Hvar is however a very charming little place. I first visited in 2000, for a wedding. The name derives from the Greek colony of Pharos, on the other side of the island. In the middle ages, the capital of the island was moved to the present site of Hvar town, the old capital being renamed Stari Grad, literally ‘the Old Town’.


Hvar

When the English architect T.G. Jackson and his wife visited Stari Grad in the 19th Century, they found little of interest. The locals tried to dissuade them from making the journey across the island to Hvar, which they described as ‘a poor decayed place’. Coincidentally, before I left Split for Hvar, my landlady there also told me that there was nothing much to see in Hvar, and that I would do better to stay in Stari Grad. For the Jacksons, getting from Stari Grad to Hvar involved a boat down the coast, followed by donkeys across the island – an arduous trip. For me, it was a short bus ride.

Jackson was delighted by Hvar town, although he noted its dilapidation, writing that ‘on all sides we saw roofless walls set with beautiful traceried windows through which the blue sky was seen, and handsome houses with rich balconies now deserted or turned into magazines or storehouses.’ Jackson added that Hvar’s heyday was in the past, as ships no longer put in there, and the end of the Turkish threat meant there was no need for its fortifications any more.

The town is in much better condition today, although walking through the narrow streets, one still comes across occasional abandoned buildings, greenery poking through ornate stone windows. Some of them are in the process of renovation. A common problem in Dalmatia is that the ownership of fine old houses is diffused among dozens of relatives, many of them in Zagreb or spread around the world. Getting agreement on what to do with such properties can be difficult, with the result that they are left to continue their slow decline. Hvar boasts the oldest theatre in Croatia. Built in 1612, it is above the arsenal, and was under renovation when I visited.

When I visited Korčula for the first time in 1990, it poured with rain. During my second visit, more than 20 years later, the rain again poured down. And indeed, the island does seem to be notably damper than the rest of Dalmatia. Travelling by bus in 1990 from Vela Luka at the western end of the island to the town of Korčula at the eastern end, I was struck by the lush green of the place, such a contrast with the arid, rocky dryness of other Dalmatian islands. The 19th British traveller A.A. Paton wrote of the ‘luxuriant and variegated shrubbery’ on Korčula, which he described as looking like ‘one great conservatory.’

In its Venetian heyday, the town of Korčula was a prosperous place, as attested to by its fine buildings. Its glory was considerably faded when Paton and Jackson visited. Paton described the Arneri Palace, across the square from the cathedral, as ‘sadly dilapidated’. Both he and Jackson were much taken by the enormous door knocker of the palace, in the form of Hercules flanked by two lions. Jackson sketched it. Sgr. Arneri described the pleasure he derived from giving the knocker a knock, which made the risk of the knocker being stolen worthwhile. A Hapsburg prince had offered its weight in gold in exchange for the knocker. Now, the knocker is kept at the museum of Korčula, in the next-door Gabrieli Palace. It is an impressive piece. I gave it a knock myself, and understood Sgr. Arneri’s delight at its rich, deep tone.


The Arneri door knocker, Korčula

Jackson also remarked on a ruined house with a ‘splendid window with carvings of birds and serpents’. The house’s balconies had been sold to an American, for his house in New York, and the impoverished owner was being tempted by offers for the window as well. I was told at the museum that the window had been kept in Korčula, but had been removed to the cathedral museum. I asked a priest at the cathedral office if I could see the window, but was peremptorily dismissed. A Korčula woman told me that Jackson had played an important role in saving the town’s heritage, setting up a fund for the purpose, and that his contribution was still appreciated. She contrasted Jackson’s efforts on behalf of Korčula with the conduct of the former Venetian rulers, who she said had ruled only for Venice, and not for Korčula.

I had heard such bitterness towards the Venetians in Dalmatia on previous occasions. Typically, they are reproached for having stripped Dalmatia of its resources, especially timber, while showing scant concern for the economic or social well-being of the inhabitants. Of course, Venetian rule did see a cultural flowering in towns up and down the coast, as the numerous fine buildings attest. And those buildings also give evidence to the prosperity that Venice’s trading empire brought to the coastal towns. But foreign travellers confirmed the neglect and backwardness of the Dalmatian interior. Paton considered that, among the various foreign rulers of Dalmatia, the Austrians had done most for the populace, building infrastructure and introducing universal education. The Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson, remarking on the primitive state of the Dalmatian hinterland in the 1840s, also noted that the Austrians had made improvements after the neglect by the Venetians.

Korčula’s particular claim to fame, disputed by many, is its assertion that Marco Polo was a native of the island. Indeed, the house where he is supposed to have resided, round the corner from the cathedral, is one of the main attractions. During my visit, it was in the process of being renovated. Wherever he originated, it is certain that Marco Polo took part in the Battle of Korčula between the Venetians and Genoese in 1298, as a galley commander, and that he was wounded, captured and imprisoned by the victorious Genoese.

In the museum of Korčula is a collection of photographs and documents concerning the Partisan struggle against the Italian and German occupiers on the island. Along with most of the rest of Dalmatia following the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Korčula was annexed by Italy. Partisan groups were formed, as a result of whose activities six hostages were shot by the Italians in August 1942. Following the capitulation of Italy in September 1943, the Partisans briefly took control of the island, before the Germans took over in December.


Fitzroy MacLean (centre, wearing beret), Korčula, 1943

On 4 November 1943, the first Conference of the People’s Liberation Council for the District of Korčula took place in Korčula town. Among the participants emerging from the conference in a photograph displayed at the museum is Fitzroy MacLean, Churchill’s envoy to Tito. MacLean had an illustrious career as a diplomat (he was in Moscow during Stalin’s purges, and travelled widely throughout the country, later writing about his experiences); soldier (he was an early member of the SAS); and politician (as a Conservative MP). But it was for his role in World War II Yugoslavia that he was most remembered, and with which he is most associated. I met him, a very old man by then, at the beginning of the 1990s, as Yugoslavia was on the point of collapse.

In 1943, MacLean was instrumental in a change in British policy towards Yugoslavia, away from supporting both the Royalist Chetniks of Draža Mihailović and the Communist-led Partisans, instead fully backing the Partisans. His brief from Churchill was apparently to find out who was killing the most Germans in Yugoslavia, and how Britain could help them to kill more. Maclean’s relatively brief stay in Yugoslavia, during which he was a guest of Tito, and had no contact with Mihailović’s adherents, resulted in his so-called ‘blockbuster’ report, which confirmed the already widely held view among the British that their full support should go to Tito. His report was, and remains highly controversial, contributing as it did to a switch in policy that helped the Communist triumph in Yugoslavia.

Evelyn Waugh, another of the British agents with the Partisans, warned of the consequences of Communist victory, including repression of dissent, and in particular of religion. Waugh met Maclean, and did not warm to him, expressing distaste at his evident ambition. Indeed, MacLean elicited resentment among many of the British military officers concerned with Yugoslavia, especially because of his close relationship with Churchill. Not only Maclean, but also an earlier British envoy to Tito, Bill Deakin, were close to Churchill. Churchill took a keen interest in the activities of the two young men, who he perhaps saw living through similar adventures to those of his own youth. He seemed to have an almost romantic attitude to the Partisan struggle in Yugoslavia, viewing Tito as a kind of T.E. Lawrence in the Balkans. Tito remarked that Churchill wept the first time they met, on the island of Vis in 1944, saying that he was the first person he had met from ‘enslaved Europe.’

MacLean was fully aware of the import of his recommendation to support the Partisans, which was perhaps remarkable for a man of his conservative disposition. When he noted to Churchill that, as a consequence of supporting the Partisans, Yugoslavia would be Communist after the war, Churchill apparently responded by asking whether MacLean intended to live in Yugoslavia? Ironically, MacLean did own a house on Korčula after the war.

While the Roman and Venetian history of Dalmatia is well known, less is said about the, largely effaced, Ottoman heritage. The Ottoman Empire reached the Dalmatian coast at Neum (now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina), where a thin strip of land separated the Dubrovnik Republic to the south from Venetian territory to the north. At the Empire’s height, in the 16th and 17th centuries, its territory stretched up and down the Dalmatian hinterland, within sight of the sea in places. Just a few kilometres inland from Split is the fortress of Klis, for centuries a vital strategic point controlling the pass from the interior to the sea.


Klis

The Scottish architect Robert Adam, who visited Split in 1757, and was responsible for some very important drawings of Diocletian’s palace, described the fortifications at Klis, and wrote about their strategic value. His visit coincided with the start of the Seven Year’s War, and he was suspected of being a British spy. Travelling through Dalmatia almost a hundred years later, the renowned English Egyptologist J. Gardner Wilkinson also described the strategic importance of Klis.

Looking up at Klis from Solin, now an outer suburb of Split, it is easy to sea its significance. The fortress sits atop a hill standing in a gap between the mountains of the Dinaric range that blocks off the coast from the interior. In the days before highways and tunnels, control of Klis was the key to Split and the whole of Dalmatia. It had been held by Romans, Croats, Hungarians and Venetians, and in 1537 it fell to the Turks, in the long succession of wars that pitted Venice and its Dalmatian subjects against the Ottoman Empire.

Apart from a brief interlude in 1596, when a force from Split surprised the Turks and held the fortress for a few weeks, Klis was under Ottoman control for over a century, until a Venetian army recaptured it in 1648. And that was the end of the Turks. The mosque they had built inside the fortress was converted into a church, dedicated to St. Vitus. The call of the muezzin, which for over a century had echoed in the rocky hills of this now most Catholic country, would be heard no more. Yet a small trace of the Ottoman period remains in the name of the main square of the small town of Klis, below the fortress, ‘Megdan’, derived from the Turkish word ‘meydan’.


The church of St. Vitus, Klis

The Venetians enlarged the fortress, which they held until their empire was rubbed out by the French in 1797. The importance of the site continued even until the Second World War, when it was occupied by the Germans and bombed by the Allies.

Over centuries of habitation, the palace of Diocletian in Split was adapted to the needs of the residents, who built their houses among the columns and arches of the former emperor’s retirement home. It is all an extraordinary hotchpotch, with Roman arches appearing out of later buildings and passing through cafes. But underneath the palace, the basement was for centuries ignored, left much as it was, with little modification. During the Middle Ages it was gradually filled up with refuse and rubble. Only in the 1950s was the importance of what lay beneath the palace realised, and gradually the basement has been cleared away. Nowadays, the cavernous halls, with their huge archways, and the little rooms around them, are open to the public.

When I visited, the halls of the palace basement were occupied by various artistic installations, some of them involving TV screens and soundtracks. I was not moved. There was no overarching theme. I felt it was an inappropriate setting, that no thought had been given to how to fit the installations into that particular space, of how the space and the installations could enhance each other. Rather, it seemed the installations had just been plonked there for no reason. They detracted from the experience of visiting the palace basement. This was in contrast with the wonderful experience of visiting the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul in 2003, the cavernous underground crypt built in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, whose installations and low music enhanced and were enhanced by the Cistern, adding to the whole experience.

Yet there was one installation that I did find striking. It was a short televised documentary concerning a popular communist-era war film based on the true story of a teenage partisan hero, Boško Buha. The actor who played the part of Buha, Ivan Kolundžić, now a middle-aged man, had, in the 1990s, joined the Croatian forces during the independence war. In the documentary, Kolundžić gave two interviews, one as himself, and the other in the spirit of the Yugoslav, partisan tradition of which the Boško Buha film was an inspirational part. The two interviews are juxtaposed, giving two diametrically opposite views on Yugoslavia, communism and the war for Croatia’s independence.


Ivan Kolundžić as Boško Buha

In the recollection of one Kolundžić, Yugoslavia was a country in which all were united, and could travel freely without borders. By building self-management socialism, the Yugoslav variant of communist ideology, they were creating a just society. This was the beautiful dream to which many Yugoslavs were once committed, and the ideal for which partisans like Boško Buha had given their lives. As the narrator of the film noted in her interview with Kolundžić, this was the vision she grew up with, watching films such as Boško Buha. It was the vision of the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of the Yugoslav peoples.

For the other Kolundžić, Croats had never believed in the Yugoslav ideology, which had been imposed on them. They had given the appearance of going along with it merely to avoid persecution. For that Kolundžić, joining the struggle to liberate Croatia in the 1990s had been the natural thing to do, as had been the emphasis in that struggle on religious, Catholic values, so alien to communism, but so bound up with Croatian nationalism.

Kolundžić appeared convincing in both roles. To the question at the end of documentary, which Kolundžić should we believe, he replied with a smile, “me”. Watching the documentary with me were two young women, too young to have any memories of their own of Yugoslavia. Too young certainly to have been exposed to the idea that there might have been something noble in the effort to build a state based on multi-ethnic harmony, contrary to the usual 20th century practice in eastern Europe of population exchanges, expulsion and forced assimilation, all in the name of the nation state. They smiled, a faint giggle, as they passed on to the next exhibit. Yugo-nostalgia in today’s Croatia is perhaps little more than an eccentricity of a few old fogies from a past era.

But there is something uncomfortable and challenging about the Kolundžić documentary for those who accept uncritically the now dominant national ideology that Yugoslavia was always doomed, that the multi-ethnic state was a sham, and that Croats never believed in it. Undoubtedly some always loathed Yugoslavia, and were never reconciled to it. Unquestionably too, by the end of the 1980s disenchantment with the common state, with its flawed constitutional set-up, its economic failure and all its disappointed promises had undermined its legitimacy in the minds of a great many Croats, and others. But Kolundžić, speaking as Boško Buha, reminded Croats that, at some level, the Yugoslav idea had once had a positive message, at least for some.

Travelling through Dalmatia, one is repeatedly confronted with signs of the still powerful draw of Croatian nationalism, and the overwhelming influence on the national psyche of the war of the 1990s. The posters of the war hero Ante Gotovina, convicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague, the graffiti about the tragedy of Vukovar, and the pre-election posters of the ruling HDZ, all reflect the pervasiveness of Croatian national feeling. In such an environment the notion that Yugoslavia ever had any place in Croatian hearts gets short shrift in most quarters. But, as the documentary in the Split underground gently reminded, Croats were once part of Yugoslavia, they participated in it, helped build it, and at least at some level, some of them even believed in it.

I first visited Trogir in 1990. My recollection of this beautiful old town, as one of the most charming in Dalmatia, was confirmed by this return visit. Since 1997 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage site, although I could not help wondering at the placing of the word ‘UNESCO’ in neon lights above the entrances to the old town. Perhaps someone had misunderstood the point of that honour. Still, wandering the narrow streets and alleys of Trogir is as great a pleasure as in any town in Dalmatia.


The portal of the Church of St. Lawrence, Trogir

The jewel of the town is the church of St. Lawrence, on the main square in the old town, and especially its intricately carved portal by the 13th century master Radovan. I was especially struck by the carved figures holding up the portal on their backs, some of whom clearly appear to be in Muslim attire, complete with turbans. Trogir had been sacked by Saracens in the 12th century, and it seemed interesting that Radovan should have wished to represent such figures in his creation.


Kairos, Trogir

Trogir was founded as a Greek colony in the 3rd century BC. Early in the 20th century a relief of Kairos, the Greek god of the propitious moment, from the 3rd century BC, was discovered in the abandoned house of a local family. It depicts the god as a young man whose forelock must be grasped in order to catch the fleeting moment, or else it will fly away, never to be caught again. The poet Posidippos described how Kairos, in answer to a question about why the artist had created him, replied that he was a moral, to remind people. The relief and the story attached to it struck a chord with me, as it might with anyone who has ever missed an opportunity, and as a reminder to grasp opportunities that come our way.

There is another nice story attached to the Trogir Kairos. Before its significance was realised, the stone had apparently for some time been fitted into a barrel and used for pressing down salted fish. Nowadays it is housed in the Benedictine convent of St. Nicholas in Trogir. I had to see it. Finding that the convent museum was closed, it being out of the tourist season, I went to the evening Mass and afterwards asked one of the sisters if I could see the Kairos. She kindly opened the museum for me the following morning.

In setting out on a journey through Dalmatia, revisiting many places I had been to before, as well as some I had not, I was inspired by a book by the excellent Sonia Wild Bićanić on past British travellers in the region (British Travellers in Dalmatia, 1757-1935, Faktura, Zaprešić, 2006). I envisaged myself following in the footsteps of such travellers as Robert Adam, A.A. Paton, J. Gardner Wilkinson and T.G. Jackson in the 18th and 19th centuries. The experience today, in the age of mass tourism, aeroplanes, buses and tourist offices is vastly different to what those earlier adventurers found. In the 1880s Jackson could write of Dalmatia as “a strange, mysterious and almost unknown shore.” Nowadays you can fly there with Easyjet.

Yet in Šibenik I could look at the same old streets as Jackson, still dominated by the marvellous cathedral of St. James, which so inspired him. Jackson approached the city by sea, passing through the narrow channel into the elongated bay that leads to the city and the mouth of the Krka river. He described it as “an imposing mass of picturesque old houses piled up the mountainside, with the great white-domed cathedral in the middle.” I arrived overland, but the impression is much the same.


The Cathedral of St. James, Šibenik

The architecture of the cathedral is noteworthy, built entirely by blocks of stone, pre-carved before being lifted into place. Great interlocking stone slabs make up the roof on one side and the ceiling on the other. It was built in several stages in the 15th century, but the principal architect was Juraj Dalmatinac, who was born in nearby Zadar. In 2000, it was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage site. Jackson, a leading Oxford architect, was astounded, describing the cathedral as one of the wonders of Christendom, its architecture ‘original to the point of daring’, adding that ‘it would be difficult to match it in singularity of construction.’ The cathedral’s ornate baptistery, to one side of the main alter, is particularly fine. A notable and unusual feature is the depiction of God the Father on the ceiling above the baptismal font, as an old man with flowing long hair.

Also appealing are little touches of humour in the cathedral’s construction. Either side of the side entrance, giving on to the central town square, are touching statues of Adam and Eve, naked and sheepishly holding hands over their private parts, their faces pictures of embarrassment. Around the outside of the apse are sculptured portraits said to be of people known to Juraj Dalmatinac, some of them plainly caricatures.

Out of the tourist season, Šibenik was quiet, nearly deserted on the Saturday evening when I arrived. It came to life on Sunday, as people gathered on the square outside the cathedral, drinking coffee in the sunshine, spilling out of the cathedral following the morning Mass. Among the devotees attending the Mass was a group of men and women from Bosnia decked out in traditional dress, who performed traditional dances for the onlookers, the older men intoning haunting, wailing, almost howling chants.

Sunday lunch was at a restaurant overlooking the cathedral entrance, Pelegrini. A marvellous place, highly unusual in my experience of Dalmatian restaurants, its cooking displayed a sophistication, ambition and adventurousness I had not previously associated with the region. Seafood in Dalmatia can be very nice, so long as you are happy with a narrow repertoire of grilled fish, crustaceans, seafood pasta dishes and risottos. Nice, but safe and unexciting. And unfortunately not always very nice, with a surfeit of restaurants offering poor quality, over-cooked fare aimed principally at ripping off easily pleased tourists. But Pelegrini is so far above all that. I started with an aubergine soufflé, perfectly executed, light and delicious. I followed it with a mushroom risotto with truffles – yum. And their home-baked bread was exceptional.

Šibenik is a charming and rewarding town to walk around and explore, with beautiful views around almost every corner in its narrow streets and alleys, and intimate little squares. So many of the buildings feature wonderfully ornate stone doorways and windows, attesting to the wealth once enjoyed by the town’s notable residents. Little churches abound, most of them closed at this time of year. Among them is a small Orthodox Church, the centre of the Serbian Orthodox diocese. Serbs have clung on in Šibenik, despite ongoing resentment from the war in the 1990s, when Serb rebel forces controlled territory inland from the city.


The Krka waterfalls

Jackson travelled by boat up the River Krka, marvelling at the waterfalls. With none of the tourist boats operating in November, I travelled by bus, but the falls are still splendid, a series of cascades interspersed with blue-green pools, framed by the greens, reds, browns and yellows of autumnul trees. Nowadays there are wooden walkways enabling the visitor to stroll around the network of pools and falls. There is a cluster of stone buildings, given over to tourism today, although closed when I visited. In their day they housed mills, powered by the water flows. Gardner Wilkinson also travelled up the Krka, continuing to the Franciscan monastery of Visovac, and then on to the Orthodox monastery of Michael the Archangel.