Howdy, and happy Turkey Day from...well...not Turkey, but Croatia. Used to call this place Dalmatia, and it was located in Yugoslavia, but of course that's all wrong now. On the way to Turkey we had 'em singing "Istanbul, not Constantinople" and were able to explain rationally why the name changed. It's harder to get "Croatia, Not Yugoslavia" to scan, or to register, or to make much good sense in any other way. People tried. Our Croatian "interport lecturer" was a nice professor of tourism (!) who did her level best to help us take this place seriously. Daily she regaled us with the glories of Croatian history and civilization, and nightly rehearsed the list of Serb atrocities commited upon it. Unfortunately for her, our political science prof is an expert on the region, lectured with her in the Core class, and daily presented a strikingly different view. He blasted all the post-Tito political leaders, especially Serbia's Milosevic and Croatia's Tudjman, as "evil clowns" who trumped up Balkan ethnic differences to destroyYugoslavia, creating artificial, unsustainable and deeply corrupt mini-states such as (...er...well...) Croatia. And while no one doubts the Serb atrocities, there are plenty of atrocities for all to live down in Bosnia. Oh my! Sooooooo with a brave face she'd stand up and rally us with "You deserve a vacation! You'll have one in Croatia!" [Cheers of approval] "We have beaches and deserted islands and little cafes perfect for romantic intrigue!" [Polite applause] She did her best, was very brave, and had all the ship's sympathy. But it was a hard sell.

Dubrovnik is gorgeous, just as gorgeous as any landscape or old city on earth. I remember my father once ranking it with Venice for sheer beauty--from him, the ultimate compliment. But here at the end of the latest Balkan wars, it is down and out. Here at the seeming end of the Tudjman dictatorship (the great man lies in a coma), it is an outcast from Europe. And here at the end of November, at the end of a two-mile pier an hour's walk from town, is our ship and not a whole lot else. "Deserted beaches and islands" seems to be an understatement. "Closed for the winter, maybe forever" is more like it. We've had hints: Last summer I could only find two guidebooks to Croatia in English. One, a Croatian production, was a knock-off of the Eyewitness Guide format, full of obscure local heroes and printed with pale pictures on flimsy paper. The other, a Lonely Planet, says "Go now before the crowds return!" on the cover. Our Croatian tourism professor let drop a telling comment: "Go out to the islands," she said. "They'll be so happy to see you! The old people out there don't see many young people any more." Ouch.

So there isn't a whole lot happening here, nor a whole lot of central heat. But to be fair, Croatia was a replacement stop for Israel in the original itinerary, and there wasn't a lot of time, I suspect, to develop much of a program here. As always in difficult countries, the screw-ups themselves are fascinating. Folks who took the organized tour to Split have found themselves parked in a hotel dozens of miles away from Split, facing a $40 taxi ride to get into the city. Why weren't they housed in Split? It turns out that for years Split's large hotels have been pressed into wartime service, the good ones for UN and NATO observers, the humbler as refugee housing. Aha. (Me, I took the local bus here, found a great pension built right in the Diocletian palace walls, and am having a fine time, even heat.) Our ever-more-resourceful students are finding things to do, of course. Someone organized a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in what is now Bosnian territory, scoring a small but significant victory over Balkan hermetic isolation. Others are going off to a nearby village to eat roasted sausage and watch peasants dance. Sure, why not?

It's only when you peek across the border into the EC that this charming Jan Morris anachronism strikes you as incredible, depressing, and criminal. Pretty as Dubrovnik and Split are, I can't shake the sense of terrible failure here. "Evil clowns" indeed. A couple of days ago I showed my Silk Road class a picture of an old guidebook. The cover said "Yugoslavia" and the picture showed a beach with sailboats in a pretty cove. Remember those days? When Yugoslavia was Europe's favorite cheap beach vacation, and the Communist world's one success story? It was I, alas, who stood up in Core and expressed what I gather was the general sentiment of us older folks on the ship, in a question to the poor beleaguered Interport: "I'm still nostalgic for Tito's Yugoslavia,"I admitted. "I still admire the attempt to suppress ethnic differences and form a prosperous Southern Slav federation. Isn't there any grass-roots sentiment in the various republics for restoring that federation?" Her reply was eloquent enough: a rapid-fire catalogue of who-did-what-to-whom and why no one ever wants to forget!! OK, sorry I even asked.

Dubrovnik has been largely repaired after its terrible1991-92 Serb shelling. But while UNESCO repairs roofs to conceal the damage, the posters keep the war alive--a bright and shining hatred. Half the signage in the city points out locations of Serb guns on the heights, the numbers of houses damaged and destroyed, the sites of direct hits, etc. etc. etc. The Serbian Orthodox church is shuttered and unmarked. No sign of the "icon museum" noted in the guidebooks. Even Saigon wasn't like this. On the bus yesterday from Dubrovnik to Split, we actually spent ten minutes in Bosnia, since a bit of that unfortunate place comes down to touch the sea at a dreary little town called Neum. It has twenty houses with ten sleazy discount shops, and one road stretching back towards the stony wastes of the Bosnian mountains. A tiny channel leads out to the Adriatic between looming Croatian headlands. I should be happy for Bosnia--judging from the map, Kosovo doesn't have even this much chance.

As a Byzantinist, I should find this all fascinating on my first visit to the region. But y'know, there are reasons I've drifted away from Byzantine studies into Islamic and even East Asian studies. When I was a student, "Byzantium" seemed a distant, romantic thing--Mediterranean port cities filled with silks and spices and great domed buildings. As I got older I learned that "Byzantium" is also a point of departure for contemporary tribalism, and found how easy it was to get caught up in its ethnic aftermath even today ("Macedonia has been Greek for 3,000 years!"). The heavy shadow of history, the unburied dead, the carefully cultivated grudges, the long lists of who-did-what-to-whom committed to folk memory--it's depressing, and being in the Balkans brings it all back to mind. Remember my reaction to the film "After the Rain"? I was ready to set up a statue of Tito in the garden.

So I'm glad to see Dubrovnik, glad to see Split, having studied both for so many years, but I've had my fill for the time being of Balkan nationalism and other people's atrocities. I'm really looking forward to Rome, another of my homes-away-from-home, capital of a fractious federation that has managed so far to stay together, even to thrive.

Can you say "Catch ya in Civitavecchia"?----------------------------------enrico dandolo.