My wife and I were on the street of Split, Croatia, or, to put it another way, we were inside of Diocletian's palace at Spalatum. The emperor settled there after he "retired" from ruling the Roman Empire, handing over power to a tetrarchy in 305 A.C.E. The famous moment in Split occurs in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. when Diocletian was begged to return to power. To this, he said:
“If you could see at Salonae the cabbages raised by our
hands, you surely would never judge that a temptation.”
In the palace, on the streets of the new city of Split, most of what I remember was the reverberating, echoing sounds of The Smiths' Bigmouth Strikes Again played loudly in the night. This wasn't the first and certainly wouldn't be last time in Croatia when a history lesson, or a quiet moment of absorption in mist of time, was taken over by pop music. The prevalence of booming songs, especially it seemed from the late 1980s and 1990s, was indeed everywhere.
I saw cabbages, very nice cabbages growing in one of the squares, and certainly, I would love to write about them, have them echo the course of a thousand years, but it is hearing The Smiths that I remember more vividly.
On the boardwalk of Split, that port of many subsequent empires, Here I go Again by Poison. On the tip of Zadar, Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo's fateful stop on the way to sack Constantinople in April 1204, The Show Must Go On by Queen. Around the Istrian peninsula to see the amphitheater at Pula, Living on a Prayer, and at a lovely dinner at Rovinj, after touring World War II pillboxes, a truly transcendent chorus of Hello by Lionel Richie in the cold off season air of November.
And, memorably, the song that played that morning at Plitviče Lakes National Park.
Thousands of beech trees sloped down into multiple valleys, a tapestry of fall leaves, the living embodiment of the color rush and updraft of a Gustav Klimt's landscape. In these valleys, hewed in the karst, a series of stepped lakes feed into each other with delightful, plunging waterfalls. You walk these valleys on wooden footpaths out of some Elven dream.
It was here, at Plitviče, that the first shot was fired in the Croatian War of Independence, one of many conflicts of the horrible Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. On March 31, 1991, now called Plitviče Bloody Easter, Croatian police retook the park, which had been occupied by a Crotian Serb alliance called SAO Krajina. The two deaths that day (one on each side) would be the first in a series of wars that would last for half a decade, tear Yugosalvia apart, and completely redraw the map of the Balkans.
I knew about what would be called the Plitviče Lakes National Park Incident, but of course there is no evidence of it in the park. Actually, I found it was quite impossible to think about the arc of conflict in that magical place. Instead, my wife and I spent the morning casually strolling the paths, wiping waterfall mist off our sunglasses, and winding though the lakes, quiet and looking at fish swimming in the water.
Open and wondrous, nature found easy entrance into the me that day. It was incredible, delightful, as many pleasant adjectives that I can throw at it. However, on our way back to the rental car, at the park entrance, massive and glorious, I Want to Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston broke the spell. And I have come to think of that song at that moment the arrival of a repressed ghost that was strange, counter-intuitive, and hard to reckon with at first.
Open and wondrous, nature found easy entrance into the me that day. It was incredible, delightful, as many pleasant adjectives that I can throw at it. However, on our way back to the rental car, at the park entrance, massive and glorious, I Want to Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston broke the spell. And I have come to think of that song at that moment the arrival of a repressed ghost that was strange, counter-intuitive, and hard to reckon with at first.
This off kilter logic would gain force. We let Google take us to Opatija, where we were going to stay for the night, and as it turned out, we were taken onto a single track dirt road through the Croatian interior. What was highways and tourist infrastructure was now a series of small farms. I am not sure why I was so surprised -- for I had readied myself to think about shots fired at Plitviče -- but many of these houses were mere ruins, shot up and mortared. There was a cemetery where the headstones were full of small bullet craters.
I had never been in a place where war was still relatively fresh. We were there in 2016, over twenty-years since the war, and it was worn on the landscape as though the troops had just walked through.
Later, one day at work, I had to find the exact battle when those headstones must have been shot up. I poured over websites which mapped out every day of the Yugoslav wars, mapped every day and every troop movement. It was a warren of minor and major skirmishes, taking over much of the landscape of the country.
I know that wars are always a matter of landscape, but that day, I finally felt it, the hills and rivers and creeks that became temporary goal-posts, boundaries, fortified positions. Country roads never before thought of as anything but a way to a market, or a shortcut between main roads, become landmarks of death. The road I was on from Plitviče to Opatija was such a landmark, but it was all so large, confusing, that I could not with certainty find the name of this forgotten battle.
I have no idea if I am right, but I started to consider that the pop music -- mostly falling between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s -- might be constitute an alternate reality in Croatia, a casual ordinary that was not allowed to happen and therefore continually asserts itself from somewhere out in the silence.
Totalitarianism, conflict, and prolonged suffering can often give a culture the moniker of a "People Interrupted." It suggests that a culture's destined life, its proper life, is one where these horrible things do not exist.
Wars interrupt and extinguish what a human is supposed to be. And this is an optimistic thought. There are those who think the opposite, who think war and conflict is our destiny.
I am not one of them. How I Want to Dance With Somebody played that morning in Plitviče seemed both a joyful noise of reclamation and the return of a traumatic past. Perhaps how Bigmouth Strikes Again was played in Diocletian's palace, singing out against the darkness of history, resisting the churn of its tournament of pain and power, had something in common with cabbages after all.