Croatia Diaries: In King's Landing
Seeing the sights of Dubrovnik, fictional and otherwise
It’s when I’m told you have to queue to get into the old town during high season that I realise Dubrovnik isn’t like other cities. It’s a grey, cold spring morning when the tour guide tells me this, early April. Just out of season, which is important if you want to enjoy yourself here.
In other cities, even famously over-visited, heaving cities like Barcelona or Venice, the old town, or gothic quarter, or whatever it’s called in that neck of the woods, is just another part of the city you can walk into without thinking. Not in Dubrovnik, apparently.
But then the old town of Dubrovnik is Dubrovnik, at least if you’re a tourist. The city may exist outside of its walled centre, but it’s the domain of locals or those determined to stay in the big chain hotels. It’s into the very centre that people want to go.
Inside the walls the city looks its clean, polished best. The main street, Stradun, is so polished its gleaming white tiles are slippery underfoot. To keep up the old-timey feel the city hasn’t allowed shops to have big signs out front; each has its name on a small lamp hanging above the door.
Stradun takes you from the main gate right to the port, and at the port end you’ll find St. Blaise’s Church and the Sponza Palace. It’s all bright white and immaculate, the streets incredibly clean. It’s so perfect that it’s hard to believe that anyone actually lives here.
But then, they don’t. Or at least a lot fewer people live in the centre of Dubrovnik than a couple of decades ago. The same tour guide, a local named Marco, tells the group of his memory of kids playing football in the old streets. He gestures to the restaurants whose outdoor tables sprawl across the roads and alleys and says, “there’s not as much room now.”
The population of people who actually live in the old town is steadily decreasing. Those lucky - and lucky is a cruise ship-sized understatement here - enough to own an apartment or building here are doing the smart thing and moving out. They rent it out, 12 months of the year. Marco says why not? Sitting on the beach and watching the money roll in sounds good to him.
It wasn’t always like this. Look closely at the polished tiles and you see pock marks and scratches. They’re a legacy of the long years of war in the 1990’s, specifically the siege of the city by the Yugoslav People’s Army in 1991.
The city was bombed and shelled, and when you know this it’s hard not to look at the place from a different angle. Stradun has scars on its walls and its polished tile floor.
In the Sponza Palace there is an exhibition of photographs from the war. Stradun is boarded up, parts of the city are damaged by bombs and fire. Locals, people who actually lived in the old town in those days, receive food parcels from the back of a truck.
Unsurprisingly, bombing a city as indisputably beautiful as Dubrovnik didn’t exactly do wonders for the reputations of Serbia and Montenegro. Bombing cities doesn’t tend to be popular, but bombing cities that happen to be UNESCO World Heritage Sites? Well, that’s beyond the pale.
But the real, old war doesn’t come up in Dubrovnik, unless you ask about it. The city has swapped real conflict for the pretend, the make-believe. Tourism was already on the rise in the early 2000’s, but then Game of Thrones happened.
There are sights all around the city related to the HBO behemoth that, years after its disappointing very, very damp squib of an ending, still holds sway here. Around every corner, on every polished street, there is a shop selling Game of Thrones merchandise.
Do you drink, and know things? They’ve got a t-shirt for that. Would you like to test the skills of airport security? You can buy daggers and swords, and all sorts of other assorted tat.
You can take Game of Thrones themed tours, though you don’t need to. The show is so engrained into modern-day Dubrovnik’s fabric that it comes up on the regular tours too.
We come to the stairs where Cersei Lannister did her walk of shame. It’s filled at almost all times of day with people doing their own walk, though they’re suspiciously free of smudged make-up and bleary eyes.
Marco tells us that for a few years, an enterprising local stood at the bottom of the steps and rented bells to tourists, so they could get the full experience. The city apparently balked at this, not because of any sense of taste, but because he wasn’t so good at filling out his tax returns.
Money is king in Dubrovnik now, not Robert or Joffrey or (spoiler) even Bran. It’s why it costs 35 euro to walk the city walls, 20 euro to get a half-decent burger anywhere in the city except Barba. And why the locals are moving out in droves to turn their homes into Airbnb’s.
But, as I walk down the shame steps towards Stradun, I think that even with so much money, how do they keep these tiles so shiny?
Some housekeeping.
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A fantastic writing workshop I attended
Last summer I attended Peter Carty’s travel writing workshop. I completely recommend it. I attended the in person session in Arsenal, but Peter runs them online too. He’s an experienced travel journalist who has been teaching people how to get into the business for 24 years. The workshop is value for money in itself, but what’s also incredible is Peter offers up his support ongoing after the workshop, and keeps in touch with his participants. Check out his website for details.
As I once said in a podcast interview, poor Dubrovnik has been dubrovnuked.
Saw it once years ago, have very little interest in returning...
Excellent read. You do are great job of bringing up the history of a place and making it interesting. Cheers.