Slavonia Travel Guide

A country's breadbasket is, of course, often flat, and so it is also a place visitors tend to pass through rather than go to (or never pass through in the first place). Regrettably, it can also be a place where wars rage most intensely. All this is true of Slavonia, the sweeping agricultural plain of eastern Croatia, which shares a border not only with Hungary to the north but also with Serbia to the east and Bosnia and Herzegovina to the south. Long a vital transport route—not least, between Zagreb and Belgrade—Slavonia today is still recovering from the aftermath of the Yugoslav war of the early 1990s. Most famously, the baroque town of Vukovar, whose siege and utter destruction in 1991 was viewed on televisions around the world, made it clear that the former Yugoslavia was indeed at war, and earned Croatia international sympathy. Despite some remaining hurdles and the unalterable fact that the coast is far away (along with most tourists), much of Slavonia today looks and feels almost as rejuvenated as the rest of Croatia. The region's sleepy towns and rural surroundings—from cornfields to forest-covered hills—have a distinctive low-key charm that can only be called Slavonian.