After a lengthy flight from IAD via VIE on Austrian Air in premium economy, we arrived in Zagreb under gray, drizzly skies. Like much of Europe, customs and immigration were a mere formality and we quickly made our way to our pre arranged driver. It was a short drive to our apt, Markiz, where we were greeted by the owner. We loved our spacious modern, 1 bedroom apt . located in an old building in the historic center of Zagreb. We wandered around the city in our usual first day jet lagged fog and were astounded by the decorative aspects of the fin de sicle architecture.

Over the next 48 hours we enjoyed a Free Spirit 90 minute walking tour that gave us an overview of the city and its history. We had a delicious lunch at Heritage Croatian. Food. Owners of Hertiage Croatian Food recommended Lanterna for dinner where we ate. The meal was okay but wasn’t nearly as good as our lunch.
We visited 2 excellent and unusual museums, Image of War Photography Museum and the Museum of Broken Relationships. Hoping to add some joive de vie to our day we went out to celebrate International Workers Day. Turned out it was just like Labor Day in the USA...nice park, bands playing, vendors selling food & drink, families picnicking and having fun.

That evening we had a virgin experience, a meal through Eatwith. We walked about 20 minutes up into the hills where we met Doris and her friend Nikki. Doris prepared an excellent meal and we had lengthy conversations about travel, politics and Croatia. All in all a very enjoyable evening.

We easily could have spent at least 1 more day exploring this intriguing city that many seem to skip. We recommend it.

The Photography Museum just opened in October. We’re museum buffs but skipped the Naive Art one in Zagreb because we will be in the town that is the center of Naive art tomorrow, Hlebine. I think different towns appeal to different people and I agree it’s depends upon when you see them.

Sounds interesting. Keen on on reading more :)

@ karenwoo.....Best wishes for your surgery.

Karen- yes, I remember you. Sorry you had to postpone your trip, but glad you will be able to go in the fall. Best of luck with your surgery.
The apt owner recommended Free Spirit Tour. I think our guide, Kristina was excellent. Despite a rather large group, she kept the tour together and moving along. She was a wealth of info. They meet in the square at 11 every morning. It is free. They give a handout and that was how we found out about Heritage Croatian Food. The food was excellent and the owners share the origin and other info about the food they serve. They were kind enough to forward us a list of places in the Istirian peninsula.

Adelaidean- thanks for following along. It may be slow going as we are trying to do this as we travel.

I’m coming along for the ride too. Did Zagreb have the look of Vienna?

hi TP- yes, we were told it was designed like Vienna. Where we are now, Osijek, reminds us a bit of Hungary.

Macedonia sounds intriguing...maybe one day.

INLAND CROATIA
Thursday we picked up our rental car and breezed out of Zagreb. We were headed to Osijek, the 4th largest city in Croatia located near the border with Serbia. It was an easy, leisurely drive through mostly flat countryside. We were a little surprised at the prosperity of the small towns. Many seemed to have newer construction perhaps rebuilt in the aftermath of the war. Bakery followed bakery and we succumbed on one occasion to have a pizza like concoction for lunch. We sat on a bench and ate by a memorial to the small towns fallen in the 1990’s war. It was sad to see boys who were killed as young as 20.

We got back on the road and in no time arrived in Osijek. We picked this area, Slavonia, to visit because some guidebooks described it as “deepest Croatia, what you might have found 60 years ago.”

After checking in we went for a walk around old town. The damage from the war was immediately evident. Although many buildings had been restored, others were pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes. In a symbolic touch, the excellent town art museum, which had taken a direct impact on one of its cirnets, had painted the damaged portion of the interior a blood red, leading us to describe it as the wounded museum.

As evening was drawing near we walked into the center of town. The town, like Zagreb, was filled with statues of people whose banes we could not pronounce. Bars and cafes crowded the river Drava edge. This seemed to be a lively town.

The next day gave us the opportunity to explore the Tvrda (Citadel) and the art nouveau architecture of the late nineteenth century. The former is a giant complex of buildings with cobblestone streets dating back to the 17th century.
Later, for a mere 15 kuna apiece (~$2 pp), we toured the Museum of Fine Arts, aka the wounded museum. The works comprise late 19th through 21st century Croatian masters and were overall of a high quality.

For us, however, the true charm lay in the fabulous art nouveau section of the old town with its wide tree lined streets. Many of the buildings were spectacular examples of art nouveau architecture. We marveled at the intricate details of the railings, the windows, doors and decorative building features. The nearby Urania Theatre was a art nouveau treasure.

That night we watched the sunset over the river Drava as we walked to dinner at Kod Ruze in the Trvda. This was our first dining experience in a traditional Croatian restaurant, complete with a five piece roving string band serenading the locals many of whom had turned out in their finest track suits. The decor was a slice of Croatian history had Croatian history been preserved in your grandmother’s attic : antique photographs, stuffed animals, ancient irons, primitive paintings, antique Singer treadle sewing machines, all things old and imaginable scattered through a series of dining rooms. Our meal consisted of very large and good portions of traditional food. The local house white wine was excellent as was the home baked apple pie we had for dessert. We recommend a visit as much for the decor as for the food.

The next day day we will be off to explore another area in the rarely visited hinterlands of which we are growing fond.

Osijek sounds great. Perhaps one of the last remaining parts of Europe that is relatively untouched by tourism.

Oh, fantastic! I just found your report! This is so exciting - I love following your travels, and hav definitely followed in your footsteps in other places. While we don’t have an immediate plans to travel to this region, it’s one we hope to see in the not too distant future.

Sign me on as another happy follower!

Tp- definitely an undiscovered part of Croatia and well worth a visit.

progol, welcome aboard. Glad you find our TRs enjoyable. I love yours also.

I’m all in! Love following you two. Have a great trip!

Ann- bet it was a very different place back then. Hope our photos bring back some nice memories.

Karen, thank you! Mostly the typing is on my iPad, but occasionally I use my iPhone. Thus you can understand the typos. Gottravel and I write together and we’ll do it while driving or hanging out. We travel pretty slowly these days.

Hi StCirq! Glad to have you following along. We have seen little of Croatia so far in our week, but I definitely think you would enjoy inland Croatia and Zagreb. There was much that sounded interesting that we didn’t see. It’s so hard to pick where to go and even though in theory we could travel as long as needed, we never seem to have enough time to see it all. Hi to your dh. I was thinking about you guys as I was reading about the caves here and remembering the great visit to Font-de-Gaume.

Glover-glad to have you along. I know what you mean about “forgetting about Croatia, same with me.
I wanted to try and have lunch before we left, but somehow the days slip away.

GOING FOR THE BAROQUE

The next morning, Yestravel watched the sunrise over the river through the fog while I slept in. Then we had our first Croatian hotel breakfast...fruit, breads, pastries, yogurt, cheese, eggs, cereal and exotic Balkan lunch meats. We hit the road by ten and were on our way to Varaždin, a legendarily baroque town near the Hungarian border.

We planned our route to take us to the village of Hlebine, the birthplace of Croatian naïve art. We stopped briefly at Gallery of Naïve Art in the center of town, and checked out the primitive, sometimes surreal, paintings it contained. We had a guided tour by a staff member, who explained the history and the changing style of the movement. The story of the genre founder Ivan Generalić was particularly fascinating. He painted on the far side of a sheet of glass, effectively painting and signing his name in a mirror image of the eventual work. We hadn’t paid an admission fee, and there was a heart-stopping moment at the end of our tour when she asked us for one; it turned out to be the princely sum of a little over three dollars for the two of us.

We reached our destination in early afternoon. It was a small but confusing town. Getting to our lodging was a little odd. It was like spiraling in in a series of concentric circles on one way streets until we arrived at our hotel near the center of town. Despite it being the first week of May, the weather was miserable, cold and rainy. We doubled down on misery by driving to the Atlas Obscura-recommended town cemetery for a tour of the elaborate statuary framed by accompanying solemn topiary. We marveled at the sheer volume of colored plastic candle containers on old tombs but were quickly driven back to our car by the inclement weather. The sheer nastiness of the weather resulted in us conducting further explorations of the town by car in search of its baroque rococo heart. Unfortunately, we seemed to be going in circles around the old center. Having not eaten since our morning assault on the Croatian breakfast buffet in Osijek, we took a temporary break from our search to have dinner at Palatin, a commendable restaurant that served tasty Croatian meals of normal portion size. After dinner, we returned to our lodging. The rain had let up and the evening had actually begun to border on the pleasant. We decided to continue our explorations on foot. We found that the baroque center was a pedestrian only neighborhood very near our hotel. Our discovery was sheer accident...we’d set out to check out the lush inviting park - and it’s proliferation of statues and spring flowers - across the street from our hotel. We spent perhaps an hour walking around the baroque area admiring the elaborate buildings, noting the absence of bullet holes and taking photographs. Despite it being about seven p.m. on a Saturday evening, the baroque section was almost abandoned. All of the businesses were closed. Mission accomplished, we returned to our room.

Given our time in both Osijek and Varaždin, we wish we’d spent more time exploring inland Croatia.



Sent from my iPad

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Croatian naïve art,
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Cemetery topiary, Varaždin
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Commemorative baroque manhole cover, Varaždin
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In case you haven’t seen enough photos of buildings [Varaždin]*

thanks, Ann. The road more travelled will becoming soon.😊

Slovenia welcomed us with open arms that poured water on us - a cold rain under gray skies.

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Before crossing the border we had purchased the mandatory vignette at a filling station. It was €7.50 for 7 days. Unfortunately it was a couple days short for our entire stay in Slovenia, so we’ll need to purchase another 7 day one. We had difficulties parking, dragging our luggage through the rain across the river and checking into our Ljubljana apartment. Once there we collapsed and poured ourselves some of the delicious Croatian wine we had brought with us. The apartment itself was fabulous. It was large, modern, comfortably furnished and on the top floor of an rehabbed old building overlooking the river near the famous Triple Bridge. As much as we liked our apartment my initial feelings on Ljubljana were somewhat ambivalent. Everyone just adores Ljubliana and I wondered what was wrong with me. It was sweet, it was precious, but I didn’t love it. Something about 45 degree weather and dreary rain in May will do that to you

The next morning, in order to save us from a king’s ransom in parking fees, gottravel was up and out bright and early planning to move from the relatively nearby parking garage to a less expensive, albeit more distant, parking lot. I was up with the sun and ecstatic that, while still quite cold, the sun was peeking out. We decided to take a walk that Andrew had described to us. It took us away from the center of Ljubljana. The highlight was the fabulous church in Trvono (Church of St. John the Baptist). Behind it was Plečnik house, now a museum. Unfortunately it was closed on Mondays. He was the architect of many of the older buildings we would be seeing.

On our way back into town at 11 in the morning, we were surprised by two things. Firstly, it turned out we were right by our car parking lot and, secondly, a party was going on in the street with wine being handed out. Of course we wandered over and couldn’t refuse the glasses of wine that were handed to us. This was happening on the grounds of the university and it appeared it was some kind of academic celebration. Inside a nearby building there was a crowd and two tables with some appetizer-sized snacks. We sampled some. Tasty. When we started getting some quizzical looks, we decided to flee before someone tried to talk to us in Slovenian. At this point gottravel had learned exactly one Slovenian word, “dobro,” which means good.

Plečnik had not been the only architect in town. Elizabeth_S had given us a tour that covered the highlights of Ljubljana’s Viennese Secessionist - a type of art nouveau - architecture. We crossed Plečnik’s Triple Bridge to check out the Hauptmann House, a spectacular Secessionist building near the Bridge. We then moved on to the Galeria Emporium, the Grand Hotel Union and the notably flamboyant Vurnikova hiša building. We ended at Miklošičev Park, which was largely lined with beautiful Secessionist buildings. As a bonus, there were some nearby modernist buildings for contrast.

Continuing on our tour day, at 4:00 we joined a food tour that also was to include highlights of the city. The tour was a comprehensive sampling of local food and wine from six Ljubljana restaurants. Our guide, Jasmine, was both knowledgeable and entertaining about Ljubljana and the Balkans in general. We ended up at 8:00 with a Ljubljana specialty dessert on the top floor of the “Skyscraper,” a 1930s building that had once been the tallest building in the Balkans. We waddled home to our apartment.

Over the next two days we did the usual Ljubljana tourist stuff (the funicular to the castle, the Dragon Bridge, the open air market, the Cathedral of St Nicholas and it’s fantastic bronze doors, etc), all of which we would recommend visitors do. In addition, we...Went to a photography exhibition at the Galerija Fotografia; while the exhibition itself was so-so, the other photos on display and the photography books on offer were world class. Saw the fantastic Super Hilda exhibition at Galerija Kresija next door to tourist info officeChecked out the exhaustive - and exhausting - overview of Yugoslavian art between the wars at Museum of Modern Art. Stumbled across the Saint Joseoh’s church and monastery, perhaps Ljubljana’s most beautiful church. And just did a whole lot of rambling in the old town.
We ran across what may have been the best item on our last day. Even the most casual, temporary visitor to Ljubljana will notice that the town has a lot of statues - a whole, whole lot of statues, perhaps the world’s highest statues to actual humans ratio. This is embodied by the Slovenian National Assembly building in the old town. The front entrance to this incredible building incorporates dozens and dozens of life size statues. It has to be seen to be believed.

At some point, maybe on the second day after the rain had stopped and temperatures increased, We found that our ambivalence had disappeared. We’d become Ljubljana converts.

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I almost forgot, a very important tip if you visit Ljubljana and stay in the pedestrian zone. They have a free service that will pick you up where the car free zone begins and take you to yours or/hotel. They also will do the reverse. It’s a great service.

StCirq-only way to plan is to lay out a proper paper map and have a go at it.��

Odd. All the apostrophes seem to be removed from Ljubljana post.