Things fall apart

The pavement of Monument plaza has a long rectangle of paving that is different from the rest of the square paving stones. It's easy to miss, I did. Our first stop on the Military Tour of Vis was at the entrance to what had been the island's second largest Yugoslavian army base. On a small piece of overgrown lawn and gravel lie a dozen blocks of marble and granite. On the three largest blocks of what used to be white marble are some incompletely chiseled out words. So, if you can read Serbo-Croatian, you'd be able to read a famous saying of Marshall Tito's that goes something like this, "we don't want what belongs to others, and we will defend what belongs to us." The marble blocks as one will guess, used to sit on the rectangular pavement on Monument plaza. Seems that even though Tito was a local Croatian boy who made good he is, because of his Yugoslavian connection, persona non grata to Croatian nationalists. The Romans called it, damnatio memoriae.

I initially thought that being on Vis / Issa would be a digression from the theme of footsteps of the emperors. Instead I'm finding that imperial collapse is not so different from national collapse. Vis is littered with decaying bits of its Yugoslavian recent past. Yesterday we visited a Submarine pen, a series of costal gun batteries, a nuclear fallout shelter for Tito and 50 important officials, and two abandoned bases. That Croatia is much smaller than Yugoslavia, the Croatian military has no need for all these sites. At least, that's what I think. Surprisingly, Tito's cave was still signed and its interior not tagged. Although that could be because the site was so remote.

The submarine pen and the costal gun batteries were the least depressing. In part, because they were most open to the outdoors. It's hard to be depressed on the Croatian coast, when the sun shines it's glorious. Underground bases and fallout shelters are another thing entirely--creepy! Still being in Tito's rooms 60+ metres underground was very cool. 

Beyond theses sites there are other remnants of the Yugoslavian past. In central Vis, for example,there's Dom JNA (Hall of Yugoslavian Army). Formerly the place to go for military and civilians alike. It had a bandstand, a marble dance floor, and a bar. Nowadays it is Club Vista, a cultural centre. It was good to see the facility maintained and used.

It's hard to say why things are the way they are here. I don't speak or read Serbo-Croatian. We don't have TV here, let alone the time to watch it. What I see as abandonment and a wilful erasure of the past may simply be the effects of economic and demographic collapse. Vis, Zak's cousin says, is losing 100 a year as the young move to the mainland or further, and the old die.  And if Zak's Croatian family are any indication they have a healthy cynicism of official nationalism. They've seen it all, and if I can say this after only a week with them, family wins out. Things fall apart and sometimes come back together.