Beside the Seaside

« In Which I Get Tongue-Tied | Home | In Which I Can't Avoid The War Any More »

In Which I Visit The Bourgeoisie

August 23, 2008 by Mike

Ribena

Route: Mošcenička Draga - Opatija - Rijeka - Senj - Cesarica - Ribena

Better get this out of the way first: I'm not really staying in a place called Ribena. But it's something like that. I rolled in quite late this evening without paying too much attention to the sign, before spotting this campsite and pulling in. And the village.. no, the hamlet.. no, the small collection of houses.. is too small to appear on my road map. So Ribena it is.

(And while I'm describing how small Ribena is: the 'campsite' is actually someone's back garden. "We live near Split," the owner explained, waving a few hundred kilometres down the coast. "When we come to our summer house, we open the campsite." I'm lucky: this time they're only here for the weekend.)

Today has been a(nother) day of spectacular coast. Just magnificent.

Mošcenička Draga is a quiet, snug little town down the coast from Rijeka, one of the major cities and ports of Croatia. The lights of the big city played across the gulf last night, and I was itching to get away and see them this morning. Everything is built up round here but the road passes through another, quite distinct, town, Opatija, on the way to Rijeka.

Built up in the 19th century by the sun-seeking Viennese bourgeoisie, Opatija is sprinkled with lavish mansions and villas. There are lots of them -- columnated piles dominate the town with icing-sugar decorations, grand rooms overlooking the sea, sculpted gardens. Quite what the Communists did with them for fifty years is anyone's guess. (My guess: they couldn't turn all of them into Institutes or Workers' Council headquarters. So the cadres of the Communist Party forced themselves to use the luxurious villas as holiday homes for.. themselves. They could cope with the trappings of bourgeois excess in a way that the rank-and-file would have found troublesome, so why make the plebs suffer unduly? How very thoughtful of them.)

One thing surprised me: the main seafront road in Opatija is Ulica Maršala Tita: so they still like Marshal Tito round here?

The road sweeps through this grand town before descending on Rijeka, putting any motorcyclist in a good mood before they get there. It's a good-looking place: not as high-falutin' as its neighbour, though the civic architecture is grander. As well as 19th century Austrian, there's 20th century Italian here too: Rijeka was known as Fiume between the World Wars when the loopy Italian nationalist d'Annunzio invaded and this stretch of Yugoslavia was, eventually, given to the Italians to stop them sulking.

Aggressive military action to claim multi-ethnic territory for specific nationalities in the Balkans? Who'd have thought?

Rijeka is a city of museums that are closed on Mondays -- yes, today is Monday -- and fountains. There are so many of them tinkling and spluttering and playing on the psyche that walking the streets after drinking too much coffee can be positively dangerous. I crossed my legs as I walked.

How many fountains are there? I gave up counting -- almost gave up the will to live -- when I reached one with this touching tribute:

For the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Rijeka's Paper Factory, the oldest in this part of Europe, and based upon a design of Rijeka architect Igor Emili, a fountain was built in 1974 at Koblerov Trg (Kobler's square) with paper pressure equipment (tiesak) made in the factory.

It occured to me that, if I stayed too long in Rijeka, somebody would build a fountain in my honour. Time to roll.

Onwards.

This mountainous stretch of coast is Mount Velebit. It's stony-faced. Certainly, it is bleak and craggy and bare. Beautiful, but bare. It wasn't always this way -- the forests that covered Velebit were cut down and shipped a few miles across the Adriatic to where the millions of trees became the millions of logs that, driven as stakes into the muddy bottom of the lagoon, became the very foundations on which Venice was built.

Beside the Seaside

In Which I Visit The Bourgeoisie

Comments

Leave your comment

Latest comments