Despite being a former edge of Europe country and having suffered war recently, the countryside and the city are much more consistently wealthy than, say, the suburbs of Tallinn or Prague which felt much more poorer than the centres of these capitals. That said, it is not a wealthy capital either, as a lot of buildings need graffiti removing and a general lick of paint. However, there are fewer tourists which is very pleasant and it is a genuinely pretty place with a great café/bar culture and enough interesting views to keep me interested. Take this one of the Cathedral:
Or this one looking towards Novi Zagreb:
Some might say that this is spoilt by the tower but throughout you get these architectural hints of former regimes within the country. It does not feel overly like a capital city and it is hard to work what keeps the city economically working other than the ministries and the shopping. This is a city still getting used to being a capital and one could almost overlook the parliament:
But this building does tell us something about the questions I was asking before I arrived: identity. You would be forgiven for thinking that Croatia is already a member of the European Union and not just a candidate country. This is a country very much looking towards Europe. Yet at the same time the leading news story on the national news is the fact that the UN has passed a resolution encouraging dialogue between Croatia’s neighbours Serbia and Kosovo. The national identity is very proud but in some ways is defined not in terms of what or who they ARE but in terms of what they want to be (European) or move away from (former Yugoslav republic). So over the coming days it will be interesting to see if this first analysis is right and what a wider geographic & cultural spread means for Europe. As I said in my first Zagreb post, travel brings as many new questions as answers.
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