My visits to Cousin Pete Zarko in Gaic were coupled with visits to the Lopin side of the family in Dubrovnik and our ancestral village of Zuljana. My Lopin grandparents were third cousins. My grandmother’s maiden name was also Lopin. They even grew up in the same selo. A Croatian village can be made of several selo, groups of houses build on rock, fertile fields separating each selo from the other. Good soil is rare in much of the country, so you don’t waste it by building. The selo my grandparents grew up in is called Pozerina, and consisted of a dozen or so two and three story houses structured around a common cistern. Water is the other precious commodity.
My first trip, in 1972, began in Dubrovnik. My cousin Zejlko was expecting me, but as was typical of my communication skills at the time, only “sometime during the summer”. I had his address, but when I arrived tired and hungry after traveling by train from Istanbul, I couldn’t gather the intelligence to find him, so with the help of the tourist office located a room in a private house. The host noticed my last name.
“You’re Croatian, yes?”
“My family.”
“And does your family live in Dubrovnik?”
“A few, and the others in a village not far from here.”
“There are lots of villages.”
“It’s called Zuljana.”
“Are some of your family called Lopin?”
“Yes! My mother’s cousins!”
“Zejlko is a my friend. He has been expecting you all summer. Why are you staying here?”
Within thirty minutes, Zejlko had come to claim me and I was installed in the guest room of an apartment that was essentially a part of the city wall.
Dubrovnik was like another world. A perfect walled city almost surrounded by water so blue it looked fake. Libertas was (and is) Dubrovnik’s summer arts festival, and despite my temporal nonchalance (or maybe because of it) I was there for the heart of it. I saw world-famous pianists, performances of folkloric dances, ballet, Macbeth on the ramparts (in Croatian), orchestras, jazz, and more. At the end of the week, Cousin Maria and her son Niko, were taking the ferry to Zuljana, and it was suggested I join them.
Niko was about ten at the time. He was overweight, sputtered, yelled, whined, and was – like me – an only child. I tried very hard to like him. I don’t remember succeeding. Maria was a worrier, fussy, emotional, and a chatterbox. She was a fabulous cook, so I liked her better. Her husband Miho was a man of infinite patience and calm. I thought him a saint.
Zuljana is on the coast, and has a little artificial harbor that was provided by the Austrians. The ferry slid through the inlet, a group of people excitedly waved, and I was welcomed back to the homeland.
To be honest, memories of my two trips to Dubrovnik and Zuljana tend to conflate, as do memories of my trips to Gaic and Ravno. What I am clear about on the first trip is visiting Pozerina with cousins Pero and Navenka and seeing the houses my grandparents grew up in, by then abandoned and in ruin. On the second floor of my grandfather’s house I found a box, almost the only thing in the room, and inside the box were postcards and letters. Two of those letters were from my grandfather, but only the envelopes had survived. My grandmother’s house no longer had a second floor. The cistern was overgrown with blackberries, and mosquitoes were rampant.
Being American, I imagined a full restoration of the selo and conversion into a heritage hotel. Being me I shared the dream with everyone, and never did a thing about it. Well, my language skills that trip were pretty slight, so describing my developer’s vision was unlikely to convince, anyhow.
I had taken Russian in high school, all four years, with the hope that it would help me learn Croatian. Grandma Zarko died a year into that experiment, and though my folks both spoke fluently, it was awkward trying to speak at home. In Zuljana, I began to pick it up, but it was all about the dictionary, and conversations – if you could call them that – were painful for everyone.
Still, when a group of Czech tourists befriended my cousins, they could often not quite understand one another even though the two languages were close, but somehow I could understand both and became an imperfect, and totally thrilled, translator. It was one night on the pier passing around a bottle of local sweet vermouth that I cracked my first joke in a foreign language. Someone made note of the full moon, and riding on the US moon landing of a few summers prior, I informed them that moonlight was now subject to an American tax. Okay, not exactly Mel Brooks, but they laughed.
Pero and his dad, Marko, were busy that summer with blasting caps slowly carving out a cistern from the granite outcrop their house was built on. They would spend an hour drilling a hole by hand, place the explosive, pack it, stretch the fuse, light it, take cover, and… boof. Not “boom”, boof. The charge would blow a toaster-sized section of rock into a loose amalgam which Pero and Marko would clear out with pickaxes. The two weeks I was there saw an increase in volume for the cistern of about the size of a carry-on bag. No one was perturbed by this timeline. It was the way it was.
And all that while, Veronika, Pero’s mother, carried five liter jugs of water down from a well high enough on the mountain that the water wasn’t brackish from infiltration of the sea. It was still slightly too mineral for good dental health, however, and was used mainly for cooking and washing. Water and rock shaped their lives.
When I returned three years later, the ferry had stopped running and Zejlko took me by car. We arrived very late. The whole family was in Veronika’s kitchen to greet me. I had not spoken a word of Croatian in three years (Zejlko spoke English) and was groggy from travel. People asked lots of questions. I answered them. About a half hour into the conversation, someone remarked how much my Croatian had improved, and they were right.
“It was a struggle for us before, we’re glad you’ve been studying.”
More amazed than they were, I left it at that.
The big news was water. Veronika went to the sink, and turned on the new faucet full blast.
“Look! We have as much as we want, now!”
“You finished the cistern!”
“No,” said Pero, “we might turn it into wine storage, though.”
“Where is the water coming from?”
“Canalization!” cheered Marko.
The government had given them a grant that included training a villager in basic hydraulic engineering (basic?) then everyone in town either signed on to provide labor, or paid a kind of tax if they opted not to. They build a ten thousand liter reservoir on a hill, dug a fifteen meter well down to a reliable source of good water, and laid pipe to connect every house in the village.
“Main lines, service lines, all professional!” enthused Marko.
As close as I now live to them, and as many times as I’ve vacationed in Italy before I moved here, I’ve never been back. I regret that.