Published
'A Hundred Years of Change. Jovici ' (issue 26, May 2009)
First published in hidden europe, issue 26, May 2009
The Croatian village of Jovici sits above the western shore of the Velebit Channel - that long natural waterway which separates the Dalmatian islands of Krk, Rab and Pag from the nearby mainland. Jovici is about twenty kilometres as the crow flies northeast of the city of Zadar, on a finger of the mainland that pokes up towards the island of Pag. Holidaymakers and delivery vans speed north towards Pag, and Jovici hardly catches the eye: a single shop, a small church, a scattering of houses among fields of shattered rock, with a sublime view over the water to the mountains of southern Velebit beyond. Yet scratch beneath the surface and, like so many places on the map, this small village and its surroundings are found to hold many hidden histories.
Like much of the surrounding area of Ravni Kotari — as Zadar’s hinterland is called — the village of Jovici has seen its fair share of change. At one time or another over the past hundred years it has variously been part of six different polities: the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; the Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia); Mussolini’s Italy; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; and now modern day Croatia. And that is without delving further back into its past — when as well as having been part of the shortlived mediaeval Kingdom of Croatia, it had spells under Venetian, Napoleonic, and Roman rule, while both the Mongols and the armies of the infamous Fourth Crusade laid siege to the nearby city of Zadar.
The region has seen fighting and had its boundaries redrawn in two world wars, and more recently, has been on the front line and experienced some of the more bitter fighting during the conflict of the nineteen nineties — much of it utterly unremarked upon by the global media who, in reporting the conflicts in a disintegrating Yugoslavia, focused on a very select list of places. Along the Dalmatian coast, that meant a relentless interest in Dubrovnik. Ravni Kotari has seen its villages mined, and its villagers conscripted into the armies of neighbouring states. And through all this locals have continued to till their fields, fish in the local waters, and graze their livestock on the small amount of foliage this harsh limestone landscape is able to support.
Krste Jovic
Krste Jovic was born in 1910 and, with only one brief exception, has lived in the village throughout his life. There are many Jovics in the village, but he is the oldest. At ninety-nine years of age he still counts the beads on the rosary as he says his prayers, and walks slowly to the table outside, in the shade of an enormous tree, to join other family members for lunch. This tree is a Jovici landmark, a fine specimen of Celtis australis, not unlike the elm, known as kostela in Croatian and found widely across the Balkans. The lotus tree of the Ancients, some say.
Krste Jovic remembers Austro-Hungarian troops marching through the village on their way to the front during the First World War. He and his brothers were too young to be drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army at the time, but not so his uncles. During the Second World War, fearing that he would be conscripted into the Italian army, Krste joined the Partisans. Not to fight for a newer, better Yugoslavia, but to oust Italy, and to see his village and his family remain part of Croatia. He recalls the approach of Mussolini’s troops during World War Two, and the apprehension as the news spread through the village — dolaze fasisti, "the fascists are coming".
Under the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — which he refers to as Stara (‘Old’) Jugoslavija — the city of Zadar became part of the Kingdom of Italy; and from 1941, along with much of the rest of the Croatian coast, was included in Mussolini’s Governorship of Dalmatia. Jovici lay just outside this Italian province and a customs post was built on the road between Razanac, a village near Jovici, and Zadar. The old Italian checkpoint still stands, its concrete shell pockmarked, gutted and covered with graffiti. The rather more handsome stone building, used by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to monitor and control travellers arriving from Italian territory, has long-since vanished, its materials carried off by locals to be incorporated into a variety of new structures — a wall here, a house there.
The border remained in this position until the fall of Mussolini’s Italy in 1943. Around this time, Krste remembers, he made one last trip over the border to a still ‘Italian’ Zadar (known as Zara in Italian), to buy himself a fine pair of leather boots. But, he recalls with rheumy eyes and a faint smile of nostalgia on his lips, the customs official took rather a liking to them on his way back, and that was the last he saw of them.
The war of the nineteen nineties
Jovici lay on the frontline during the war of the nineteen nineties. Croatian troops were stationed in the village — there are still watchtowers just off the main road — and Serbian forces advanced as far as nearby Slivnica, just five kilometres away to the east. This was the first and only time Krste and his wife moved away from their house in Jovi?i. They took the advice of Croatian troops and moved northwest to the island of Pag.
Not far from Jovici is the village of Islam Grcki, today a bleak reminder of the recent war. Many of the houses and surrounding fields are still strewn with landmines. Worn, plastic ribbons surround properties, printed with the words mine (mines), and prominent signs by the roadside warn of the danger. Over the past couple of years some of the houses have been raised and landmines cleared, so that rebuilding can take place; others simply have the name of the owners painted roughly on the door or wall, awaiting the day when they return. Only a short distance along the road lies the sister village of Islam Latinski, also damaged during the war. As the names imply, the population of Islam Grcki was predominantly Serbian Orthodox, and that of Islam Latinski Roman Catholic. For decades the two communities lived in peace, even sharing a single primary school. Children played together. Then armies came, and the population of both villages fled. Although only a few kilometres inland from Zadar, their shattered and still derelict homes remain a side of Croatia that few visitors to the country’s sunny coastline ever see.
Images from the war years of the nineteen nineties show locals in Zadar walking to the shops through streets filled with anti-tank mines. For older folk, everyday life perhaps recalled the Second World War years when Allied Forces launched at least thirty bombing raids on the city in 1943 and 1944, leading to the destruction of over half its buildings. The Yugoslav air force had itself bombed the city in 1941, anxious to oust the Italians from their coastal exclave. Following the fall of Italy in 1943, Zadar was occupied by German forces.
Life in Jovici
Just to the west of the village of Jovici, across the main road, are the fields or polje where olives and grapevines are tended, and tomatoes, potatoes and other crops are grown. These fields lie in a natural depression, characteristic of limestone karst terrain and typically providing the only suitable area for cultivation in this otherwise harsh and rocky landscape. There is a spring in the vicinity, and a narrow, walled path leads up to the village, through stunted trees where tortoises wander lazily from one area of shade to another. Olive oil is produced, together with wine and some particularly fine rakija, and excess tomatoes are sieved and bottled as puree. Those few villagers who still keep sheep drive them through the village each day between one area of sparse grazing and another.
Fishing is a great mainstay, and local fishermen each have their preferred areas for procuring a good catch — many nowadays home in on their favourite fishing spot using a GPS. One of the more elaborate traditional methods of fishing is called parangal, in which a series of lines — each with a hook and baited with a chunk of sardine and all attached to a single, longer line — are laid out from a boat, and left overnight. To prevent the lines from becoming tangled during preparation, they are baited while suspended over the side of a large plastic basin, divided by notches around its rim. Many of the fish caught here have local names — zela, pjerka, sanpjer — all of which are far removed from the standard entry you might find in a Croatian dictionary (the latter for example would be kovac on the market in Zagreb, but here the local designation follows the Italian pesce san pietro — meaning St Peter’s fish or, as it is commonly called in England, John Dory).
An asphalt road now leads down from Jovi?i to the small, rocky beach — called Radanovica — where a small area for mooring boats is enclosed by a large concrete breakwater which affords good protection from the furious local wind known as the bura. The asphalt on the road was only laid about three years ago, a thin veneer over a rocky track. The coming of the asphalt surface was an event of some excitement in the village — in particular the new extension from the main road to the local church and cemetery. Previously the villagers had used explosives to cut rough tracks through the fractured terrain. But the improved road has brought with it an increased number of visitors to the beach, who are now catered for by a small cafe, which blasts out music at an incongruously high volume, powered by a spluttering generator. A couple of years ago I arrived at the beach to discover the unlikely spectacle of a fashion shoot taking place, with models posing on top of the piles of rusting iron chains, and the volume from the café given an extra nudge for effect.
New houses are also springing up, some built by locals returning to the village to enjoy their days of retirement engaged in endless fishing, some with a view to renting rooms to overseas visitors, as in neighbouring Razanac. Mains water only arrived last year — its presence conspicuous by the red hydrants now dotted through the village. Before this, water came from bunari, wells or underground cisterns dug laboriously into the rocky soil.
Family ways
The ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of Jovici are thought to have arrived in the area in the seventeenth century. At that time there was a great to-ing and fro-ing of peoples following the Ottoman irruption into the Balkans. These newcomers initially settled at a point on the coast itself, at what is now Razanac; but later moved inland to the present location of the village, as it was more suitable for farming — and these first settlers were farmers and herders, rather than fishermen. Fishing came later.
Krste Jovic is also one of the few surviving links with a once common system of family hierarchy stretching back centuries — that of the extended family, or zadruga. Krste’s grandfather died when his son Ivan (Krste’s father) was still quite young, and his grandmother later remarried. According to village protocol, it was not seen fit for children from a first marriage to continue living with a parent who remarries, so Ivan was adopted by his uncle — who also happened to be the family Ban. Ban in this instance was the title given to the head of an extended family, the members of which were known as banovi. (This is not to be confused with the use of the same title to denote a governor or viceroy.) It was an important and influential position, with some of the responsibilities of a local or village headman, as well as that of paterfamilias. Such extended families were mutually supportive, employing communal farming methods; and in the case of Jovi?i comprised more than fifty members at the time of its division in 1937, following the death of the last Ban the previous year. Most other extended families in the area had already divided by this time, due in part to their increasing size, and to the growing trend for private property. Following the Second World War the age-old system disappeared entirely in the new communist order.
Asked which of the multiple and apparently transitory nation states in which he has lived he judges to be the best, Krste Jovic replies laughing that he didn’t really like any of them that much. But, he adds, since he had in a way fought for the establishment of the present one, he would have to say that he liked it best.
Text and photographs copyright Rudolf Abraham 2009
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