Greetings from Old Dubrovnik (Ragusa)
Part 4 of this weekend's armchair travels
Reference is made to the following postings:
And here’s the final part of this mini-series.
Concluding Remarks from Kaser 2001 (see the first post for the reference)
To sum up, we can say that of all the bigger cities on Croatia's long coast Dubrovnik has probably the most limited potential for economic development due to its precarious geographical and strategic situation resulting from the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The sea scarcely offers any economic opportunities. In comparison, industrial centres such as Split or Rijeka are set to attract economic activity even more strongly in the future than has been the case until now.
Dubrovnik must—and can—go other ways. Tourism is central to these cities also, but not as vital as for Dubrovnik. All the cities on the Croatian coast have considerable and significant cultural possessions. But Dubrovnik has more: in the shape of its museum-like old city it is in a position to activate extraordinary historical and cultural capital in order to make its mark in the hugely competitive tourist sector.
The architectural plan and organization of the other coastal cities express a long continuity of settlement, their texts exhibit passages from every era of their history. But in Dubrovnik the situation is different: the text was created during a relatively brief period of time and after that was ‘frozen’. A clear border was drawn between the frozen text and the dynamic parts of the city in the form of the city walls. The text in relation to the architectural ensemble of signs and its perception, while readings of the text are subject to dynamic historical processes that permanently demand a compromise with the city's own history.
Finally, departing from this idea, we could say that Dubrovnik’s present compromise with its history benefits all participants, despite yielding a number of real or apparent contradictions, as we have seen. Once tourists have passed the city gates, they enter a world thought to have been lost but which at the same time offers modern facilities. In an accelerating world increasingly penetrated by technology, this kind of symbiosis between a reverie of the past and the present is gaining attraction for people from the more northern parts of Europe.
This compromise appears to be in agreement with Dubrovnik and the identity of its population because it has brought a profitable reorientation away from the sea and towards the continent while (still) enabling an interpretation of the present in harmony with the city’s glorious past.
Dubrovnik Before the Balkan Wars of the 1990s
Wonderful collection. The aloes have been there over a hundred years!
And the trees! The ones that look like spindly monkey puzzle trees. Do you know what they are?
Thank you. I've not visited Dubrovnic or Split but had a short trip to Zadar a few years ago which had a few places of historical interest.