Croatia – The Land of Ghosts

Part Two of the Balkan Voyage: Can We Be Free of our Past and Future?

One of the mysteries and marvels of travel is how our quirky human souls connect with the various locations on our path. Each town or village, mountain range or beach, speaks to us in a different manner. Some whisper, some shout, some sing, some growl, and all have a message.

During my voyage through Romania, Hungary and Croatia, each country touched my psycho-emotional body uniquely, evoking different recollections, affecting my senses and my energetic field. The weather, the people I met, and the food, all played their part in my perception. But it was my memories I was most aware of. They trailed me like cobwebs, and no matter how hard I brushed them off, I’d find sticky fronds of the past clinging to my hair. Whether it was the Ceaușescus in Romania, or teenage trips to Budapest and Croatia, as my feet hit the Balkan soil, it hummed of the eighties.

Zagreb

The “Good Old Days”

It was in Zagreb that the clouds appeared. They spread over the city like bruises. The rain hammered so furiously on the window that it juddered, and the deluge was both a relief and a disturbance. Finally, someone had found the off button on the air fryer the region had been roasting in for the past fortnight. I pulled back the purple curtain in my Air B & B feeling haunted.

I was only in Zagreb for two days. It was a waystation between Budapest and the Adriatic, and the terminus of my long, hot, and altogether fascinating train voyage. Under a blotchy sky, I trotted the length of Zrinjevac park, savouring my liberation from my rucksack. At that moment, it was slumped, half-disembowelled, in my room. Despite having discarded clothes at every stop, and using up most of my small toiletries, the damn thing seemed to weigh more now than it had when I first stepped off the plane in Bucharest.

I was on a mission to find a photocopy shop to print off a bus ticket. It was easier said than done. The square was flanked by an imposing regiment of 19^th century buildings, and as I walked, the park fountains spewed up water which the pigeons dodged. I passed the empty bandstand. A tram whooshed by me, ringing its bell. As I stood and imbibed this city, I couldn’t quite escape the feeling I was stuck in a time loop somewhere between 1987 and 1990. These were the first and last times I visited Croatia, when it was still a part of Yugoslavia.

Even when I type that, I can feel the sensitivity of it. I could feel it when I was there, lingering under the surface of streets like a hematoma. Because soon after I left this beautiful land back in the early nineties, a mighty claw descended upon it, and ripped it into pieces.

I hear so many people my age and older droning on that things are terrible today—wars, climate change, blah blah blah. “Oh, I feel sorry for the young today,” they patronisingly intone, because apparently it was all much easier and more positive in the good old days. It wasn’t. It’s nonsense. Every older generation that’s ever lived has said exactly the same thing. I remember my grandparents saying it. Why do people love inculcating their children and grandchildren with this rhetoric of doom? Jealousy I think. “Oh when we were young…” Yes. When we were young, we were young. We were gorgeous and lean with endless energy, and zero experience. That’s what we’re missing. The state of the world? Hmm, not so much. We were slap bang in the middle of the Cold War for Lord’s sake, with two nutcases’ fingers on ‘the button’.

Duran Duran.

Zagreb was a city of ghosts, though whether they were mine or the land’s I couldn’t decide. Just like me, it felt as though Zagreb had decided to remain in 1987 too. I could hear the notes of Alphaville’s Forever Young filtering from a window as I walked up the long, straight pavement. Then I caught sight of a Duran Duran poster in the park, and stared wide-eyed, wondering how Simon Le Bon looked today (answer: a little saggier and a lot less attractive, like us all). I turned a corner into a side street. As I entered the building and trotted down the stairs, I saw five photocopiers and printers lined up, ready for action. A young man in drainpipe jeans and a curly mullet handed me the printout of my bus tickets. I had to stifle a chuckle before checking my hands to make sure I wasn’t still a teenager.

Pastry crust coastline.

Two days later though, the clouds had evaporated and the sun was back in business. Zagreb was now an eerie dream hanging onto the fringe of a brand new day. I had arrived on the Croatian coast, and it wriggled around me like an expensive gold chain. Expensive being the operative word. My heart raced when I asked for restaurant bills.

It was evening when for the first time in forty years, I waded into the Adriatic Sea. I gaped about, incredulous that the place was still so recognisable. Unlike so many of the world’s coastlines, Croatia is almost unscathed by the mindless cement mixer of mass tourism. Save for the paddle boards and electric scooters, I could almost have been back in...you guessed it…the late eighties.

I entered the sea, let my body sink into the crystalline waters, and swam and swam. All the thoughts and memories began to percolate. They distilled into a dense glob of history that seemed to hover just in front of me. I watched it quietly. The blob of memory held a persistant sadness skulking under the pink veil of nostalgia.

Pristine waters.

As I swam in circles watching my childhood memories swirl before me, an image floated to the surface of a nightmare I’d suffered. I was incinerating in white light because the Russians had dropped a nuclear bomb on London. I must have been about eleven years old.

I tried to shake off the mental slideshow. It clung on. As I trod the beautiful azure waters of Croatia and marvelled at the pastry crust coastline, the sticky residue from the eighties congealed in my awareness. Other things from that time reappeared. The ozone crisis. Remember that? Yeees. A massive hole in the ozone layer had appeared because people were using too much hairspray. It was the CFCs in the aerosols, which were also in fridges. And everyone had a fridge, so the hole was growing bigger by the day, and as a result, we were all going to fry in the sun’s radiation like bacon rashers.

As the memories rose and fell, the Adriatic rippled around me, and the story regrouped in my mind. I clearly recalled all the scientists at the time had said that the hole in the ozone layer could never repair. The best we could do was to slap on factor 50 sun cream and try to reduce the CFCs we were throwing into the atmosphere. But with all those fridges around, how could we? We were doomed…

That night, I returned to my room and sat on my balcony. The sea glimmered beneath the stars like freshly poured coffee while the warm air moved slowly over my skin. It was all so exquisite. Curious, I pulled out my laptop and typed, “What happened to the Ozone layer?” After all, I am still here in 2024 and visibly not a shrivel of barbequed skin stuck to the pavement. Articles flicked up on my screen, one by one. Well, well, well. Contrary to that which was predicted at the time, the hole in the ozone layer has indeed repaired itself, (once humans stopped throwing CFCs and halon gases into the atmosphere), and is expected to return to its 1980 state in about 25 years*. Huh? I don’t remember anyone banging a drum about this, or calling a street party (possibly because I’ve been living on a mountain for over a decade, but anyway). I mean, this is huge news! The world has been saved! Why is no one talking about it? I shut the laptop and frowned. The stars winked.

The world is still here. Croatia is still here. And so am I.

Can we escape our futures?

The older I get, the more life on planet Earth amazes me. For I see how she is not a dead and passive bystander to our actions, but a self-regulating, self-repairing, highly intelligent organism who loves to work with us. I wonder what solutions we might find if we simply asked the planet and listened. Sometimes I see things that give me great hope and incentive. Other times I’m heartbroken. I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m ready to be surprised.

The great dangers we face as humans are most often not the ones drip-fed us by the news. The great danger is being taken over by destructive beliefs and being paralyzed by them. The great dangers are the despair we embody from intravenously absorbing such colossal negativity, and from living as though one hypothesised outcome is the God-given truth. It never is. It never could be.

Meditation

On that balmy evening on the final days of my Balkan voyage, I watched the timeless waters of the Adriatic lapping at multiple island shores, just as they have for thousands of years. Some were rocky inlets, others were bedecked in pine forests, some were speckled with human life, others were colonised by birds. The Adriatic is a sea so pure and clean that it’s difficult to imagine it could have ever seen a skirmish in its history. Yet it’s seen many. As I lost myself in its clarity, I stepped off the endless train of memories and worries shuttling through my mind. I became its observer rather than its passenger. In that moment I was renewed, freed from both a semi-fictitious, memorized past and an imaginary future.

Yes. When we stand back from the train of our beliefs and watch it chug merrily into the sunset, we gain space. This is what meditation is all about: observing thoughts and garnering some distance from them. Because it is in the pristine gap between observer and thought that the real power to change exists. Ah...if we humans could just let go of the doom, and deeply connect with the wonder we are swimming about in day by day. If we could spend as much time being affected by the marvellous as we are by the atrocious, by the miracles of flowers, trees, light, and water, the kindness of our fellow humans, many of whom are engaged in acts so inspiring and decent they make a mockery of the news. If we explored each and every blessing of our lives, bought into them wholesale, and used them as the basis of our reality, if we believed that miracles were possible, even probable, how would our behaviour change? How would we view our past? And how would that impact our future?

Rijeka airport rocking that eighties style.

* The Ozone layer recovery was first noticed in 2016, and is mainly a result of the Montreal Protocol, and big chemical firms agreeing to develop alternatives to CFCs and halon gases (found in fire extinguishers). On 9 January, 2023 the UN announced that the ozone layer was on track to fully recover within four decades. But it also warned new geo-engineering technology could reverse that recovery.

If you enjoy my work, do give it a ‘like’ to let me know.

---

In this vein, here’s a beautiful video of a woman in a hut who hears her land, feels sorrow and grief, and then changes her belief about what might be possible and acts upon it. There are many things I love about this story, but most of all I love that there’s room for ‘We don’t know’.

I’ll be discussing this video, as well as my own personal journey, in my Nature of Freedom podcast, exclusively for paid subscribers here on Substack.