In 1987 I spent four months backpacking through Europe, of which roughly three weeks were devoted to roaming Yugoslavia, the nation in the Balkans created following World War I, and dissolved during the horrendous civil wars of the 1990s.
Yugoslavia’s components of Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo are now independent. I touched ground in them all except the latter two.
Yugoslavia was a budget-friendly place to travel, which is to say ridiculously cheap. In sort of a socialist precursor to Airbnb, ordinary people were allowed to offer “private rooms” for let, and these usually cost the equivalent of $5 a day. Riding trains and buses, which also were inexpensive, I was able to cover a fair amount of ground, and based on my stock of knowledge at the time (I knew so very little), most of the “must sees” were viewed.
But in retrospect, quite a lot of worth was omitted, like the city of Split. It is a port on the Adriatic and one of the principal cities in the historic Croatian region of Dalmatia (in essence, coastal Croatia). I missed Split without regrets in 1987 because Dubrovnik had been declared a personal priority, and it...Read more
