Arriving in the Old Town always takes my breath away. Stari Grad, the old town of Dubrovnik, Croatia, is a medieval city constructed entirely of white stone. Great walls envelop the town, clinging to the rock like barnacles, the Adriatic Sea crashing against them. Inside, houses of white stone with orange-tiled roofs are set closer than New York City apartment buildings, and laundry hangs on wires strung between them, flapping and billowing in the Mediterranean wind like ghosts.
Brick lane: An outdoor café on Stradun. Kristin Vukovic
Pero Carević navigates the snaking roads leading to the Old Town, only occasionally glancing at the road because his hands know the way from his many trips to and from the airport. He chats with my friend Senka in the local language, eyeing us in the rearview mirror. Senka is a Bosnian from Sarajevo, and although the Croatian coastal dialect differs, they understand each other perfectly. Carević had offered to pick us up from the airport at no charge since there was some miscommunication about our lodging. We had reserved rooms at Carević and his wife Valerija’s 600-year-old family home, which the couple has turned into a bed-and-breakfast. It’s called Villa Ragusa, after Ragusa, the name for Dubrovnik when it was founded in the seventh century. But as Villa Ragusa was full, Carević had set us up with his neighbour Pero Paviša, who also rents rooms in a renovated old house.
Carević and Senka speak fast, with sentences too complex for me to follow, so I tune out and let their conversation wash over my ears. The language is both familiar and foreign, and every time I return to Croatia, I wrestle with the words, the way the sounds make my mouth contort in unusual ways.
My grandparents didn’t teach my father the language when they migrated to the US; they didn’t want him to speak English with an accent. After my grandparents died, my father started researching his roots, and that is when I developed a desire to learn Croatian. I was lucky enough to attend one of a handful of US universities that taught “Serbo-Croatian”. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, New York, I had taken a year of basic language classes, and studied in Dubrovnik one summer. I grew to know the city intimately, and made friends with some locals.
The word vjenćanje (marriage) interrupts my thoughts.
“So you are getting married here?” Carević asks me in English.
“Yes. This is where he proposed. We are here to plan our wedding,” I say.
“He is Croatian?”
“No. He is from India.”
Carević pulls into the parking lot near the side entrance to the walled city. There are two main drawbridge entrances, Pile and Ploče, located at opposite ends of Old Town, but entering through the side gate is much easier, he tells us, unless we want to walk up the steep side-street stairs. After he has helped us manoeuvre our luggage down the uneven stone steps, we drag ourselves upstairs and fall into our beds.