Mountain walking and trekking guide to Croatia - Europe

• Location
• Description
• Contents
• Introduction
• Sample Route
• Maps
• Updates
• Further Reading

Walking and Mountaineering Guidebooks

When this guide was first published in 2004, it was the only English-language walking/mountaineering guidebook for Croatia (apart from one translation mentioned below). Since that date, it has been joined by Sandra Bardwell’s handy Croatia. Car Tours and Walks (Sunflower, 2006).

Within the country, there are a number of guides available in Croatian. The Croatian walker’s Bible is Hrvatske planine by Dr Željko Poljak (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 1996). First published in the 1970s and reprinted a number of times, this is an exhaustive guide to practically every walking and climbing area in Croatia – including a number now in neighbouring countries, but (at least before the war) easily accessible from the Croatian side of the border. Note that pre-1991–95 editions include a number of areas now unsafe to visit. The same author’s 50 Najljepših planinarskih izleta u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2001) is a more compact selection from the above. (The latter publication has been expanded, with additional routes and information for foreign visitors, and published in English under the title Mountains along the Croatian Coast, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2002.) An excellent guide to the entire north–south route over Velebit is Velebitski planinarski put by Alan Caplar, and the same author’s Dinarska Hrvatska gives more extensive coverage of the Dinaric Alps. Also available is Mrkopaljski planinarski put (covering the MPP on Bijele stijene).

For those combining a visit to Croatia with Montenegro, there is Rudolf Abraham’s The Mountains of Montenegro (Cicerone, 2007)

General Guidebooks

Numerous general guidebooks to Croatia have been published over the past few years, most of which have now run through several editions. Without any doubt the best is Croatia. The Bradt Travel Guide (4th ed; Bradt, 2010) by Piers Letcher, who has been visiting Croatia for 20 years (4th ed. updated by myself).

Others include Lonely Planet Croatia and The Rough Guide to Croatia. There are excellent little city guides to Zagreb and Dubrovnik, again from Bradt. For Dubrovnik there is also the Visible City Guide by Annabel Barber. French readers are well served by the excellent, colourful and informative Croatie from Guides Gallimard, which includes illustrated sections on wildlife, typical woodland trees and history; and are also referred to the Guide Routard.

A number of English-language guidebooks written while Croatia was part of Yugoslavia are available on the second-hand market, and several remain useful: Ante Pelivan, Dalmatia: Natural and Cultural Sights (Zagreb, 1985); Lazar Trifunovic, Yugoslavia: Monuments of Art (Belgrade, 1988); and last but very much not least, J.A. Cuddon, The Companion Guide to Jugoslavia (London: Collins, 1968; 3rd revised edition 1986).

History

The Illyrians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) by John Wilkes is the most detailed account available of the Illyrian lands from prehistory through to the late Roman period. Dimitri Obolenski’s The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971) is a thorough account of the region during the medieval period, and also contains material on Croatia.

Two of the best accounts of the war in the former Yugoslavia are The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin and BBC Books, 1995) by Laura Silber and Allan Little and The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1992) by Misha Glenny. The latter author’s The Balkans, 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta, 1999) is a detailed analysis of the formation of modern southeast Europe. Ivo Goldstein’s Croatia: A History (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1999) is a good account of the country’s history from antiquity to the present, although it concentrates primarily on the modern period. Fred Singleton, A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 1985; rep. 1989) is a balanced account which finds equal favour among the present author’s Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin friends!

Language Courses, Phrasebooks and Dictionaries

The most comprehensive and easily obtainable Croatian language courses in the UK are Colloquial Croatian: The Complete Course for Beginners by Celia Hawkesworth with Ivana Jovic (Routledge, 2005) and David Norris’ Teach Yourself Croatian (Teach Yourself, 2003). In both cases material has been re-evaluated and updated from two earlier publications, Colloquial Croatian and Serbian and Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat, written by the same authors respectively. Also good is Dobro Došli 1 by Jasna Barešic, although this is more easily obtainable in Zagreb.

Pocket-sized Croatian–English/English–Croatian dictionaries include the small, cheap and easily obtainable Langenscheidt Universal Croatian Dictionary. However, this fails to distinguish between the various possible meanings of a word, and these various meanings are not necessarily listed in the order you might expect – which can lead to considerable confusion! Somewhat better is the slightly larger pocket dictionary published by Školska knjiga (Zagreb, 2003). The most comprehensive Croatian–English dictionary is the weighty (and remarkably pricey) two- volume set by Željko Bujas, though this is obviously not something to pop in one’s pack and carry up a mountain. Note that Lonely Planet’s small Eastern European Phrasebook, although published comparatively recently, contains inaccuracies in both modern Serbian and Croatian.

Natural History

The most detailed information on the flora of Croatia is to be found in Oleg Polunin’s monumental work, Flowers of Greece and the Balkans: A Field Guide (Oxford: OUP, 1980; rep. in paperback Oxford: OUP, 1987). This includes detailed sections on the flora of Risnjak, Mljet, Plitvicka jezera and Velebit/Paklenica, together with that of national parks in other Republics of the former Yugoslavia. More general and slightly smaller is the same author’s The Concise Flowers of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; reprint, based on Polunin’s much larger Flowers of Europe: A Field Guide). Another more general field guide is Christopher Grey-Wilson & Marjorie Blamey, The Alpine Flowers of Britain and Europe (Harper Collins, 1979).

Birds of Europe, by Lars Svensson, Peter J. Grant, Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström (Princeton University Press, 1999), is an outstanding field guide. Collins’ Birds of Britain and Europe Field Guide (HarperCollins, 2004) is also good.

An excellent field guide to reptiles and amphibians is E. Nicolas Arnold and Denys W. Ovenden, Reptiles and Amphibians of Europe (Princeton Field Guides, 2002). This was reprinted from the Second Edition of Collins Field Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Britain and Europe (HarperCollins, 2002), however the Princeton edition has the advantage of being in paperback.

Gerard Gorman, Central and Eastern European Wildlife (Bradt, 2008) is an excellent general guide with plenty of colour photos.

Travel Literature

Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (London: Macmillan, 1942; reprinted Canongate Books, 1993) remains one of the finest accounts of the various republics of the former Yugoslavia, drawn from the author’s travels through them on the eve of the Second World War. It’s a vast tome, and should be more than enough to keep even the most voracious of readers busy for a whole trip. Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949; numerous reprints) contains details of the author’s exploits with the Partisans during the Second World War, sandwiched between material on the Western Desert and Soviet Central Asia. More recently, Dervla Murphy’s Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys (London: John Murray, 2002) recounts its intrepid author’s travels through the region on a bicycle. Alberto Abbé Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia, originally published in 1774 and translated into English as Travels into Dalmatia (reprinted London: J. Robson, 1978; New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1974), recounts the 18th-century Venetian traveller’s experiences along the Croatian coast. Accounts of travel in Dalmatia in the nineteenth century include Sir J. Gardiner Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro (London: John Murray, 1848; reprinted New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1971, and Elibron Classics, 2001); F. Hamilton Jackson, The Shores of the Adriatic – Austrian Side (London: John Murray, 1908); and Robert Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Dalmatia (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1894).

Croatian Literature

Croatia has an extensive literary tradition stretching back to the Renaissance. Of particular interest with reference to this guide is Planine (‘The Mountains’) written in 1569 by Petar Zoranic. The first secular prose work in Croatian, it sets out to imbue the mountains around its author’s native Zadar with mythical history and legend, in the tradition of Ovid, or Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Probably the most important Croatian writer of the 20th century was Miroslav Krleža. Works by Krleža available in English translation include On The Edge of Reason (New Directions Press, 1995), The Banquet in Blitva (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Return of Philip Latinowicz (Northwestern University Press, 1995). Other well-known modern Croatian writers include Ivan Aralica and Dubravka Ugrešic, a number of the latter’s books also having been translated into English, including The Culture of Lies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998) and In the Jaws of Life (London: Virago, 1992). A good collection of short stories is S. Koljevic (ed. and trans.), Yugoslav Short Stories (London, 1966).

Major poets include Antun Gustav Matoš and Tin Ujevic. Though not about Croatia itself, The Bridge over the River Drina by Ivo Andric remains one of the most highly regarded novels to emerge from the former Yugoslavia. Born in Bosnia, educated in Zagreb and finally settling in Belgrade, Andric was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.