The Balkans Start South of the Hotel Esplanade.

So, the picture has nothing to do with the title of this post. It's just too good a statement to let go of though. The picture is the front page of Vecernji list from 1969. It's the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. 300,000 people in the square to hear a speech from Tito. In 1969 that was somewhere around half the population of the city. What is also interesting is that, for some reason, the picture is reversed.

Anyway, to the quote. I was working in the City Museum today (as I do every Friday from 10 to 12 when the library there is open to outsiders) and the librarian (a very nice lady, who's husband was a visiting faculty member at UofI Chicago) mentioned the quote. It is from Krleze, one of the most renowned (if not the most, but I am sure Ivo Andric fans would have something to say about that) Croatian writers of the 20th Century. It's an interesting quote because the Hotel Esplanade is right next to the main train station, just north of the railroad tracks. Now, when Krleze said that there was alreay a lot of the city south of the railroad tracks, but that was the poorer part of town, cut off from the rest of the city by the tracks. So there is a definite class element to the comment. In reference to The Square, as Danka said, that means The Square is in Europe. Krleze is an interesting guy too, because he was a life long communist, and a member of the central committee of the party in Croatia until 1969, when he resigned over the language unification project. When he left the party he said "I am a communist, and I am a Croat, but it appears I am a Croat first." That comment kind of sums up everything that was going on here in the 1980s too.

In other news, if there was any doubt in people's minds that politics is primarily an exercise in emotion, the latest polls in Croatia should put an end to that. The SDP has pulled ahead of the HDZ in a national poll for the first time in 4 years. This appears to be completely out of sympathy for Mr. Racan, who is fighting cancer and probably will never return to politics. Very ironic since Racan was the guy that gave the SDP a sense of legitimacy. He was a life long technocrat who didn't seem to have an addiction to corruption. Can't say the same for the rest of the people running the SDP.