There were three holidays last week. All public attractions and many private, including some restaurants, were closed. All the countries I visited in the region close public attractions on holidays. And there are lots of them. The three last week are representative: Anti-Fascism Day (Wednesday), a communist era remnant; Corpus Christi (Thursday), one of the numerous Catholic observances; and Statehood Day (Saturday), a post-independence commemoration. Closing down and losing all that potential revenue seems a strange policy to me for a region that encourages tourism and needs the money.
John and Chris returned from their Dalmatia/Istria trip late Wednesday. We walked around looking for things that were open on Thursday. There was a mass at the Cathedral, which I had only seen from the outside. The last time I was there with Valerie, the pope was in town and you couldn't get anywhere near it.
Although there had been a church on this site since the 11th C, the current cathedral is not that old by European standards. It was renovated in the neo-Gothic style in the late 19th C, after it was extensively damaged by the earthquake in 1880.
I found myself back at the Cathedral on Sunday with Ellen, who finally came to visit from Belgrade. We walked around inside to see the sarcophagus of Cardinal Stepinac, the controversial WWII archbishop of Croatia. Ellen had a special connection with him because her brother (and Alan Alda) had gone to Cardinal Stepinac high school in suburban New York. Stepinac was controversial because of his on again/off again relationship with the Ustashe (Croatian fascist party). After the war, in what some claimed was a show trial, he was found guilty of war crimes, mainly for forced conversion of Serbian Orthodox to Catholicism. Tito kept him under house arrest until his death in 1960. Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal and under John Paul II he was beatified as a martyr. That certainly explains the prominence in the cathedral of the glass casket containing his mummified body.
After the cathedral, John, Chris and I went from the divine to the ridiculous -- the idiosyncratic Museum of Broken Relationships which displays momentos and stories of past loves lost but not forgotten.
We walked down the Strossmayer Promenade back to the apartment. The promenade, named after another prominent Croatian prelate, is lined at the top benches and kiosks selling art and beer. After that it slopes sharply downhill ending above Frankopanska.
John and Chris went on their own on Friday when most of the state-run museums were open. They left very early on Saturday morning. John was shocked that the taxi arrived on time to pick them up. He had worried for two weeks that the cab wouldn't show and they would miss their flight.
Ellen arrived Saturday afternoon with her dogs. After getting them settled we walked around Kaptol and people watched on Tkalciceva Street, Zagreb's best outdoor bar and restaurant venue. We walked up the hill through the Stone Gate to Trilogija, a restaurant just on the other side, where we had a wonderful meal. The food there is definitely the best I have had in Zagreb and perhaps all of Croatia.
Sunday we went to Gradec where I revisited the Naive Art Museum. It was just as good the second time around. St. Mark's Church, the one with the tiled roof, was also open. I had never seen the inside. But, unfortunately, there was a Mass in progress which was being televised, so we could not look around.
We walked down the hill, through the cafe district, to the Museum of Arts and Crafts where they have an interesting collection of furniture and art objects as well as a large exhibit devoted to the art deco movement in the 1920's to which Zagreb artists and designers made a significant contribution.
Ellen left late in the afternoon, having at last seen a bit of Zagreb after spending 7 1/2 years in Belgrade.
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