You can usually tell the difference between Rick photos and Deirdre photos: mine only rarely have people in them. In fact, it’s hard for me to remember to actually take photos of Rick or myself. Or anyone.
I’m just so conditioned to waiting for that people-free shot, which means I usually don’t have photos of the whole of a tourist monument; my shots typically start above peoples’ heads.
Why? Partly for the reason in this photo: a lot of the photos of people in touristy locations wind up being very meta. I’m quite charmed with the meta nature of this one, though.
Despite the fact that it was a brutally hot day, magnified by the stones soaking up the hot sun, it was super-great to finally have the chance to walk around Dubrovnik. In the early 80s, I had a French teacher from Yugoslavia who waxed poetic about the place (she herself was from Belgrade, which is now in Serbia). I’ve wanted to go ever since, so more than thirty years.
At the time Rick took this photo, I was sitting in a shady spot behind on the right. It was still a billion degrees out.
Some comments I posted to a mailing list:
The day our cruise ship reached Dubrovnik, I spent some time walking around the old walled city, and then joined the ship’s captain and two members of his family in hiking up the tall ridge overlooking the town. (This was intended to be a group hike, but the day was so brutally hot that I was the only passenger to join it. We had a great time, and it turned out that Captain Terje Willassen is from the same town in Norway my father was born in (Kristiansund): http://www.seadream.com/the-captains/captain-willassen
Our hike was up 412 meter Srd Hill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srd), which has a commanding view of the city and can be reached by cable car. At the top, you can see one giveaway showing what grievous damage the old city took from the late-1991 heavy artillery shelling it took during the three-month siege by the Yugoslav People’s Army: All but about 5% of the rooftops are lighter in colour, being only 20 years old. The 5% were the undamaged roofs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Dubrovnik
I observed to Capt. Willassen that it’s a shame some lieutenant in the Yugoslav People’s Army didn’t try just walking down to the town doors and asking if they wouldn’t mind surrendering. Dubrovnik had really no defending forces at all (and also no military significance), and reportedly the Yugoslav People’s Army just started shooting at this UNESCO World Heritage Site without asking the Croatian residents whether they might prefer to just let their ex-countrymen walk in, instead.
Capt. Willassen speculated that the lack of request for surrender might owe to the city’s historical reputation: It has never surrendered to any attacking force.
Srd Hill is also the spot from which Austrian and British troops (unsuccessfully) tried to shell the city into submission in 1814, back when Dubrovnik was the Republic of Ragusa (as Patrick O’Brian readers may recall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Ragusa
Willassen is correct, if on a technicality: During the Napoleonic Wars, the Republic of Ragusa very nearly fell to Russian and Montenegrin assault, was relieved of the siege by French Marshal Gabriel Molitor’s forces, and then the Republic surrendered to the forces of France in 1806, and ceased to exist as an independent county (being grabbed first by Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, then Austria-Hungary, then Yugoslavia — and is now part of Croatia).