Balkans Road Trip: Day 1

There were many things that could have gone wrong today, so I was constantly surprised as good fortune dispelled my paranoia. My friend Yang and I left Oxford at 5:30 in the morning using the rental car Johnny and I had borrowed for our York trip. The day before, Johnny helpfully suggested we park it outside our college in the evening so that we wouldn’t have to walk far the following morning. This plan worked perfectly and helped us avoid rush-hour traffic on the way to Heathrow.

I was constantly worried I would forget something at home or that we would have issues with returning the car, but both of those worries turned out to be groundless. The car changed hands without a hitch and after checking several times, I was finally convinced that I had everything I needed. Even getting from the car rental place to the airport turned out to be quite simple: the bus was easy to locate and took us straight to Terminal 3.

In the end, we had much time to kill at Heathrow, which we did by queuing up at Café Nero for about twenty minutes before eating our hard-earned breakfast. Our plane was supposed to depart at 8:55, but it must have departed a little later than that, as we only finished boarding a little before then. For the most part, the flight was fine, though our descent into Zagreb was quite bumpy. The clouds seemed to hang particularly low above the city and still flitted below us as individual trees began to become recognisable from the plane.

My next major worry was about the car rental in Zagreb. Johnny and I had encountered some unpleasant hidden charges for our rental in London, and I was worried this might happen again in Croatia. Fortunately, this was not the case. The only mess-up in that regard was that we took a bus to the car rental lot, not realising that the company had a shuttle service.

I began to drive as Yang figured out the GPS. I found the roads surprisingly wide and well-kept, which made my re-adjustment to driving on the right much more pleasant. Our first stop of the day was Mirogoj Cemetery, a sprawling complex north of the city centre that serves as the final resting place of Croatia’s greats. Among the people buried there is Franjo Tuđman, a historian and the first president of Croatia. His grave is located in a surprisingly prominent place for a modern politician: it stands right behind the Church of Christ the King, which dominates the cemetery.

Another pleasant surprise upon leaving the cemetery was that we did not get ticketed for keeping our car at the nearby parking lot. We read a few signs suggesting it was free of charge but did not quite understand why it had a booth staffed with two officers. Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, we drove down to the city centre to check into our hostel before heading out again. That too was quite easy, and I marvelled at the size of the hostel’s parking lot, which made good use of a repurposed inner courtyard.

The centre of Zagreb is quite small and during the time of our visit, practically every major sight was undergoing renovations. I imagine this might have something to do with the 2020 earthquake, which seriously damaged the southern spire of Zagreb Cathedral. The building has had a rough existence, being levelled by the Mongols in 1242 and receiving serious damage in the 1880 Zagreb earthquake. Unfortunately, the cathedral is currently off-limits to tourists, so we did not get to go inside and see the reliquary bust of Saint Stephen – one of the building’s greatest treasures.

From the cathedral, we walked west through a quaint park and clambered up a stairway to the upper part of the city. This is the location of Stone Gate, the only remaining entrance of Zagreb’s old fortifications, dating to the 13^th century. The most interesting feature of the gate hides on the inside: the structure houses a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, dubbed Our Lady of the Stone Gate. Opposite this shrine, we were surprised to find benches with quite a few people praying as though they were in a church.

With the famous Church of Saint Mark closed off for some kind of high political event – or so we gleaned from the number of fancy cars milling about – we continued to the viewpoint above the city. Somewhere on the way, we missed a few signs prohibiting entry to tourists, as this is another area undergoing renovations. We were almost fenced in by the workers who were either too polite or too bashful to tell us to leave.

Finally, we walked a little way out of the old city to take a look at the Croatian National Theatre, a performance venue built in the nineteenth century amid a tide of growing Slavic nationalism. As we ate lunch late, our dinner consisted of knedle, a Croatian dumpling made of potato flour. I had a walnut knedle and one made with passionfruit and blackberry, while Yang had a pesto version and another one with pistachios and raspberries.