Long before Croats existed, the eastern shore of the Adriatic and its mountainous hinterland were inhabited by Indo-European peoples whom the ancients lumped together under the name Illyrians. Two stood out: the Liburnians, expert sailors and feared pirates of the Kvarner gulf and northern Dalmatia, whose light vessels — the liburnae — went on to inspire Roman warships; and the Dalmatae proper, who gave the region its name. Inland lived the Iapodes and, further north, Pannonian tribes. Greeks from Syracuse founded colonies on the islands, such as Issa (Vis) and Pharos (Stari Grad, on Hvar), in the 4th century BC.
Rome took more than two centuries to master this shore. After defeating the last Illyrian king, Gentius, in 168 BC, and putting down successive rebellions — the great Pannonian-Dalmatian revolt of AD 6 to 9 was one of the hardest wars Augustus fought — the territory was organised into the province of Dalmatia and the two Pannonias. Cities such as Iader (Zadar), Salona, Pola (Pula) and Parentium (Poreč) were thoroughly Romanised: aqueducts, forums, amphitheatres. Salona, near present-day Split, became the capital and one of the largest cities on the Adriatic.
Out of that Roman Dalmatia came one of the most remarkable figures of late antiquity. Diocletian, born near Salona around 244 into a humble family, became emperor in 284 and reorganised the empire with the tetrarchy. In 305 he made an unprecedented gesture: he was the only Roman emperor to abdicate voluntarily, leaving power and retiring to a colossal fortified palace he had ordered built beside Salona, at Spalatum. There, as the anecdote goes, he answered those who asked him to return to the throne that if they could see the cabbages he planted with his own hands they would not talk to him about taking power back. He died in that palace around 311. Centuries later, when the Avars and the Slavs destroyed Salona in the 7th century, its inhabitants took refuge inside those walls: and so an emperor's palace turned, little by little, into the core of the city of Split.
The collapse of Roman power on the Adriatic left a vacuum that new peoples filled. In the 6th and 7th centuries Slavic tribes — often pushed along or accompanied by the Avars, a steppe people of Asian origin — poured into the Balkans and Pannonia, sacking Roman cities such as Salona. Among those newcomers, or shortly afterwards, came the Croats (Hrvati), who settled across former Dalmatia and southern Pannonia and mixed with the Slavs and with the surviving Romanised population that had taken shelter in the coastal cities and on the islands.
The most cited source on this episode is the treatise De administrando imperio, written in the 10th century by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, which places the arrival of the Croats in the 7th century, coming from a 'White Croatia' north of the Carpathians, around what is now southern Poland and western Ukraine. Modern historians debate the date and the story: the mainstream view puts the settlement between the end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th, while some minority hypotheses date it later. What is certain is that by around the year 800 there were already Croat communities organised around towns such as Nin, Zadar and Trogir.
Those Croats were Christianised over the course of the 8th and 9th centuries, drawn into the orbit of Rome and of Charlemagne's Frankish empire, which brought the region into its sphere at the start of the 9th century. From that period date the first Croatian principalities or duchies — coastal or Dalmatian Croatia and Pannonian Croatia — and some of the country's oldest monuments, such as small pre-Romanesque churches and the first inscriptions in Glagolitic script, the Slavic alphabet that would survive exceptionally long in Croatia.
Through the 9th century the Croatian dukes gained ground in autonomy against Franks and Byzantines. The first great leap came with Tomislav, of the Trpimirović dynasty, who was duke around 910 and who by around 925 appears already styled king of the Croats (rex Chroatorum) in a letter from Pope John X. Tomislav united Dalmatian and Pannonian Croatia under his sceptre and held off both the Bulgars and the Magyars; his reign is remembered as the birth of the medieval Croatian kingdom, and that is why his figure would become, centuries later, a national symbol.
The kingdom peaked in the 11th century. Under Petar Krešimir IV (1059-1074), Croatia extended its rule over a good part of the Dalmatian cities — it is to Krešimir that we owe the first mention of Šibenik, in 1066, the only large city on the coast founded by the Croats themselves — and asserted itself as an Adriatic power. His successor, Demetrius Zvonimir, was crowned in 1075 with papal backing, in the middle of the Gregorian reform. But Zvonimir died without a direct heir around 1089, and his disappearance opened a dynastic crisis that left the kingdom without a firm successor and exposed to its neighbours' ambitions.
Hungary resolved that crisis. After years of disputes, King Coloman of Hungary prevailed and was crowned king of Croatia and Dalmatia at Biograd in 1102. According to a tradition recorded in the document known as the Pacta Conventa, twelve Croatian noble houses recognised Coloman as king in exchange for keeping their lands and privileges and for the obligation to provide cavalry in time of war. So began a union with the Hungarian crown that, with ups and downs, would last more than eight centuries: Croatia kept its own diet or parliament (the Sabor) and its viceroy (the ban), but shared a monarch with Hungary until 1918. It was neither a simple annexation nor full independence, but a dynastic bond that Croats would invoke again and again to claim statehood of their own.
From the year 1000, when Doge Pietro Orseolo II sailed the Adriatic and took the title 'duke of Dalmatia', the Republic of Venice contested control of the coastal cities and islands with Hungarians, Byzantines and Croats. For centuries the Dalmatian ports — Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir, Split, the islands — changed hands again and again between Venice, Hungary-Croatia and Byzantium, prized for their maritime trade and their strategic position on the route to the Levant. Venice needed to dominate the eastern shore to secure its routes, and it did so harshly.
The most brutal episode of that struggle was the fall of Zadar (Zara) in 1202. The city, rich and rebellious, had placed itself under the protection of the king of Hungary. That year the armies of the Fourth Crusade, unable to pay Venice the price of the fleet meant to carry them to the Holy Land, accepted the deal proposed by the aged Doge Enrico Dandolo: settle the debt by conquering Christian Zadar for Venice. Between 10 and 24 November 1202, crusaders and Venetians besieged and sacked the city, the first attack by a Catholic crusade on a Catholic town. Pope Innocent III, scandalised, excommunicated the crusaders, though shortly afterwards he lifted the penalty on everyone except the Venetians. The crusade, knocked off course, would go on to sack Constantinople too in 1204.
The Venetian presence consolidated through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Under the Peace of Zadar of 1358, Venice had to cede Dalmatia to King Louis I of Hungary, but from 1409 it regained control of almost the whole coast — Zadar was sold that year by a claimant to the Hungarian throne — and held it until the Republic fell in 1797. From that long domination come the bell towers, the loggias, the lions of St Mark and much of the Venetian air that still defines the cities of the Dalmatian coast; and also a cultural and linguistic border — Venetian on the coast against Croatian inland — that would mark the region for centuries.
At the far southern end of the coast, a single city escaped Venetian rule and forged its own destiny: Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik. Founded, by tradition, by refugees from neighbouring Epidaurum after the Slavic invasions, Ragusa was first Byzantine, then a vassal of Venice (1205-1358) and, after the Peace of Zadar of 1358, a practically independent aristocratic republic under the nominal sovereignty — and later the tributary protection — of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Governed by a Senate and a rector who changed every month to prevent tyranny, the small republic made the word Libertas its motto and its banner.
Its strength lay not in armies but in diplomacy and trade. Ragusa kept consuls and agents in dozens of Mediterranean ports, paid tribute to the Ottoman sultan in exchange for trading freely across his domains, and practised a permanent balancing act between the great powers that let it survive for centuries as a tiny state among giants. Its merchant fleet came to rival the largest in Europe. And its legislation was among the most advanced of its time: as early as 1416 the Senate banned the slave trade, one of the first abolitions of slave trafficking in Europe, although — and this is worth stating precisely — what was outlawed was the trade, not every form of domestic servitude, which died out later.
Catastrophe arrived on 6 April 1667, when an extremely violent earthquake flattened the city: some 2,000 people died inside the walls and up to a thousand more in the rest of the territory, including the rector himself, Šišmundo Gundulić, and much of the nobility. Gothic and Renaissance palaces, churches and monasteries collapsed; what stood, above all, were the walls. Ragusa rebuilt in the baroque style that characterises it today, but it never fully recovered its former splendour. The Republic survived another century and a half, until Napoleon's troops occupied it in 1806 and formally abolished it in 1808, ending more than four centuries of independence.
The 16th century brought Croatia its hardest test. After the Hungarian defeat at Mohács in 1526, where King Louis II died, the Croatian nobility elected Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg as sovereign in 1527, hoping for protection from Vienna against the Ottoman advance. But the Turks kept gaining ground for decades: strongholds fell one after another, and the kingdom was reduced to a narrow strip around Zagreb and the northwest. The Croats themselves called what was left, in Latin, reliquiae reliquiarum olim inclyti regni Croatiae: 'the remains of the remains of the once-illustrious kingdom of Croatia'.
The tide began to turn in 1593 at the battle of Sisak, where an Austro-Croatian army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottoman army of Bosnia, whose commander, Hasan Pasha, died on the field along with thousands of his men. Sisak halted Ottoman expansion towards Zagreb and central Europe and marked the beginning of the Turkish ebb. To defend the line of contact permanently, the Habsburgs organised the Military Frontier (Vojna krajina, Militärgrenze): a vast border zone administered directly from Vienna and settled by soldier-colonists — many of them Orthodox Serbs and other Christians who had fled Ottoman territory — who defended the frontier in exchange for land and liberties. That policy settled numerous Serb communities in the Croatian interior, a fact with enormous consequences in the 20th century.
Under the Habsburgs, Croatia remained a kingdom with its Sabor and its ban, but was increasingly absorbed into the machinery of the Central European monarchy. The region lived through the tensions of the Counter-Reformation, attempts at Germanisation, and in the 17th century the failed plot of the nobles Zrinski and Frankopan (1671), who sought greater autonomy and ended up executed in Vienna, an episode that national memory later turned into a symbol of Croatian resistance to imperial power. The Military Frontier would not be dissolved until 1881, when it was reincorporated into Croatia.
As elsewhere in Europe, romanticism fed an intense national awakening in 19th-century Croatia. Faced with pressure from the Hungarian nobility, which was trying to impose Hungarian as the official language and absorb Croatia, a group of young writers led by the poet and journalist Ljudevit Gaj launched what became known as the Illyrian movement (Illyrianism) in the 1830s. Its name invoked the ancient Illyrians as the common root of all South Slavs, and its aim was twofold: to create a standardised Croatian literary language as a counterweight to Hungarian, and to promote the cultural unity of the South Slavs within the Austrian empire. In 1835 Gaj founded the first newspaper in Croatian and its literary supplement, Danica.
The movement had its political moment in the revolution of 1848. That year the Sabor elected as ban of Croatia Josip Jelačić, a soldier from the Military Frontier and a sympathiser of Illyrian ideas. Jelačić abolished serfdom, convened the Sabor and, above all, broke with Budapest: when the Hungarian revolution broke out, he led his troops against Kossuth's revolutionaries in the name of the emperor in Vienna. Croats hoped their loyalty to the Habsburgs would be rewarded with autonomy, but the result was the centralist absolutism of the Bach regime, which dashed those expectations: hence the bitter saying that the Croats received 'as a reward what the Hungarians received as a punishment'.
After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which split the empire between Austria and Hungary, Croatia fell within the Hungarian half and the following year signed the Nagodba (1868), an agreement that granted it some internal autonomy while keeping it subordinate to Budapest. In those decades the great currents of modern Croatian politics took shape: the nationalism of Ante Starčević's Party of Rights, which demanded a Croatian state; and the Yugoslavist ideas of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, who dreamed of a union of the South Slavs and founded decisive cultural institutions in Zagreb, such as the Academy. That ideological ferment — a Croatian state of its own or a Yugoslav union — would dominate the century to come.
The First World War (1914-1918) sealed the end of the Austro-Hungarian world to which Croatia had belonged for centuries. Thousands of Croats fought and died in the emperor's armies, on the fronts of Galicia, Italy and Serbia. As defeat for the Central Powers became inevitable, the empire's South Slav politicians organised to decide their future: in October 1918 the Sabor in Zagreb cut its ties with Austria-Hungary and proclaimed the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, a short-lived entity that, pressed by the Italian advance in the Adriatic and by its own weakness, immediately sought union with the kingdom of Serbia.
That union was proclaimed on 1 December 1918: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was born, under the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty, and in 1929 it would be renamed Yugoslavia. For many Croats the hope of a federation of equals was frustrated early on: the new state was organised on centralist lines from Belgrade, with Serb predominance in the army and the administration, and Croatian demands for autonomy collided again and again with the central power. The main Croatian party, Stjepan Radić's Peasant Party, embodied that discontent.
The crisis broke tragically in 1928, when a Serb deputy opened fire on the Croatian deputies inside the Belgrade parliament itself: Radić died of his wounds. His killing deepened the national rift. In 1929 King Alexander suspended the constitution and imposed a personal dictatorship; he would himself be assassinated in 1934 in Marseille in an attack organised by Croatian Ustaše and Macedonian nationalists. In 1939, on the eve of the new war, Belgrade and the moderate Croats finally agreed the Sporazum, which created a large autonomous province, the Banovina of Croatia. But it was too late: the Second World War was at the door.
In April 1941 Nazi Germany and its allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia. Over much of present-day Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Axis powers installed a satellite state, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), handed to the fascist Ustaša movement and its leader, Ante Pavelić, who took the title Poglavnik ('leader'). The NDH was never fully sovereign — it depended militarily on Germany and Italy and ceded much of the Dalmatian coast to Rome — but its leaders used their margin of autonomy to set in motion, from the first weeks, a policy of racial and ethnic terror modelled on the Nazi example.
The declared aim of the Ustaša regime was an ethnically 'pure' Croatia, and to that end it persecuted and exterminated Serbs, Jews and Roma, as well as Croatian and Muslim political opponents. The Ustaše built a system of concentration and extermination camps whose centre was Jasenovac, on the river Sava, in operation between 1941 and 1945. The victim figures have been the object of intense — and politicised — controversy; it is best to stick to serious historiography and to specialist institutions. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) estimates that at Jasenovac the Ustaše murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people: mostly Serbs (between 45,000 and 52,000), together with between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma and several thousand Croat and Muslim opponents. The Jasenovac Memorial keeps a list of more than 83,000 named identified victims, which researchers consider still incomplete.
Care is needed around those figures: during socialist Yugoslavia and in later propaganda, hugely inflated estimates circulated — hundreds of thousands or even a million — which historians reject today; and, in the opposite direction, Croatian nationalist circles have tried to minimise or deny the scale of the crime, which research rejects just as firmly. Current historiography puts the total number of Serbs killed across the whole NDH at somewhere between 300,000 and 340,000, plus some 30,000 Jews and tens of thousands of Roma. Against that regime the resistance rose: the communist Partisan movement led by Josip Broz, Tito — himself Croat-Slovene — which brought together antifascists of every Yugoslav nationality and which in 1943, in the Bosnian town of Jajce (AVNOJ), laid the foundations of a future federal Yugoslavia. Zagreb, capital of the NDH, fell on 8 May 1945; Pavelić fled and managed to escape to Argentina and later to Spain, and was never brought to trial.
After the Partisan victory, Croatia became one of the six republics of the new federal socialist Yugoslavia, led by Tito with its capital in Belgrade. The regime was one-party and repressed all opposition harshly — the early years were marked by executions and camps, such as Goli Otok — but it also industrialised the country, taught the population to read and, in time, opened Yugoslavia to tourism and to the West in a way unthinkable in the rest of the communist bloc.
The great turning point came in 1948, when Tito broke with Stalin. Expelled from the Cominform in June that year, Yugoslavia was cut off from the Soviet bloc and put under heavy economic pressure, but Tito held out — Stalin is said to have claimed, in vain, that he need only lift a finger to bring him down — and charted his own course: 'self-management socialism' at home and, abroad, leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement alongside Nasser, Nehru and others. That 'third way' between the two blocs gave Yugoslavia international standing far beyond its size, and gave Yugoslavs a passport that opened almost every border.
Inside Croatia, though, national tensions did not go away. In the late 1960s a reformist and cultural movement grew, known as the Croatian Spring (or Maspok, 'mass movement'), demanding greater autonomy for the republic, full recognition of the Croatian language and an economic settlement less favourable to Belgrade. The movement, backed by intellectuals, students and part of the Croatian communist leadership itself, alarmed Tito. In December 1971, at his hunting lodge in Karađorđevo, the marshal issued an ultimatum to the Croatian leaders: the Spring was crushed, its leaders removed or jailed and many of its supporters purged. Paradoxically, the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 ended up granting the republics much of the autonomy that had been demanded, unwittingly laying some of the groundwork for the country's future dissolution. Tito died in 1980, and without his figure the federation began to crack.
After Tito's death, economic crisis, the rise of Slobodan Milošević's Serbian nationalism and the discrediting of communism pushed Yugoslavia to the brink of rupture. The first free Croatian elections, in 1990, were won by Franjo Tuđman's Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and on 25 June 1991 Croatia declared independence, almost at the same time as Slovenia. Croatia's Serb minority, concentrated above all in the former Military Frontier, rejected the secession, proclaimed its own entity — the Republic of Serbian Krajina — and, backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), took up arms. The first Croatian death of the war came as early as March 1991, in the incident at the Plitvice lakes.
The war was especially cruel in its first phase, at the end of 1991. In the east, the city of Vukovar, on the Danube, withstood an 87-day siege (August-November 1991) by the JNA and Serb paramilitaries: defended by barely 1,800 lightly armed men against vastly superior forces, the city was reduced to ruins under relentless shelling, the first European city entirely levelled since 1945. When it fell, on 18 November, hundreds of people were executed — the Ovčara massacre, with more than two hundred prisoners from the hospital murdered, would later be tried as a war crime — and tens of thousands of residents were expelled. In the south, between October 1991 and mid-1992, the JNA and Montenegrin forces besieged and shelled Dubrovnik, including its old city, a World Heritage Site; UNESCO placed it on the list of heritage in danger, and images of the shelling of such an emblematic place drew international condemnation and hastened recognition of Croatia.
After years of a stalled front and part of the territory under Serb control and UN peacekeepers, Croatia regained the initiative in 1995. In August, Operation Storm (Oluja) — a major Croatian offensive on the Krajina — defeated the Serb forces in a matter of days and put an end to the self-proclaimed republic. The victory was also the beginning of an exodus: between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina, and by some estimates as many as 250,000, fled towards Bosnia and Serbia, in one of the largest population displacements of the Yugoslav wars; several hundred Serb civilians who stayed were killed and many houses were looted and burned. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague tried war crimes on both sides: it convicted Serb commanders over Vukovar and Dubrovnik, and the Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač over Storm in 2011, although the appeals chamber acquitted them in 2012. The war left some 20,000 dead and closed with the peaceful reintegration of the eastern region of Slavonia (Vukovar) into Croatia in 1998.
The postwar period was long. Croatia had to rebuild entire cities, reintegrate territories, care for hundreds of thousands of displaced people of every background and face its own past before international courts, in a process that was often painful and contentious. Tuđman's death in 1999 and the political change of 2000 opened a phase of rapprochement with Europe: cooperation with the ICTY in The Hague — including handing over the accused — was one of the conditions for progress towards the European Union.
On 1 July 2013, after years of negotiations and a favourable referendum, Croatia became the 28th member state of the European Union, the first enlargement since 2007 and the first accession of a country born out of the former Yugoslavia after Slovenia. Integration was completed a decade later: on 1 January 2023 Croatia adopted the euro — becoming the twentieth member of the eurozone, at a conversion rate fixed at 7.53450 kuna to the euro — and joined the Schengen free-movement area, so that checks disappeared on its land and sea borders with the rest of the area (air checks were lifted in March that year).
Today Croatia is a country of a little over three and a half million people whose economy depends heavily on tourism: the walls of Dubrovnik, Diocletian's palace, the Plitvice lakes, the Dalmatian islands and the Istrian coast draw millions of visitors every summer. Challenges remain — depopulation of the interior and of many islands, young people emigrating to other EU countries, the still-open wounds of the war — but the country that was for centuries a frontier of empires and that was born in 1991 amid shelling has consolidated itself as a European democracy. Its history, from Diocletian to the eurozone, can still be read in every stone of its coast.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
The Istrian peninsula owes its name to the Histri, an Illyrian people of sailors and sometime pirates who lived there in antiquity. Rome subdued the Histri in 177 BC and thoroughly Romanised the peninsula, which became one of the westernmost regions of Adriatic Illyria and, in time, closely tied to neighbouring Italy. Cities such as Pola (Pula) and Parentium (Poreč) acquired forums, temples and walls.
The most impressive monument of that era is the Pula amphitheatre, the Arena, raised in the 1st century under the Julio-Claudian emperors and enlarged under Vespasian. With room for more than twenty thousand spectators, it is one of the six largest Roman amphitheatres surviving anywhere and one of the best preserved: its three tiers of arches are still standing, and gladiator fights were held inside. Today the Pula Arena hosts concerts and film festivals under the Adriatic sky.
Pula also keeps other notable Roman remains, such as the temple of Augustus in the old forum and the arch of the Sergii. The whole peninsula was marked by that Latin imprint, which carried on through Byzantium and the early Middle Ages and largely explains the strong presence of Italian culture and language in Istria over the centuries that followed.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Istria passed into the orbit of the Byzantine Empire, which ruled much of the Adriatic from Ravenna. From that period comes the peninsula's artistic jewel: the Euphrasian basilica of Poreč, built in the mid-6th century under Bishop Euphrasius on the remains of older churches.
The Euphrasian episcopal complex is one of the best-preserved examples of early Christian and early Byzantine architecture in the Mediterranean. Its apse is decorated with splendid gold-ground mosaics — the enthroned Virgin, angels, saints and Bishop Euphrasius himself offering the church — related to the famous mosaics of Ravenna. The complex also includes the baptistery, the atrium and the bishop's palace.
For its exceptional value, the episcopal complex of the Euphrasian basilica was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997. Poreč, the Roman Parentium, also preserves its street plan of Roman origin, with the main streets (the cardo and the decumanus) still recognisable, testimony to the long historical continuity of this Istrian city.
Through the Middle Ages and much of the modern period, Istria was divided by a border that split it for centuries. Most of the coast — Poreč, Rovinj, Koper, Piran — fell under the rule of the Republic of Venice, which governed it from the 13th century until its disappearance in 1797. The interior, on the other hand, along with Pula and a few areas, was tied to the Habsburgs through the county of Istria and Pazin (Pisino). So a single small peninsula ended up divided between the Serenissima and the empire.
That double allegiance left a deep cultural mark. On the Venetian coast people spoke and thought in Italian (more precisely in the Venetian and Istriot dialects), and the towns took on the typical look of the domains of St Mark: squares with loggias, bell towers, winged lions carved over the gates. Rovinj, perched on a peninsula with its church of St Euphemia crowning the whole, is perhaps the most photogenic example of that Venetian Istria of packed houses and lanes tumbling down to the sea.
Inland, by contrast, the population was mainly Croatian (and, further north, Slovene), rural and Slavic-speaking. This coexistence and simultaneous separation between a Latin-Venetian coast and a Slavic interior defined Istria's plural identity and would become, in the 20th century, the source of very painful national tensions once modern nationalism turned those cultural differences into political conflict.
With the fall of Venice in 1797, Istria passed to the Habsburgs, who governed it throughout the 19th century as part of the Austrian Littoral, with Pula turned into the great naval port of the Austro-Hungarian imperial fleet. The peninsula was then a mosaic of Italians in the coastal towns and Croats and Slovenes in the countryside, who in the empire's last decades began to organise politically along national lines.
The First World War changed the map. Italy, which had entered the war on the Entente side with the promise of receiving these territories, obtained Istria (and the city of Zadar, in Dalmatia) under the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920. The whole peninsula was thus incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy.
Under Mussolini's fascist regime, Istria's numerous Croatian and Slovene population suffered an intense policy of forced Italianisation: public use of Croatian and Slovene was banned, first names, surnames and place names were Italianised, Slavic schools and associations were closed and dissenters were persecuted. That national repression left deep resentment and fed, on the Slavic side, an antifascism that would pour into the Partisan resistance during the Second World War. Istria thus became a contested territory where two nationalisms — Italian and Yugoslav — would clash with particular violence.
The end of the Second World War reversed the situation completely. Between 1943 and 1945, the fall of fascism and the advance of the Yugoslav Partisans unleashed a wave of violence against the population seen as tied to the Italian regime: the so-called foibe massacres, in which Partisan forces and the Yugoslav political police (OZNA) threw numerous victims — Italians, but also anticommunists of other nationalities — into the region's karst sinkholes (foibe). The exact number of victims remains a matter of historiographical debate, but the violence was real and it was seared into Italian memory.
When, after the war, Istria passed to Yugoslavia (definitively under the treaties of 1947 and 1954, with the temporary exception of the Trieste zone), the so-called Istrian-Dalmatian exodus took place: between the end of the war and the mid-1950s, the great majority of the Italian population of Istria, Rijeka and the coastal areas left their homes and emigrated to Italy and other countries. Estimates vary widely depending on the source — between some 200,000 and 350,000 people for Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia together — driven by fear of violence, by rejection of the communist regime and by pressure on their national identity. Those who chose to leave while keeping Italian citizenship were called optanti; they call themselves esuli, the exiled. It is a real and painful episode that for decades was barely told and that serious historiography today recognises as a tragedy of mass uprooting.
Of that Italian world of Istria there remained, however, a minority who chose to stay, and who today form a recognised community. Present-day Croatia — and Istria in particular — is officially bilingual across much of its territory: Italian holds co-official status alongside Croatian in numerous municipalities, there are Italian-language schools, media and associations, and signs appear in both languages. That bilingualism is the living trace of a centuries-old history of Latin-Slavic coexistence, and also of the wound of the exodus that interrupted it.
Zadar, the Roman Iader, was for centuries the leading city of Dalmatia. Founded by the Liburnians and thoroughly Romanised, it preserves a Roman forum from the age of Augustus and, built on its remains, the pre-Romanesque church of St Donatus (9th century), one of the most singular buildings on the Adriatic. Its strategic position in the middle of the coast made it the object of permanent dispute between Venice, Byzantium and the Hungarian-Croatian kingdom.
Being so coveted a prize earned it one of the most famous — and most tragic — episodes of the Middle Ages. In 1202, rich and rebellious Zadar, which had placed itself under the protection of the king of Hungary, was besieged and sacked by the armies of the Fourth Crusade, who accepted the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo's commission to take the city in order to settle the debt they owed Venice for transporting the fleet. It was the first attack by a Catholic crusade on a Christian city, and Pope Innocent III went so far as to excommunicate the crusaders. Zadar fell on 24 November 1202.
After centuries of Venetian rule, Zadar had a singular fate in the 20th century: under the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920 it was assigned to Italy as an enclave (along with some islands), while the rest of Dalmatia went to Yugoslavia. Heavily bombed by the Allies in 1943-1944, the city passed to Yugoslavia after the Second World War and then lived through its own chapter of the exodus, with much of its Italian population leaving. Rebuilt, Zadar today combines its Roman and medieval heritage with contemporary creations such as the famous 'sea organ', which turns the swell into music.
Unlike the other large cities of the Dalmatian coast — founded by Illyrians, Greeks or Romans — Šibenik was a creation of the Croats themselves. Its first documentary mention dates from 1066, in a charter of the Croatian king Petar Krešimir IV, who chose it for a time as one of his seats; hence it is also known as 'King Krešimir's city'. Born as a fortress beside the mouth of the river Krka, it was the only large town on the coast built by Croatian hands.
In the following centuries, Šibenik passed from hand to hand between Venice, Byzantium and Hungary-Croatia, until in the 15th century it settled under Venetian rule. From that golden age comes its great monument: the Cathedral of St James (Sveti Jakov), built between 1431 and 1536, a masterpiece combining late Gothic and Renaissance. It is famous for being raised entirely in stone, with no brick and no timber, using a unique interlocking-slab technique, and for the frieze of seventy-one carved heads that runs around its apse, realistic portraits of citizens of the day by the master Juraj Dalmatinac (George the Dalmatian).
For its exceptional value, Šibenik cathedral was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000, as testimony to the artistic exchange between northern Italy, Dalmatia and Tuscany in the passage from Gothic to Renaissance. The city also preserves a remarkable set of Venetian fortresses built to defend it from the Ottomans, who besieged it without ever taking it, in particular the imposing St Nicholas fortress at the entrance to the channel.
No city embodies the layering of eras that characterises Croatia better than Split. Its heart is, literally, the palace that Emperor Diocletian — born in nearby Salona — had built at the end of the 3rd century for his retirement, after becoming the only Roman emperor to abdicate voluntarily, in the year 305. That colossal walled compound, half imperial villa and half military camp, covered almost four hectares and housed the emperor's apartments, a mausoleum, temples and garrisons.
When the Avars and the Slavs destroyed nearby Salona in the 7th century, its inhabitants took refuge inside the solid walls of the abandoned palace. Little by little, that imperial compound turned into a living city: Diocletian's mausoleum — the emperor who had persecuted the Christians — became, in an irony of history, the Christian cathedral of St Domnius; the cellars, the lanes, the peristyles and the columns filled up with houses, workshops and shops. That unbroken continuity, with people still living today inside the walls of a Roman palace, makes Split a unique case in the world.
The historic complex of Split, with Diocletian's palace at its core, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979. Under Venetian rule from the 15th century and Austrian afterwards, Split grew over the centuries into the largest city in Dalmatia and the second in Croatia, a bustling port where daily life goes on among stones that are one thousand seven hundred years old.
A few kilometres from Split, on a small islet linked to the mainland by bridges, sits Trogir, one of the best-preserved historic towns on the Adriatic. It was founded in the 3rd century BC by Greek colonists from Issa under the name Tragurion, and Romanised later. Through the Middle Ages it passed, like the rest of Dalmatia, through Hungarian-Croatian and Venetian hands, and under Venice (from 1420) it lived its period of greatest artistic splendour.
Trogir's old town is a maze of medieval lanes, palaces, churches and walls of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and baroque origin. Its crowning monument is the cathedral of St Lawrence, and in particular its western portal, carved by the master Radovan in 1240, one of the supreme works of Romanesque sculpture in this part of Europe, with its rich programme of figures, months of the year and biblical scenes.
For the exceptional continuity and coherence of its heritage, the historic centre of Trogir was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997, regarded as an outstanding example of a medieval town built on and with the remains of earlier Hellenistic and Roman settlements. In a tiny space, Trogir sums up more than two thousand years of Adriatic history.
The river Krka, which rises in the inland mountains and reaches the sea near Šibenik, has shaped one of Croatia's most beautiful river landscapes, protected since 1985 as a national park. As at Plitvice, over millennia the water has built natural travertine barriers that form a staircase of waterfalls; the most famous is Skradinski buk, a broad sequence of falls and pools. On an island in the river stands the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Krka and, at another point, the Franciscan monastery of Visovac, testimony to the long and at times conflictive coexistence of communities and faiths on this historic frontier.
That frontier condition marked northern Dalmatia in the 20th century. The region was the scene of fighting in both world wars — Zadar, Italian since 1920, was devastated by Allied bombing in 1943-1944 — and, above all, of the war of independence of 1991-1995. The interior of the region, around Knin, was the centre of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina, and the area saw hard fighting: the Maslenica bridge, key to linking the north and south of the country along the coast, was destroyed and retaken in Croatian military operations.
The war ended here with Operation Storm in August 1995, which reintegrated the Dalmatian interior into Croatia and caused the exodus of the Serb population of the Krajina. With the conflict behind it, northern Dalmatia has recovered its tourist vocation: Zadar, Šibenik, the Krka waterfalls, the Kornati archipelago — a string of more than a hundred uninhabited islands and islets turned into a national park — and the beaches of the coast now draw travellers from all over Europe, in a region where natural beauty lives alongside a still-recent historical memory.
In southern Dalmatia, the city of Ragusa — today's Dubrovnik — built a singular state over the Middle Ages and the early modern period: an aristocratic merchant republic that, without powerful armies, managed to keep its independence for more than four centuries between far larger powers. After the period of Venetian rule (1205-1358), the Peace of Zadar of 1358 freed Ragusa from the Serenissima's yoke and opened the way to almost total autonomy, first under the nominal sovereignty of Hungary and then under the tributary protection of the Ottoman Empire.
The secret of its survival was diplomacy. Governed by a Senate of nobles and by a rector whose term lasted barely a month — to stop anyone accumulating too much power — Ragusa kept consuls and spies in dozens of ports, paid an annual tribute to the sultan in exchange for trading freely across the whole Ottoman Empire, and practised a delicate balance between Christians and Turks, between Venice and the Habsburgs. Its motto, carved on the Lovrijenac fortress, summed up its ideal: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro, 'liberty is not sold for all the gold in the world'.
That prudent policy made Ragusa a commercial power whose merchant fleet came to rival the largest in the Mediterranean, and a republic whose institutional sophistication astonished travellers. The city equipped itself with institutions advanced for its time — one of the oldest working pharmacies in Europe, in the Franciscan monastery; a quarantine system to prevent epidemics; hospices and orphanages — that made it a model of urban organisation.
Among the most notable decisions of the Republic of Ragusa is the one its Senate took on 27 January 1416: banning the slave trade throughout its territories, one of the first legal renunciations of slave trafficking in Europe. The scope of the measure is worth stating precisely: what was outlawed was the trade, the commerce in people — in particular the sale of Slavic slaves that some Ragusan merchants practised — and not, at a stroke, every form of domestic servitude, which died out later. Even so, the decision put the small republic far ahead of its time on rights.
The greatest catastrophe in its history came on 6 April 1667, when an extremely violent earthquake shook the city. Some 2,000 people died inside the walls and up to a thousand more in the rest of the territory, including the rector himself, Šišmundo Gundulić, and much of the nobility. The quake, followed by fires, brought down Gothic and Renaissance palaces, churches and monasteries; what remained standing, above all, were the walls and a few solid buildings such as the Sponza palace.
Ragusa rebuilt with remarkable urban discipline in the baroque style that dominates its old town today, with regular streets and buildings of uniform height. The need to replenish the decimated nobility even forced the ennoblement of some commoner families, altering the old social structure. The Republic survived another century and a half, until Napoleon's troops occupied it in 1806 and abolished it in 1808; under the Congress of Vienna of 1815, Dubrovnik and all of Dalmatia passed to the Habsburgs, closing the history of the independent Ragusan state.
The islands of southern Dalmatia hold some of Croatia's most singular stories. Hvar, the sunniest island on the Adriatic, was a Greek colony (ancient Pharos, today Stari Grad) as early as the 4th century BC; the agricultural plain of Stari Grad (Ager), with its geometric field pattern laid out by the Greek colonists and farmed without interruption for twenty-four centuries, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008. Under Venetian rule, the town of Hvar opened a communal theatre in 1612, considered one of the first public theatres in Europe, open to nobles and commoners alike and built precisely to calm the tensions between them. The island is also famous today for its lavender fields.
Korčula, the Greeks' 'black Corfu', covered in thick pine forest, is famous for two reasons. The first is its Statute of 1214, one of the oldest legal codes in this part of Europe, which regulated island life in minute detail and which, among other pioneering provisions, severely restricted slavery, two centuries before Ragusa itself. The second is the tradition — disputed but stubbornly defended by the islanders — that Marco Polo, the great traveller, was born on Korčula.
Both islands share a long stonemasonry tradition. The white stone of Korčula, quarried at sites such as the one on the islet of Vrnik, and the skill of its masons and master builders fed the construction of palaces and churches for centuries throughout Dalmatia and even beyond the Adriatic. That craft of stone, along with vines, olives and fishing, sustained for generations the economy of islands whose beauty now draws travellers from all over the world.
Mljet, one of the most wooded and least populated islands on the Adriatic, distils both the beauty and the drama of the Croatian islands. Its western end, protected as a national park since 1960, holds two saltwater lakes connected to the sea, and on an islet in one of them stands an old Benedictine monastery from the 12th century. Tradition has it that this is where Odysseus spent years held by the nymph Calypso, and the island is also linked to St Paul's shipwreck on his way to Rome: legends that speak of a thousand-year fascination with these waters.
But the real history of Mljet and of so many other Dalmatian islands is also a history of depopulation. For centuries the islands lived on vines, olives, fishing and salt, with populations that at their peak filled villages that are now half empty. At the end of the 19th century, the phylloxera plague ruined the vineyards and sank the main source of income; the crisis pushed tens of thousands of islanders to emigrate, above all to the Americas — the United States, Chile, Argentina — and later to Australia and to the mainland cities.
That exodus, sustained throughout the 20th century, left many islands and inland island villages almost depopulated, with an ageing population and houses shuttered for much of the year. Croatian emigration was so massive that communities of Croatian origin living outside the country today add up to millions of people. Tourism has revived the economy of the larger islands in recent decades, but depopulation remains one of the great challenges of island Dalmatia, where the beauty of the landscape sits alongside the silence of emptied villages.
In the autumn of 1991, the city that had survived for centuries thanks to diplomacy suddenly found itself under fire. After the Croatian declaration of independence, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by Montenegrin forces, launched an offensive on the Dubrovnik region from 1 October 1991 and besieged the city, cutting it off by land and sea. Militarily, Dubrovnik had almost no strategic value and lacked serious defences; the siege was above all a matter of punishment and pressure.
The shelling reached the old city, a walled ensemble declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which was hit by mortar rounds and rockets. The most intense day was 6 December 1991, when artillery pounded the historic centre for hours: palaces, churches and roofs were damaged — the Franciscan monastery, the Sponza palace, the clock tower — and there were civilian casualties. Across the siege as a whole, some eighty to ninety civilians died in the region, and thousands of buildings were damaged.
The shelling of so universally recognised a place set off a wave of international condemnation: UNESCO placed Dubrovnik on the list of World Heritage in danger, and the images of the city in flames became an image disaster for Belgrade and Podgorica, contributing to the international recognition of Croatia. With the siege lifted in 1992, the city was carefully restored under UNESCO supervision, and today its walls and its new roofs — a brighter red where the tiles were replaced — again draw crowds, walking the same old town the ambassadors of the old Republic of Ragusa walked.
Zagreb was born of the union, not always peaceful, of two neighbouring hills. The first was Kaptol, the ecclesiastical hill: there, in 1094, the Hungarian king Ladislaus founded the bishopric of Zagreb, which turned the place into a religious and administrative centre. The name Kaptol comes from the Latin capitulum, the chapter of canons that governed the district around the cathedral. The second hill was Gradec (or Grič), a lay borough of merchants and craftsmen.
Gradec's decisive leap came in 1242. While the Mongol invasion was devastating central Europe, King Bela IV of Hungary — who had taken refuge in the area — granted Gradec, by a solemn document known as the Golden Bull, the rank of 'free royal city'. Its inhabitants gained the right to elect their judge or mayor, their jurors and councillors every year, to build walls and to govern themselves by their own laws, outside the bishop's power. Gradec ringed itself with walls and towers, some of which still stand in the Upper Town.
Those two communities — clerical Kaptol and bourgeois Gradec — spent centuries at odds over questions of jurisdiction, markets and tolls, in disputes that sometimes spilled into open violence. The very name of one of the streets that separates them, the now-buried Medveščak stream, recalls that old border. Only in the modern era did the two hills and their outskirts finally merge into a single city, which kept as its historic core the Upper Town (Gornji grad), with the cathedral on Kaptol and the multicoloured-roofed church of St Mark in Gradec.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Ottoman advance reduced Croatia to the 'remains of the remains' of its former kingdom, Zagreb lay close to the front line and became one of the last safe strongholds. As the towns of the south and east fell, the city gained importance as a political centre: it was here that the Sabor, the Croatian parliament, began to meet regularly, and here that nobles and institutions fleeing the occupied territories took refuge.
The closeness of the battle of Sisak (1593), fought a few kilometres to the south, shows just how much of an active frontier the region was. The Austro-Croatian victory at Sisak pushed the Turkish threat away from the capital for good and allowed Zagreb to grow in greater safety. The city gradually acquired convents, baroque churches, noble palaces and an increasingly intense cultural life, though it was still a modest town compared with Vienna or Budapest.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Zagreb consolidated its role as the administrative and ecclesiastical capital of Croatia within the Habsburg monarchy. The Sabor, the ban and the kingdom's bureaucracy were based here, and the city became the stage on which Croatia's relationship with Hungary and with Vienna was debated over and over. That institutional weight would prepare Zagreb for the leading role it took on in the national awakening of the 19th century.
In the 19th century Zagreb became the laboratory of the Croatian national revival. It was here, in the 1830s, that Ljudevit Gaj and the circle of the Illyrian movement launched their campaign for a Croatian literary language and for the cultural unity of the South Slavs: the first newspaper in Croatian and its supplement Danica were printed in Zagreb in 1835, and from Zagreb radiated the ideas that would shape modern Croatian politics.
The city was also the centre of the political drama of 1848. Its Sabor elected Josip Jelačić as ban, and his equestrian statue has presided since the 19th century over the city's great central square, the symbolic heart of Zagreb. Through the second half of the century, figures such as Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer endowed the city with first-rank cultural institutions — the Yugoslav (now Croatian) Academy of Sciences and Arts, the modern university reorganised in 1874, galleries and museums — making Zagreb the undisputed intellectual capital of the Croats.
That cultural leadership went hand in hand with rapid urban growth. After the devastating earthquake of 1880, the city was rebuilt and expanded southwards with the so-called 'Green Horseshoe' (Lenucci), a sequence of landscaped squares surrounded by historicist buildings — the national theatre, pavilions, museums — that gave it its air of a turn-of-the-century Central European capital. Zagreb entered the 20th century as a modern city, proud of its role as the Croatian national metropolis.
In the 20th century Zagreb was the great stage of turbulent Croatian history. In October 1918 it was in its Sabor that ties with Austria-Hungary were cut and union with the South Slavs was proclaimed. Between 1941 and 1945 it was the capital of the Ustaša Independent State of Croatia, and its fall on 8 May 1945 marked the end of that regime. During socialist Yugoslavia, Zagreb was the capital of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and the country's second city after Belgrade, with strong industrial and urban development, including modern New Zagreb south of the river Sava.
The city was also the epicentre of the Croatian Spring of 1971, the reformist and national movement that Tito repressed, and in 1991 it experienced the war of independence at first hand: in May 1995, close to the end of the conflict, it was the target of a cluster-rocket attack launched by Serb forces from the Krajina, which killed and wounded civilians right in the centre.
Today Zagreb is the capital of an independent, European Croatia, with around 800,000 inhabitants in the city and more than a million in its metropolitan area: seat of the government, the parliament and the main institutions, and the country's economic and cultural engine. In March 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, a strong earthquake struck its historic centre again and damaged the cathedral and numerous buildings in the Upper Town, a reminder of the city's old seismic vulnerability. Even so, Zagreb combines its Austro-Hungarian heritage with a lively contemporary life of cafés, museums and markets such as Dolac.
Beyond the capital, the Croatian interior unfolds in a landscape very different from the coast: wooded hills, karst plateaus and rivers that, in the Lika region, have shaped one of the most spectacular natural ensembles in Europe, the Plitvice lakes. It is a sequence of sixteen stepped lakes of blue-green water, joined by dozens of waterfalls and separated by natural travertine barriers that water, vegetation and microorganisms slowly build up over the centuries.
Protected as a national park since 1949 — the country's oldest — and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979, the Plitvice lakes are today Croatia's great natural icon and one of its most visited destinations. The wooden boardwalks winding over the water let you cross an ecosystem of exceptional richness, a refuge for bears, wolves and numerous birds.
But Plitvice also holds a place in the country's recent history: it was here, on Easter Sunday, 31 March 1991, that the so-called 'Plitvice lakes incident' took place, a clash between Croatian police and Serb militiamen from the Krajina who were trying to take control of the area. In that clash the policeman Josip Jović was killed, considered the first Croat to fall in the war of independence. That episode, in one of the most beautiful spots in the country, foreshadowed the tragedy that would descend on Croatia in the years that followed.