On Croatia's Istrian peninsula, age-old traditions are securing locals' futures

The roar of the crowd echoes against the 2,000-year-old arches of Pula’s Roman amphitheatre, cut through by the metallic screech of sword on shield. Two gladiators circle one another in the arena, kicking up dust with sandalled feet, sweat dripping onto the dry earth. They each take a few tentative swipes before one fighter connects with the crucial blow; his adversary staggers, clutching his side, then crumples in a heap of leather and steel on the floor.

For a split second the audience hesitates, unsure of what they’ve just seen. Then, the fallen warrior stands up, wipes fake blood from his brow with a grin and bows enthusiastically. “And now, we will enjoy a procession of the best haircuts in Ancient Rome!” the announcer proclaims over a crackling loudspeaker.

Proudly yet lightly — that’s how the Croatian city of Pula wears its heritage. “Back in the first century, Pula was known as Pietas Julia,” explains Vesna Jovicic, a local guide with long gunmetal hair and thick-rimmed purple sunglasses, when I meet her after the gladiator show at the arena. “Emperor Vespasian had a lover from Pula, called Antonia — a freed slave who became his companion after the death of his wife. He built the amphitheatre for her.” 

Much has changed in the intervening centuries. The amphitheatre now hosts the annual Pula Film Festival, while British band Florence and The Machine had graced its stage a few weeks before my arrival. In 2013, the arena even hosted the beatification of a saint, priest Miroslav Bulešić, who was murdered for his beliefs in the 1940s. Still, its ancient stones have stood firm while the political sands have shifted time and again around Pula and the wider region of Istria in which it sits. Despite, or perhaps because of, the mercurial political climate, Istria has developed vivid, proudly protected cultural traditions all of its own, in music, dance and languages. It’s these that I’ve come to explore.

The Istrian peninsula is the largest in the Adriatic Sea, spanning Croatian, Italian and Slovenian territory, with a Croatian county, also called Istria, making up 90% of its landmass. It came under control of the Austrian Empire in the 19th century, and Italy between 1918 and 1947. It was then part of Yugoslavia before becoming absorbed into the newly minted country of Croatia in 1991.

“I have a friend whose grandfather was born in Austria, his father in Italy, himself in Yugoslavia, and his son in Croatia — all without leaving Pula,” says Vesna. “Governments come and go, but Istria just carries on being itself. Technically most Istrians are ethnically Croats, but other Croatians say we’re Italian. Both wrong — we’re Istrian!”

Pula is Istria’s largest city, and its naturally protected harbour has long made it attractive to invading forces, from the Romans and Franks to Napoleon and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its streets are a picture book, telling the story of its varied history. Vesna points up a sloping street which leads south of the amphitheatre, where medieval houses covered in fading frescoes sit among Yugoslavia-era tower blocks and modern apartment buildings.

“This street has a rock music cafe, a church, a sex shop and an amphitheatre,” she says with a smile. “What more could you need?” Most of the buildings are hewn from gleaming white Istrian stone, an impermeable limestone which has been prized by successive invaders from the Goths to the Venetians. Around 90% of the buildings in modern Venice are made from it — a physical manifestation of what is, as I’m about to discover, a closely entwined cultural relationship. 

As we walk through the old town, Vesna reminisces about the celebrities she’d seen in Pula in her youth: Elizabeth Taylor walking arm-in-arm with President Tito of Yugoslavia, her husband Richard Burton (who was playing Tito in the 1973 movie The Battle of Sutjeska) trailing behind. Tito loved Istria, spending four months of the year in villas on the Brijuni Islands, around five miles from Pula.

Today, the islands are a national park, where peacocks wander wild and the rocky coastline is imprinted with the 130-million-year-old footprints of their ancestors, the dinosaurs.  Vesna takes me for lunch at the Amifteatar Restaurant — she wants me to try Istrian olive oil. “Pliny the Elder said it was the second-best in the Roman Empire,” she says, with a hint of pride. It’s aromatic and grassy, and, like all the finest olive oil, leaves a warming sensation in the throat. We enjoy it with bread and pršut, the jewel of Istrian cuisine: a cured ham dried by the bora, a northerly wind which buffets the Adriatic Coast in the winter months and lends the meat a soft saltiness. 

Emanating from the restaurant speakers is a soundtrack of bagpipes, recorders and voices, intertwining along unusual-sounding scales: Istria’s unmistakable brand of folk music. Keen to learn more, I arrange to meet Dario Marušić after lunch, a musician who’s been at the forefront of the Istrian folk music revival for decades. He’s a tall man, with white, spiky hair, his silver earring the only clue to a rock ‘n’ roll-tinged past. “When I was 15, a friend lent me records by two English bands, Pentangle and Steeleye Span,” he says.

“I was enchanted so I went to England to find out more. I was amazed that there were young people who looked like me, with long hair, rock musicians playing traditional folk tunes. I thought, why shouldn’t I do the same thing in Istria?”

Istrian folk music presents special challenges when it comes to fusion with Western styles, however. Unlike traditional Western music, which is based on the use of tones and semitones evenly spaced within a scale, Istrian folk makes extensive use of improvisation and microtones — the notes that would fall in between the keys of a piano. “This music is very free — it’s difficult to understand for formal musicians,” says Dario. Classical composers have attempted to codify Istrian music into formal scales but the inexact spacing of the notes means they defy easy categorisation. 

When Dario was asked to formally describe Istrian folk music for its inclusion on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009, he settled on ‘two-part polyphony in narrow intervals’. “It’s a mouthful, but it needs to be to describe it!” he says with a chuckle. “The polyphony refers to the two singing voices, characteristic of our music.”

I had listened to some Istrian folk music on YouTube before my trip. Woodwind instruments wrapped around dual voices, improvising in the microtonal way Dario had described. To ears like mine, used to a rigid system of tones and semitones, the constant use of microtones can sound dissonant or harsh. That much was evident from the video’s comment section, where one rather ungenerous observer had suggested the music sounded like “someone stepping on a cat”. 

Istrian folk music is mainly found these days in its natural habitat, in the villages of the countryside. There are associations working to bring it to a wider audience, such as KUD Uljanik. I walk with Dario to Pula’s Forum Square, where the group is staging a performance. The artists — numbering around 20 — are dressed in traditional rural garb: the men in white shirts, leather waistcoats and knee-high boots, the women in flowing headscarves, white blouses and red pleated skirts. Musicians play bagpipes made from sheep stomachs and huge recorders called roženice, while occasionally breaking into microtonal polyphonic singing. As the music unfolds, it begins to make more sense to my untrained ears. “This is just music with a different ABC, a different grammar,” says Dario. “But anyone can learn to understand it.”

While the musicians play, the other performers dance, circling one another with arms linked, reminiscent of British country dancing. After the performance, I get talking to one of the dancers, Vanja Fornazar, a woman of around 30. I ask her why she does it. “‘It started out as something fun — I just liked dancing,” she says. “But then it started to feel like something important, to preserve this traditional part of our culture.”

Valorising the past

The next morning, I hire a car and drive 20 minutes north through forested countryside to Vodnjan, a pretty town of imposingly tall Venetian, gothic and baroque houses. I visit one, Istrian de Dignan Ecomuseum, a preserved 200-year-old home, whose rooms bear the relics of both settlement and migration. Gnarly looking agricultural scythes and pitchforks are arrayed on a back wall; in a corner sits a collection of 1950s suitcases, placed there as if in anticipation of the need for a quick getaway.

“A symbol of the people who went away when the countries changed,” says Rosanna Biasiol-Babić, the museum’s manager. “Émigrés to Italy, most of them.” Between the end of the Second World War and 1960, as many as 350,000 Italian speakers fled the new Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in fear of ethnic persecution by the government, an event known as the Istrian-Dalmatian Exodus. A silver statue of a Venetian gondola gleams on a cabinet. “Venice was always a dream for working people in Istria. They’d save up to go there on their honeymoon.” 

We sit at a heavy wooden dining table and sip vin de rosa, a sweet, pink wine made with dried grapes. On the table next to us is a copy of Vodnjan Tales, a new series of graphic novels bringing the region’s rich folklore to life, featuring stories of inter-village rivalries and fearsome devils. Rosanna tells me the museum was set up in 2014. “To valorise the past,” she says proudly. I sense a touch of defiance infusing the nostalgia. This seems to be a widespread impulse among Istrians: a desire to preserve those cultural traditions which transcend lines on maps. A result, perhaps, of disillusionment with the region’s constantly shifting national identity.

I step outside into Vodnjan’s main plaza, the People’s Square, where another traditional music and dance performance is taking place, courtesy of the folklore group of the Italian Community of Vodnjan-Dignano. During the period of Venetian presence in Istria between the 12th and 18th centuries, Vodnjan became a more significant settlement than Pula, which was ravaged by a series of invasions and epidemics; as a result, there’s still a greater proportion of people of Venetian descent in Vodnjan today. The costumes are influenced by Venetian dress from the 18th century; the men in black suits and red waistcoats, and the women in brocaded tunics, their hair carefully styled into waves. 

The songs, meanwhile, are sung in Istroveneto, a dialect of Venetian which many of the performers speak at home. It’s one of two Istrian languages influenced by the Venetian dialect; the other is Istriot, thought to be spoken today by only around 1,000 people, spread across six villages.

I get talking to one of the performers, a man of late middle age with a magnificent white walrus moustache, named Livio Belci — the erstwhile president of the folklore group. I express admiration for his costume. “It takes us two hours to get ready,” he says. What’s the motivation to maintain these centuries-old traditions, I ask. He twists his whiskers and closes his eyes. “If a person doesn’t know their past, they can’t look into their future,” he says, nodding sagely, before breaking into a wide grin. “Also, it’s fun!”

Saints & sea dogs

The last stop on my cultural tour is Rovinj, a half-an-hour drive north. It’s an impossibly pretty city of red-roofed Renaissance buildings, squeezed tightly onto a bulbous headland like the seeds inside a pomegranate.

As luck would have it, my visit to Rovinj coincides with the annual town festival — the feast day of St Euphemia — when traditional Istrian culture is at its most alive. Euphemia was a martyr from Asia Minor who was killed for her Christian faith in 303 CE.

Her statue, including the breaking wheel on which she was tortured before being thrown to the lions, graces the top of Rovinj’s baroque church. It sits on a rotating platform, doubling as a weathervane as it turns in the wind. Even here, in the realm of saintly meteorological reports, Istria’s Italianate cultural predilections are revealed. “When she faces east, it means wind and rain,” says my guide Mihaela Medić with a grimace as she shows me around the church. “But when she faces Italy, the weather is perfect.” 

There’s a religious zeal in the air today. Euphemia’s coffin, said to have washed up miraculously on Rovinj’s shores in 800 CE, is housed in the church, and this is the one day of the year when the public can view it. My curiosity gets the better of me and I join the queue of devotees. I get to the front and peer into a stone sarcophagus, shrouded with red velvet; in the middle, lined with rows of flowers, lies Euphemia, her skeleton now covered with a wax effigy and dressed in robes of scarlet and gold. I then do as I have seen the faithful do before me: cross myself, drop a votive offering of a few euros into Euphemia’s collection box and raise my phone camera in salutation.

It’s late afternoon when I leave the church and the sun has warmed Rovinj’s white Istrian stone to a flaxen gold. I walk downhill along cobbled streets to the harbour, where another special festival event is taking place: a regatta of batanas, the traditional wooden boats which Rovinj’s fishermen used for centuries to haul in the crabs, cod and sardines for which this stretch of the Adriatic Coast is famous.

The boats are flat-bottomed — a necessity due to Istria’s hazardously rocky coastline — and their name comes from the Italian battere (‘to beat’), a reference to the characteristic slap they make on the surface of the water.

The regatta is a light-hearted affair, with no competitive spirit on show from the participating fishermen beyond a jovial play fight between the two frontrunners, who cross the finish line neck and neck. Many of the batana owners are former fishermen who offer tourist cruises to cover the cost of maintaining their boats. One of them is Edi Poropat, a grizzled sea dog with a chin dusted with salty stubble, who agrees to take me on a sunset trip around the harbour. I climb into his wooden boat and sit on a central plank as we head out on the water.

“Hand-in-hand with the batana goes the bitinada, a special way of singing for us fishermen, which made the time go quicker when we were working,” says Edi, standing up to man the oars. “Our hands were busy, so some of us imitated instruments with our mouths, then one of us would sing songs about the sea over the top.” He’s too shy to give me a demonstration, but no matter — this being festival time, there are groups of bitinada singers giving live performances in Rovinj’s bars tonight. I start to hear the music as we turn back towards the harbour; it sounds like a barbershop quartet, with the deeper voices, imitating basslines and drums, bouncing on the still evening air.

The sun sinks over the church as we row back into the harbour, with St Euphemia’s statue, gazing west towards Venice, a voided silhouette against the pink and gold sky. It’s the last night of the festival, and there’s a carnival atmosphere in the air. It’s a scene as timeless as the ancient stones of Pula’s amphitheatre: children playing in the squares; cats stealing away from restaurant tables with scraps of fish. All the while the plaintive melodies and rhythmic bom-bom-bom of bitinada emanate from the harbourside bars, the batanas bobbing in time on the Adriatic Sea.