Dubrovnik

• 1. Introduction

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  Dubrovnik sits at the southern tip of Croatia's Dalmatia coast, its limestone walls rising straight from the Adriatic Sea. In 1564, a poet named Ivan Vidalić wrote a letter to his fellow writer Nikola Nalješković and called the city "crown of Croatian cities." That phrase captures something true about a place that has spent centuries being claimed, conquered, and yet somehow remaining itself.

  For listeners encountering Dubrovnik for the first time, a few facts sharpen the picture quickly. Its total population in 2021 was 41,562 people. Its old walled center earned a place on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979. And for more than four centuries, from the 14th century to 1808, the city governed itself as a free republic, the Republic of Ragusa, navigating between the Ottoman Empire to the east and the Republic of Venice to the west without being swallowed by either.

  But the city has also been nearly destroyed more than once. A catastrophic earthquake in 1667 levelled most of its public buildings and killed over 5,000 citizens. Then, in 1991, during Croatia's war of independence, it was besieged by artillery for seven months. How a city survives those blows, and what it carries forward when it does, is what this documentary sets out to explore.

• 2. Two Names, One City

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  Ragusa appears in the historical record in various forms since at least the 10th century: in Latin, in Dalmatian, in Italian, written as Raugia, Rachusa, Rausia. Constantine VII described it in his work De Administrando Imperio as a city founded by refugees from Epidaurum, a Roman city some 15 km to the south, after Slavic forces allied with the Avars destroyed that settlement in the 7th century. The name, according to that account, derived from Lausa, a rocky island on which the earliest settlement was built.

  Dubrovnik entered the written record much later. It appears first in the Charter of Ban Kulin in 1189. The most widely accepted explanation traces the name to a Proto-Slavic root meaning oak, with dubrovnik referring to an oak wood or oak forest. The two names coexisted for several centuries. Ragusa remained the official name of the republic until 1808 and stayed on the books within the Kingdom of Dalmatia until 1918.

  The linguistic diversity of the city ran even deeper than those two names suggest. The native Dalmatian language, now extinct, was documented in a 1325 letter. Croatian speech grew in everyday use through the late 13th century and entered the city's literary output by the mid-15th century. Latin served as the official language of official documents until 1472, when Italian began to replace it. Albanian was attested in the city as early as the 14th of July 1284, when a crime witness testified, in the words of the Latin record: Audivi unam vocem, clamantem in monte in lingua albanesca. That moment, a single voice heard crying on a mountain, marks the first written attestation of the Albanian language anywhere in history.

• 3. The Free Republic

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  The Republic of Ragusa received its own Statutes in 1272, among the earliest such legal codes in the Adriatic world. Those statutes codified Roman practice alongside local customs and included prescriptions for town planning and the regulation of quarantine. The republic did not wait long to build on them. A medical service appeared in 1301. A pharmacy opened in 1317 and is still operating today. An almshouse followed in 1347, and the first quarantine hospital, the Lazarete, opened in 1377. Slavery was abolished in 1418, decades before most European states addressed the practice.

  In 1438, the Neapolitan architect and engineer Onofrio della Cava completed a 20 km water supply system for the city, replacing cisterns with a proper aqueduct. He added two public fountains and a series of mills along one of its branches. An orphanage opened in 1432. These were not coincidental achievements but the deliberate policies of a republic that valued, in its own words, Libertas, the freedom featured prominently on the white flag its merchant ships flew around the world.

  The fleet those ships made up was known as argosy, and it reached as far as India. Merchants from Dubrovnik arrived in Goa between 1530 and 1535, founding a colony they called Sao Braz, named after the city's patron saint, Sveti Vlaho, or Saint Blaise. At its peak, around 12,000 inhabitants lived in that colony. It thrived until the 1570s, when trade between the Croatian merchants and Indian partners declined.

  The republic also played an unlikely role in the Balkan slave trade, serving as an important transit point for enslaved people moved from the Balkans across the Adriatic to the Aegean. That trade was abolished in 1418, the same year the republic erected a Roland statue in Luža Square as a symbol of its independence, and adopted the white Libertas flag.

• 4. Diplomacy and Survival

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  From 1382 to 1804, the Republic of Ragusa paid annual tribute to the Ottoman sultan. That arrangement sounds like submission, but the Ragusans turned it into a commercial advantage. As a tributary state, they gained access to the Black Sea, paid reduced customs duties, and received diplomatic backing from the Ottomans in trade disputes against Venice. Their inland merchant network through the Balkans became, according to the source, unequaled among Christian states.

  For centuries, Dubrovnik allied with Ancona, the other major Adriatic maritime republic that Venice could not absorb. Together, they developed an alternative trade route running from Dubrovnik to Ancona, then through Florence all the way to Flanders. That route bypassed Venetian control and kept both cities viable. In 1699, after the catastrophic earthquake weakened the republic's position, Ragusa was forced to sell two strips of its mainland territory to the Ottomans to avoid being caught between Ottoman and Venetian military forces. That strip of land is now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina and remains that country's only direct access to the Adriatic Sea.

  The republic's diplomatic reach extended even to the Americas. The source notes Dubrovnik's involvement in the American Revolution, though the city's fleet had long since declined. Skilled diplomacy, the republic's other main export beside commerce, remained its sharpest tool. When French General Jacques Lauriston arrived on the 27th of May 1806 and demanded that his troops be allowed rest and provisions before continuing to the Bay of Kotor, the Ragusans let them in. It was a deception: the French occupied the city the moment they entered it.

• 5. Earthquake and French Occupation

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  The earthquake of 1667 was the defining catastrophe of the republic's later history. It killed over 5,000 citizens, levelled most public buildings, and set in motion the long decline of a city that had been prospering for centuries. Few of the Renaissance buildings that gave the city its architectural character survived. The Sponza Palace, dating from the 16th century and now housing the National Archives, is among the finest that remained.

  The French occupation that began in 1806 ended the republic entirely. Marshal Marmont issued a proclamation in 1808 abolishing the Republic of Ragusa and absorbing its territory into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. Marmont then claimed the newly created title of Duke of Ragusa. In 1810, Ragusa joined Istria and Dalmatia as part of the Illyrian Provinces of France.

  The Ragusans did not accept this passively. After seven years of French rule, encouraged by the collapse of Napoleon's Russian campaign and the return of Austria to the war, the city's population rose in a general insurrection in June 1813. On the 18th of June 1813, together with British forces under Captain William Hoste aboard HMS Bacchante, the insurgents forced the surrender of the French garrison on the island of Šipan, and then the heavily fortified town of Ston and the island of Lopud. The insurrection spread through the mainland.

  What followed was a different kind of betrayal. Austria, whose Emperor Leopold I had in 1684 promised in writing the inviolate liberty of the Republic, and whose Empress Maria Theresa had renewed that promise in 1772, used the insurrection to install their own forces. They persuaded a temporary governor, Biagio Bernardo Caboga, to keep one gate closed to Ragusan troops while the Austrians entered from the other side. Caboga was later condemned as a traitor by his own people. The Flag of Saint Blaise flew alongside Austrian and British colors for exactly two days before General Milutinović ordered Mayor Sabo Giorgi to lower it. Giorgi, the last Rector of the Republic, refused, saying the masses had hoisted it.

• 6. The 1991 Siege

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  On the 1st of October 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army attacked Dubrovnik. The siege lasted seven months. The heaviest single day of bombardment was the 6th of December, when artillery fire killed 19 people and wounded 60. Among those killed during the siege was the poet Milan Milišić. The Croatian Red Cross counted 114 civilian deaths in total.

  The Old Town's walls, built to be 4 to 6 metres thick on the landward side, absorbed 650 artillery hits. The attacks damaged 56 percent of the city's buildings to some degree. Foreign news coverage drew criticism at the time for focusing more heavily on damage to historic architecture than on the human cost.

  The Croatian Army lifted the siege in May 1992. Repairs to the Old Town followed, conducted according to UNESCO guidelines in the original style. Most reconstruction was completed between 1995 and 1999. A chart near the city gate records every artillery hit during the siege. The brighter-colored new roof tiles, visible from high points around the city, mark where the reconstruction work was done.

  The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later prosecuted officers responsible. General Pavle Strugar, who coordinated the attack on Dubrovnik, was sentenced to a seven-and-a-half-year prison term. The cable car that connects the Old Town to the top of Srđ mountain, first built in 1969 and the first cable car in the Adriatic region, was severely damaged during the war and did not reopen until 2010.

• 7. The City That Remains

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  George Bernard Shaw visited Dubrovnik in 1929 and said: "If you want to see heaven on earth, come to Dubrovnik." The tourists who have arrived ever since might be seen as taking him at his word. By 2018, the city found itself managing severe overcrowding in the Old Town, staggering cruise ship arrivals to spread visitor numbers more evenly through the week.

  The Dubrovnik Summer Festival, founded in 1950, runs for 45 days each year and draws live plays, concerts, and games to a city that has always understood the value of performance, in every sense. The Franciscan monastery at the city's center holds 30,000 volumes, 216 incunabula, and 1,500 valuable handwritten documents. Its pharmacy, opened in 1317, remains in operation.

  The walls themselves, running almost 2 km around the city, have drawn 1.3 million visitors in a single year. The HBO series Game of Thrones used them to represent the fictional city of King's Landing from season 2 onwards. Parts of Star Wars: The Last Jedi were filmed in Dubrovnik in March 2016. The city has also appeared in a Bollywood film, in a Robin Hood production, and in a text-based video game set aboard a ship off its coast.

  In October 2023, Dubrovnik joined the European Network of Saint James Way Paths, adding a 147-kilometer pilgrimage route called the Camino Dubrovnik-Međugorje, expected to open to visitors in May 2024. A city that once governed itself under a white flag bearing the word Libertas now draws pilgrims, travelers, and film crews from every direction, still finding ways to be exactly what it has always been: a place at the edge of the sea that refuses to be anyone's possession.