We are standing on the city walls, looking across Dubrovnik’s rooftops towards the sea. This is our Dubrovnik moment: a sea of glowing red roofs, enclosed by the walls, with the deep blue of the Adriatic beyond.
Hardly a roof breaks ranks. No modern intrusion disturbs the scene. No architectural eyesore from the seventies elbows its way in. From up here, Dubrovnik seems almost unreal in its coherence. Picturesque, of course. But also remarkably perfect.
Then Angie starts pointing at individual roofs.
“That one is new,” she says. “That one too. And that one.”
She counts, compares, reads up on it later. Many of Dubrovnik’s roofs are not old: they were re-roofed after the war. And when you look more closely, you really can see it. Some shine just a little brighter, smoother, fresher than the others.
Later, we take a walking tour. Our guide is called Ivana. She shows us the street in the old town where she grew up.
“We lived here,” she says. “We had no electricity for three months. I was eight. My father went to war with a hunting rifle.”
She is talking about the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991. About houses destroyed in the heavy attack on St Nicholas’ Day. And she takes us to a map at Pile Gate showing which houses and roofs were hit during the war.
On the map, we later see what Angie had already suspected: this harmonious roofscape is also a picture of reconstruction. Large parts of the old town were damaged or hit at the time.
Of course we had read about the war in Yugoslavia. We kept encountering it on this journey. Even so, much of it remained difficult to grasp: how recently it happened, the many layers of the conflict, the different memories.
1991 is not history in some distant sense. It is almost the present.
Dubrovnik was rebuilt with international support and according to conservation guidelines. That is why the roofs look so coherent today. Why, from above, the city probably glows more brightly than it would without this history.
It is an almost paradoxical thought. A city is damaged. Its visible wounds are closed. And decades later, tourists stand on the walls admiring an image of beauty that seems so complete precisely because, at first glance, the ruptures are barely visible any more.
That does not make the view wrong. Beauty needs no explanation in the moment. It is allowed simply to move us.
But it has a history.
We think back to our Dubrovnik moment. The view remains. But beneath the red roofs lies more than a beautiful picture.