Croatia

Croatia curves like a boomerang, one arm running down the Adriatic coast and the other reaching east across the Pannonian plain. The sea has drowned its limestone ridges into more than a thousand islands, from Krk to Hvar, Korčula and Mljet. Behind the shore the Velebit range walls off the interior, where water dissolving the karst built the travertine terraces and lakes of Plitvice. Further east, the Sava, Drava and Danube cross the farmland of Slavonia.

The Roman emperor Diocletian built a palace at Split to retire to around AD 300, and the old town grew inside its walls. Tomislav, crowned by tradition in 925, was the first Croatian king. From 1102 Croatia shared its king with Hungary, while Venice held much of Dalmatia and Dubrovnik ran its own merchant republic until Napoleon ended it in 1808. Croatia joined the new South Slav kingdom in 1918 and was one of Tito’s socialist republics after 1945. Independence was declared in June 1991, and war lasted until 1995.

Klapa choirs harmonise unaccompanied in Dalmatian squares, and the necktie takes its French name, cravate, from the scarves of Croat soldiers in seventeenth-century France. Cooks roast lamb or octopus under an iron bell called a peka, and Istria hunts truffles. DNA tests showed a Dalmatian grape, Crljenak Kaštelanski, to be California’s Zinfandel. Summer visitors bring in much of the national income, alongside shipyards, the port of Rijeka and medicines: azithromycin was discovered at Zagreb’s Pliva laboratories in 1980.