Adriatic Blues
I landed in Dubrovnik under the most Dalmatian atmospheric conditions, with the warm Scirocco wind from the South, locally lovingly called Jugo, coming to greet me, setting the tone with a low, gray hanging sky and damp air.
Like in every coastal culture, winds do not just dictate the route of boats: they’re also believed to affect your inner compass. “It makes you do crazy things”, everyone kept insisting. I braced myself — what moody storm was I about to walk into?
Later I learnt that this belief is rooted in history, as the council of Dubrovnik never met on a day when the Jugo was blowing, putting to work the old adage of better be safe than sorry. So much so, if you committed a crime and could prove that on that day the Jugo was blasting, your sentence would be drastically reduced.
Such is the power of winds.
And as soon as the Jugo dwindled down, his feisty sister, Bora, gusty, cold, and dry, tumbled down from the Velebit mountain range and started pounding the shores and peeling my face. The sky got a deep cleanse and so did my head and my spirit. Colours became extra crisp, putting technicolor to shame. The ideal conditions to hike up Mt Srđ, a geographical, topographical, and historical landmark for the defence of Dubrovnik towards the land. The pearl of the Adriatic seems even more precious from this perspective, the small yet proud walled town wedged like a rocky wave onto the side of the hills, arising from the glistening sea.
From up there, the eyes have an unobstructed view of the Adriatic sea and its shores for miles…a long chain of peaks that unrolls along the coast from Istria, all the way down to Montenegro, and then dips into the water to form a constellation of islands dressed in emerald green — one, ten, seventy-nine…otok, otok, otoci…a thousand, if you also include islets and uninhabited rock spurs. There’s rhythm to these shores — the perfect hopscotch landscape scenario.
The sunset turned the sky fiery crimson, orange, and gold, like an explosion, while some remaining clouds cast a dark shadow down on the sea below, turning it silver and cobalt blue.
Alfred Hitchcock famously said that Zadar has the most beautiful sunset in the world. I humbly beg to differ, Mr Hitchcock.
I saw a charcoal swordfish-shaped cloud pierce through the lava orange and violet blue in Hvar. In Split, it veered towards a romantic shade of powder blue and flamingo pink.
This is a land that invites you to lose yourself in its horizon, eyes mesmerized by its infinite shades of blue and green, sandwiching stripes of chalky white rocks. It’s a reflective exercise, one that allows you to observe in and out, where tones change drastically depending on the season – from pastel hues to vibrant patches, duller undertones to metallic accents. Rothko at sea.
The Adriatic is “a sea of intimacy”, as author Predrag Matvejević has written. Yet this microcosm, squashed between mountains, is a “liquid plain” (Braudel) full of complexity, a place where similarities and differences converge. And long after the light fades and the colours dissolve, stories are whispered to the winds for those patient enough to listen, by the starlit sea.
