Vukovar

The ship was still sailing towards Vukovar, Croatia in the morning arriving in Vukovar around 10 am. Vukovar was the site of a fierce battle in the breakup of Yugoslavia with the Serbs shelling the town for three months.

Our tours use local guides whenever possible. When we got off to meet our local guides we found that the local guide for another group was our Program Director for our Prague to Budapest trip last year. I walked over to say hello, and he greeted me by name before I could say a word. Vukovar is his hometown, we heard a few stories about the battle on that trip. We talked to our program director and switched groups for the local tour so we could hear the rest of the story from him. His son had a university exam today, but sometimes works with him as an interpreter for the home-hosts visits that we will be going on later, so we missed out on meeting him.

There are the ruins of a hotel that is near the boat dock that shows the damage it sustained during the battle.

There is an interesting mural painted on the bridge crossing a small river that empties into the Danube.

There are a few signs of the battle, the town was 90% destroyed in three months, but has been rebuilt.

Our local guide tells about hiding in their basement vs going to the hospital basement which was a designated bomb shelter during one particularly bad shelling event. The hospital ended up collapsing, killing many in the basement. After this event, his family went to live with relatives in Germany for six years, returning when reconstruction of Vukovar started, so he’s fluent in German as well.

Vukovar had 45,000 inhabitants before the war. It has 23,000 inhabitants now. The large shoe factory in town had 23,000 employees before the war, now there are 450.

There is some confusion in the group and the local guide went over the difference between Slovakia (a country), Slovenia (a different country) and Slovonia (the region we are currently in.)

We boarded the buses to go to our home-hosted lunch, we switched back to the group we were supposed to go with, as we are assigned to small groups. The drive takes a little time, so the guide answers a question about housing prices which have shot up since Croatia went on the Euro. It’s about 2000 € per sq/m to buy a home here, the net salary after taxes is about 1300 € per month. So it takes a long time to save up for a house, the average age for children to leave home was 24 years old in 2000, now it’s around 36-38 years old.

We are divided into groups of 6-8 people and the buses drive through the countryside to drop us off in small villages. Our group is the last to get off, and the guide stays with us as our host doesn’t speak much English, he acts as the translator.

We pass by fields of corn, wheat, beets and sunflowers on our drive to and from lunch.

After returning to Vukovar, We visited a cemetery where some victims of the war were buried. There were 938 white crosses in this cemetery.

After the cemetery, we stopped at the water tower, which became a symbol for the defenders of the city. It has been turned into a museum in it’s damaged but reinforced state.

After returning to the ship, there was a talk about segregation in the schools. Serbs and Croats go to different schools. It starts in pre-school and continues through high school. This doesn’t happen in most of Croatia, just in a few towns in this region. It used to happen in more towns, but they have re-integrated successfully. Our speaker is trying to change this in Vukovar.

She has two small children. She didn’t win the lottery to get her younger child into the same school as her older child and would have to drive to the other side of town for her, which means the family would need a second car. The school building her older child goes to has two sides, one Croat, one Serb, each with their own door. The other side had room, so with some work she managed to enroll her younger child that school, so she now is able to walk them to the same building and drop them off at separate doors.

At the port talk before dinner we found out that the low water on the river will prevent us from making it to the Black Sea. They have shuffled things around because of this, inserting an extra day on the river in Serbia before we get to Bulgaria.

After dinner, the local Balkan band, Tamburica, came onboard to present a show.