I’m sitting in a trendy restaurant in Zadar, Croatia, with my parents and older sister: the type that serves truffle pasta and squid ink risotto. Outside, the street is lined with the archways and delicate pillars of Venetian architecture. A pathway dotted with Roman ruins leads to the looming facade of a 9th-century church.
This is a city of contrasts, where the past and present exist in harmony.
At the back of my menu, there’s a quote by Alfred Hitchcock: Zadar has the most beautiful sunset in the world.
The sky is painted in fiery hues of orange and magenta, mirrored on the water’s reflection like stained glass windows. In the background is the melody of Zadar’s famous sea organs—Mother Nature’s unique symphony of waves colliding into the promenade, casting the city into a cinematic dream.
Dad is also gazing out to sea, his eyes alight with admiration for his homeland.
This is the place of my family history – a family I have never met.
*
The next morning welcomes my cousin Ivan, who drives us to Dobra Voda: our village.
Despite every chaotic bump and swerve, Ivan maintains a practiced precision on the gravelly roads. I grip my seat until my knuckles turn white.
“Is that where you were born Dad?” my sister jokes, pointing to the remnants of a rustic barn.
“There’s a hospital here; we’re not barbarians!” Ivan responds.
My dad coming from “The Village” has always been an abstract concept, born from years of teasing his odd habit – like eating directly from a pot with a wooden spoon, or picking his teeth with a piece of paper.
It had always been good fun in the Babic household, but now that concept is taking shape, becoming tangible. This was my dad’s home. It is still my dad’s home; it demands respect.
This doesn’t stop my sister and I from exchanging smirks, daring each other to break out into childish giggles.
“There were landmines over there,” Ivan points out casually.
I am wordless, dazed.
How can a place so quaint and peaceful be marked by war as recent as 20 years ago?
We pull into Ivan’s family home: uniform peach walls neatly tucked into a low stone fence, the angles slightly off-kilter. Greenery swallows the house in an unruly fashion, adorned with vibrant pink flowers.
Draga and Marko – Ivan’s parents and my aunt and uncle — beam at our arrival. Their smiles could cast out the sun.
“Dobrodošli! Dobrodošli!”
Marko pulls me into a tight embrace, punctuated by a kiss on each cheek. Draga then spoils us with a feast. Roast lamb, grilled squid and various salads: all the familiar tastes of Croatia that remind me of my grandparents’ cooking.
A slender, ornate bottle filled with a black liquid on the table is slid towards me, alongside a shot glass. The notorious fruity brand: Rakija.
“Ukus! Ukus!”
My polite refusals are futile; I don’t want to be rude and reject a tradition whilst meeting family for the first time, not while they smile at me with eager anticipation.
Shooting it down my throat, I feel as though my body has hollowed out, my organs eviscerated by the sharp burn. This liquid fire makes my mind swirl, like oil marbling on water.
Everyone booms with laughter, and while I can’t understand the language, its familiar cadence feels like home. There’s something so authentic about watching my dad speak freely in his native tongue, with his family from across the ocean.
I watch the boy who was born here come to life.
Draga looks at me suddenly, smiling, touching my hair gently.
“Imaš kosu kao Vinko!” You have hair like Vinko – my grandfather.
An awkward tension coils up inside me from the guilt of not being able to communicate with her properly.
Why did Dad never teach me how to speak Croatian?
When Draga looks at me, I think of the Croatian Licitar heart. The mirror in its centre symbolises how one is reflected in the heart of a loved one.
At that moment, I am a reflection of her missing loved one – my grandfather. Her love for him passes along to me.
I’m unsure of what I have done to earn Draga’s delicate smile. I have relegated myself to being a foreign stranger, a diluted Croatian whose heritage is so far from my Australian upbringing.
And yet in this small interaction, as I feel the gentle touch of Draga’s fingers through my hair, I am welcomed as family.
Later, we walk to Baba Stoja’s house: my late great-grandmother. It stands proudly – a perfect time capsule, filled with nothing but echoes.
Dad, my sister and I wander through the cold space. Under a mass of withered paper, what we uncover is priceless.
In my hand is a family of four, cradled happily in their sepia-toned world. The image is caked in dirt, time eating away at its edges. I see a chaotic scrawl on yellowed paper: writing in a hand I’d recognise anywhere.
I watch Dad sift through the collection, staring. I wonder if he recognises himself in the boy in the picture. It feels exceptionally private; a memorial for a life I was not privy to.
Our visit ends with a drive to a monument inside a stone church close to Vransko Jezero: the largest lake in Croatia.
The silence between us is so heavy it feels like it slows the car down, allowing it to move only an inch at a time.
The church walls are lined with photos and crosses, with a metal perimeter barring visitors from what appears to be a well at its centre. There is a bouquet of red and yellow flowers on the floor surrounded by candles.
At the tail end of World War II, the Yugoslav Partisans – a communist-led anti-fascist resistance group – came into the home of my then four-year-old grandfather and took away his father. He, along with thousands of others, were killed and put into mass graves.
My dad turns away from the grave of a grandfather he never knew and joins my family in tears. I’m not brave enough to look at their faces.
This story of violence has always been distant, abstract, only ever pages in a book. But standing here looking at a hole in the earth, I ask myself, Did my great-grandfather spend his final moments falling? The light above him turning into nothing but a pinprick in a black sky, his life mercilessly snuffed out?
I cry for someone I never knew.
*
Chance weaved its magic when my grandparents left this place for Australia, and its rewards are what brought us back here to Croatia.
It is now another source of home, not in place, but in feeling.
Standing on the cliffs looking out at Vransko Jezero, the sun sets and I’m reminded of the story of how the village got its name – which my grandfather told me over and over again.
Ottomans had come here long ago and unknowingly tapped into an underground water supply. Once it started flowing, it didn’t stop. A magical spring for the thirsty Ottomans: Dobra Voda, ‘Good Water,’ where my family has been for over 600 years.
I want to remember this place. Not one that was laden with war and suffering, but filled with love, family and magic.
Hitchcock was wrong – Dobra Voda has the most beautiful sunset in the world.