Croatian Quotes

As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home." "I prefer normal music." "Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse.

Tiho, o tiho govori mi jesen; Šuštanjem lišća i šapatom kiše. Al zima srcu govori još tiše. I kada sniježi, a spušta se tama, U pahuljama tišina je sama.

Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades. Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.

I feel absolutely no loyalty to Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian national causes. I have no other emotion but utter contempt for people who helped destroy Yugoslavia, and I feel the same about the people who are now selling what is left of it." (p. 13)

Alkohol ubija... znamo, o znamo, Znamo da alkohol škodi, No rakije, rakije, rakije amo, Jer utjehe nema u vodi.

Tell the truth and . . .run!" Old Croatian proverb

Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the Croatians--all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese--all the peoples of Asia. This took a long, long time, but when it was all over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy. Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know anything different. But one day, two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, "What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?" Kurt said, "I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me--and troubling me deeply." His friend asked what it was. "It's this," Kurt said. "I cannot shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about." And that's how the paper ended.' Ishmael nodded thoughtfully. 'And what did your teacher think of that?' 'He wanted to know if I had the same crazy feeling as Kurt. When I said I did, he wanted to know what I thought we were being lied to about. I said, 'How could I know? I'm no better off than Kurt.

Bukščar motoru znači "nek' te motor zgazi". Klkačar šleperu "nek' te zgazi šleper". Mlnšići tuga, "nek' te tuga pojede". Tuga, motor i šleper, ono što te ubije, naše su riječi u njihovim psovkama. Nije slučajno.

Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

Turning her body slightly to the left, he gently bends her knee, breaking eye contact to lick her slowly, from Venice to Trieste—then down the Croatian Coast, the length of Serenissima.

That’s exactly what we all are. We spend so much time trying to figure out what race a person is when we could just get to know them as individuals. I felt like answering their question with a question. Does it matter? Will it make a difference if she is Croatian, Muslim, Serbian?

Dobar način da oprostimo onome koji se ljuti na nas zbog nepostojeće uvrede jest da ga zbiljski uvrijedimo.

Gle malu voćku poslije kiše: Puna je kapi pa ih njiše. I bliješti suncem obasjana, Čudesna raskoš njenih grana. Al nek se sunce malko skrije, Nestane sve te čarolije. Ona je opet kao prvo, Obično, jadno, malo drvo.

The Croatian word for silence is “Tišina”, so the island’s name literally means “the silence”.

See, American boyfriend? Eventually I am not so stupid a Croatian Catholic shiksa woman. I even learn to say ‘ain’t.

They say Croatians come to Italy to steal husbands. But I’m not so predictable. I’m also American. I could steal anything.

When I drop my kids off at school in the morning, I often frame my farewells with an emphasis on their responsibility to look for the good. Instead of saying, "Have a great day!" I'll say, "Choose to make it a great day!" Because I do believe it is a choice. We've all met people who seem to have it all and yet are completely miserable. And then we've met people who have next to nothing, have weathered many trials, and lost so much, yet carry themselves with such lightness. There's a Croatian saying that goes "Svako je kocač svoje sreće." It means "Everyone is a blacksmith of their joy." We should make an effort to create happiness in our lives instead of blaming our unhappiness on everyone else and everything else.

So how long have you been together? Two months?' 'Five.' 'Five? Jesus, Steve, you might as well get married. I should buy a hat.' 'Don't. They give away your Spock ears.' She laughed. 'This is the Romanian girl?' 'Croatian.' 'Right. She's a painter?' 'Photographer.' 'Right.' She studied him. 'What?' he laughed self-consciously as though he was a twelve-year-old boy who'd just been caught with his first girlfriend. 'Nothing.' 'Come on.' 'I don't know Steve,' she cut into her meat, 'you've changed. You no longer write about Victoria Beckham and you have a girlfriend. I think...' 'You think what?' 'I don't know, I might be jumping the gun here, but I think there's a possibility you might not be gay after all.' A chip was hurled at her head.

Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief,” recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress’s representative. “Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”44

Tell us more, Darcy, about how European you are. Tell us about the way the Croatian sun roasts your shoulders, tell us about your love of canned fish and the girl you’d kiss for practice at your German primary school.

Incompatible religious doctrines have Balkanised our world and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

a Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovičić was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho for short.

Ah, čijem si se zahvalila, tašta ljudska oholasti? Sve što više stereš krila, sve ćeš paka niže pasti! Vjekovite i bez svrhe nije pod suncem krepke stvari, a u visocijeh gora vrhe najprije ognjen trijes udari. Bez pomoći višnje s nebi svijeta je stavnos svijem bjeguća: satiru se sama u sebi silna carstva i moguća. Kolo od sreće uokoli vrteći se ne pristaje: tko bi gori, eto je doli, a tko doli gori ustaje. Sad vrh sablje kruna visi, sad vrh krune sablja pada, sad na carstvo rob se uzvisi, a tko car bi, rob je sada.

The only thing that I am sure of is that we are mysteries to others, as much as to ourselves.

Živjeti – to je izazov.

Potkupljivost je u ljudi isto što u Boga milosrđe.

I am living with these pigs, with these horses and with these cows. Every day I have to look at their blank eyes, their stupid bellies. They call themselves by the names of various nationalities. As if that would make any difference! Germans, French, Italians, Croatians, Russians, Poles, and other animals. Thank you for the pleasure! I love animals, but only real animals. I love animals who do not pretend to be humans. You should look, sometimes, into the eyes of real cows. They are serene, quiet, round. They are good, so good. Like medicine. I like being with cows. I have spent much of my life with them. They do not know greed, they do not play politics. I love them. Protect me from human beings! Let me live with cows! I'll live as a shepherd, if that's the only way. You are driving me out of my mind, you, the Thinking Animals!

The documents reveal that the ‘real’ Odessa was much more than a tight organization with only nostalgic Nazis for members. It consisted instead of layered rings of non-Nazi factions: Vatican institutions, Allied intelligence agencies and secret Argentine organizations. It also overlapped at strategic points with French-speaking war criminals, with Croatian Fascists and even with the SS men of the fictional Odessa, all in order to smuggle Hitler’s evil minions to safety.

Miroslav Volf puts a finer, harder point on this: we are substantially defined not only by those we love but by who our enemies are. Our own identities are shaped by our interactions with them. As a Croatian Protestant, he was defined by the identity and convictions of Serbian Christians. We are all, whether we wish it or not, in profound relationship with our enemies, especially when that relationship is a combative one. When we respond in kind to hatred and aggression, we risk becoming like our foes. And so the biblical virtue of “love” of enemies is not romantic but practical, a love of action and intention, not of feeling. This religious wisdom would subvert the either/or choices often presented for debate in our age, where rhetoric about enemies local and global abounds. This faith requires both realism and compassion. We might need to fight our enemies or keep them at a safe remove; but we cannot let hatred, anger, and fear toward them determine our character and our actions. This cleansing of focus is the true purpose of forgiveness. I

I am alone as the pearl is alone in its shell. I have withdrawn into myself, but the sea – life hits me and forces me to open. It opens my womb, takes out my round pearl – soul, and strings it on a necklace. I cannot breathe under its weight. It holds all my dear, lost pearls...

The Second World War was never merely a conflict over territory. It was also a war of race and ethnicity. Some of the defining events of the war had nothing to do with winning and maintaining physical ground, but with imposing one’s own ethnic stamp on ground already held. The Jewish Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of western Ukraine, the attempted genocide of Croatian Serbs: these were events that were pursued with a vigour every bit as ardent as the military war. A vast number of people – perhaps 10 million or more – were deliberately exterminated for no other reason than that they happened to belong to the wrong ethnic or racial group.

Zloća pretpostavlja moralnu odluku, nakanu i stanoviti promišljaj. Debili ili prostak ne razmišlja niti rezonira. On djeluje nagonski, kao zvijer, uvjeren da postupa ispravno, da uvijek ima pravo i ponosan je što podjebava, s oproštenjem, svakoga tko mu se učini drukčijim, pa bilo to bojom, vjerom, jezikom, nacionalnošću ili, kao u slučaju gospodina Federica, slobodnim aktivnostima. Na svijetu nam treba više istinski zlih ljudi, a manje potpunih budaletina.

Frane Selak (born 1929) is a Croatian man who has allegedly escaped death seven times, and afterward won the lottery in 2003, prompting journalists to dub him “the world’s luckiest man”. Encounters with death started in January 1962 when the train he was on crashed into a river, drowning 17 passengers. The next year, he survived an airplane accident that killed 19 people. In 1966, a bus that he was riding in fell into a river, drowning 4 passengers. In 1970 his car caught fire as he was driving, but he managed to escape before the fuel tank blew up. Three years later, in another driving incident, the engine of his car burst into flames. In 1995, he was struck by a bus in Zagreb. In 1996 he eluded a head-on collision on a mountain curve and his car fell 90 metres (300 ft) into a gorge; he was ejected from the car and managed to hold onto a tree. In 2003, two days after his 73rd birthday, Selak won €900,000 (US$1.1 million) in the lottery.

I would want to have died on a sunny day. The seed of this small secret wish I carry since childhood. What frightens me most about the death, is the perception of darkness with which it is connected. I admire the religions of the East that have managed to bring to humanity a bright, sunny death, to instill in t the perception of the endless jás after the grave. They have, perhaps, given to mankind the greatest good that a mortal can receive. I would want to have died lying prone on the good, hot soil, all bathed in sun and glory, to have died in the plentitude of a day, into the hour of the scorching crickets. Into the hour in which sleepily silence the folded wheat fields, in which ripen the bulking grapes, into the hour of the searing after noon silence. It scares me, the death at sunset, the death in the autumn, the death behind the slanting curtains of the rain. Vladan Desnica, The Springs Of Ivan Galeb (*English translation from the Serbo-Croatian: Boris Gregoric)

Mi smo ovdašnje utjelovljenje jednog kozmosa koji je izrastao do samosvijesti. Počeli smo razmišljati o našem porijeklu: zvjezdana tvar koja razmišlja o zvijezdama; organizirani skupovi od deset milijardi milijarda atoma koji razmišljaju o evoluciji atoma slijedeći u mislima dugi put na kraju kojeg je, barem ovdje, niknula svijest. Naša je odanost upućena ljudskoj vrsti i planetu. Mi govorimo u ime Zemlje. Obavezu da preživimo ne dugujemo samo sebi samima već i tom kozmosu, prostranom i golemom iz kojeg smo ponikli.

Tada, ne znam zašto, kao da nešto puknu u meni. Prodereh se iz sveg glasa, ispsovah ga i rekoh neka se ne moli za mene. Zgrabih ga za ovratnik. Istresoh na njega sve što mi je ležalo na srcu koje je igralo od radosti i bijesa. On je baš tako siguran, je li? Pa ipak, cijela ta sigurnost ne vrijedi ni pišljiva boba. Nije čak siguran ni da je živ jer živi kao mrtvac. Ja sam naoko praznoruk, ali sam siguran u sebe, siguran sam u sve, sigurniji od njega, siguran u svoj život i u smrt koja će uskoro doći. Da, ja imam samo to, ali bar posjedujem tu istinu isto onoliko koliko ona posjeduje mene. Imao sam pravo, imam još pravo, imam svako pravo. Živio sam ovako, a mogao sam živjeti i drukčije. Činio sam ovo, a nisam činio ono. Ovo nisam uradio, a ono jesam. Pa onda? Čini mi se kao da sam cijelo vrijeme čekao ovaj čas i osvit dana kad ću se iskupiti. Ništa, ništa nije važno i dobro znam zašto. I on zna zašto. S dna moje budućnosti, za cijelog ovog besmislenog života koji sam vodio, diže se do mene, kroz godine koje još nisu došle, neki neodređeni dah, a taj dah izjednačuje na svom putu sve ono što su mi nekad predlagali, u onim godinama koje sam proživio i koje nisu bile nimalo stvarnije. Što se mene tiče smrt drugih, ljubav jedne majke, što me se tiče njegov Bog, život za koji se netko odlučio, sudbina koju je odabrao, kad jedna jedina sudbina odabire mene i sa mnom na milijarde povlaštenih koji, kao i on, trvrde da su mi braća. Razumije li, razumije li napokon? Svi su povlašteni. Postoje samo povlašteni. I ostali će jednog dana biti osuđeni. I on će biti osuđen. Što mari ako ga optuže zbog ubojstva i smaknu zato što nije plakao na sprovodu svoje majke? Salamanov je pas vrijedio isto toliko koliko i njegova žena. Ona ženica-automat isto je toliko kriva koliko i Marie koja je željela da se uda za mene. Što mari što mi je Raymond bio isto tako pajdaš kao i Céleste koji vrijedi više od njega? Šta mari što Marie pruža danas usne nekom drugom Mersaultu? Razumije li, napokon, taj osuđenik, da s dna moje budućnosti... Gušio sam se vičući sve ovo. Ali ključari su mi već oteli iz ruku ispovjednika i prijetili mi. On ih, međutim, umiri i zagleda se načasak nijemo u mene. Oči mu bijahu pune suza. Okrenu se i nestade.

Rekao sam ti,” he whispers in my ear. “What does that mean?” I say. “I told you so, in Croatian. You didn’t say I couldn’t say it in Croatian.

The sieges of Gvozdansko, Croatia and Alamo, U.S. tell the true stories of small bands of heroes who stood against massive armies to defend their homelands. They echo innate human devotion to the idea of fighting for freedom across the world. Alamo was designate by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2015. Gvozdansko deserves more research and the same level of respect and protection for its equal relevance. The Croatian landmark was the site of the pivotal 103-day Battle of Gvozdansko in 1578 against the Ottoman army. Among those who fought and died there were the common miners together with their families.

In the square field of the game he has found the ground mirror of the circular plan of the heavenly sphere. Through play, he was becoming aware of the crux gemmata – the sign of Christ, and he created the letters of the Glagolitic script, and turned the trinitarian game into a tetragonic one. He had made the Glagolitic script, a game of four gospels in which the symbol of Christ’s name is placed. The Glagolitic is his game with three marbles – one for each of the messengers of the good news.

There was He, there was She, they become It.

I will return to the books... Constantine is right; books are more merciful towards each other than people.

What would I wish for the one who is mine? I would wish him a good, knowledgeable sense, a resilient gut, and the capability for survival. Wrong... it is not enough just to survive... To the one who is mine, I would also wish faith that will renew and heal him from the pains of existence.

You began the letter with the form of the cross, and the sound “A,” a symbol of a man and a Christian. With the first nine letters you said that it is good to live honorably in this world. Your signs are letters. Your letters are numbers. Your letters are also symbols.

With symbols you have connected the two worlds, the visible and the invisible.

Your letters are birds. Caught in your net, stirred from their flight... Their wings are our written down speech. Landing and takeoff is conducted according to the rules. The rules you call grammar, but it is nothing other than geometry.

I myself was passionate about games and contests... I wanted to be the first in translation, wandering and writing.

They believed that the very name Croat comes from the word mountain (gora)... They were competing in the reading of the Bible and the chapters in which their name was mentioned: Isa 10, 29; Isa 10, 31; Ezek 27, 9; Ps 83, 8.

Wild animals, that is what we are, John. You believe in man and his laws, and laws would not be necessary if we were not wild animals. Look at my cat, he does not attack you, even though you have desecrated his territory. We men, we are wild. Rabid and petulant... In a rabid dog too, one can see only – a short life.

I put together letters, I formed words, I spoke.

There was no doubt, the world is orbis quadratus, mundus quadratus, and its balance rests on the number four – a symbol of firmness, order and legality.

My politically charged coming-of-age story Voices in the Forest brings the futility of the bygone Croatian marriages to the fore. If the pretty but obtuse image of Fairy of Velebit personifies the Queen of Croatia, it would be better for Croats to dethrone her and put equally beautiful but the shrewd image of Zsa Zsa Gabor in her place. It would give Croatia a new angle how to manage her future marriages while still sexy and in demand. Remember, every marriage a box of diamonds and a house.

Nevertheless, by the time the Ustashi collapse came, the Croatian Catholic hierarchy had blood on its vestments from years of tacit cooperation with genocide in the Balkans.26 Worse, the Vatican compounded its blunder by indiscriminately assisting thousands of Ustashi criminals to escape to Italy and South America; many of these men were, by any standard, among the most heinous criminals of the war.27

I study dead languages for a living,” I said. “That’s why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How’s your Serbo-Croatian? What’s your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?

Come on, Tony!” a woman shouted. “Make the clear!” Adam didn’t have to be told that the woman shouting was Tony’s mother. Had to be. When a parent calls out to her own child, you can always tell. There is that harsh ping of disappointment and exasperation in their voice. No parent believes they sound this way. Every parent does. We all hear it. We all think that only other parents do it but that magically we are immune. An old Croatian proverb Adam had learned in college applied here: “The hunchback sees the hump of others—never his own.” Three

Serbs don’t forget, as the graffito goes, the atrocities that the Croatian ustashas committed against them in World War II. That was repeated in school over and over by history teachers when I was a pupil in Croatia. Many Croats don’t forget the slaughters that the Serb nationalist chetniks committed on the Croatian rural population, although that lesson was passed over in silence in our history lessons. My brother-in-law—who died of stomach cancer, and who had spent the recent war two hundred yards away from the Serb border toward Vukovar, from where his street was shelled almost daily—told me that when he was a child, during World War II, he ran into a ditch full of Croatian peasants massacred by chetniks. He never forgot, and wasn’t even allowed to talk about it because he would be jailed for spreading nationalist propaganda. He told me this in the park after my father’s funeral, at a moment when we were both talking about life, death, and souls. Which is better, to forget or to remember? Of course, to remember, but not to abuse the memories as Serbian leaders have done to spur their armies into aggression against Croats and Muslims. Croats will remember Vukovar. Muslims will remember Srebrenica. And what is the lesson? Not to trust thy neighbor? But that’s perhaps where the trouble began and will resume.

When he moved to another end of our town, our friendship diminished, and I made other friends. I moved to the States, and he stayed home. During the Serbo-Croatian war, he became a Serbian soldier, and I heard reports that he participated in the bombing of our hometown. That friendship seems to be ruined; it is hard to forgive something like that—anyhow, it will take a couple of decades perhaps. On the other hand, maybe the rumor is not true. And maybe I made his childhood bitter, who knows; maybe it was partly because of me that he resented the town.

Yandex translation from Croatian to English: Nomadom was the time when the ratio of beauty began to think about how about love than between two parts, in which opposites attract only magical powers, and the same ratio is equal to the lords and architecture and nature.

..quite limitless: climbing a Swiss Alp, tasting wine at a French chateau, renting a surfboard in Portugal, having tea & scones in England, chilling out in Sweden's Ice Hotel or sipping a local Karlovacko beer while soaking your toes in the Adriatic off the Croatian coast.

I think that it is important for everyone to understand the brutality of the Bosnian War. The Army of Republika Srpska (VRS, operated by Serbian Chetniks), The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA, who transferred from their army and into the Army of Republika Srpska), The Croatian Army (HV), and the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) committed genocide against Bosnians, the majority of them being Bosniaks. Political parties that supported Croatian and Serbian nationalism included the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS). 90 percent of war crimes were committed by Serb forces while Croats were responsible for 6 percent of war crimes.

Bosnian Americans are a minority even though they are of European origin and have white skin. They have been systematically oppressed for a very long time by those who support Serbian and Croatian nationalism. They are not formally accepted as a minority, but I think that their horrifying conditions qualify them to be one. Bosnians have not received any “white privilege” and this is particularly true for Bosniaks. I had classmates attack me for being a Muslim. I faced severe xenophobia and Islamophobia. My classmates had the audacity to scream that I would bomb their house.

Over 857,000 immigrants arrived during Williams’s first year, of whom about 60 percent were Italians, Jews, and Slavs. These new immigrants were overwhelmingly male (including 89 percent of all Croatians and 81 percent of all Italians), overwhelmingly unskilled (including 96 percent of all Ruthenians and 89 percent of all Lithuanians), and mostly between the ages of fourteen and forty-five.

What we once called jugoslavistika at the university—that is, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian literature—had disappeared as a discipline together with its country of origin.

A language is a dialect backed by an army. Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are backed by paramilitary forces. You’re not going to let semiliterate criminals advise you in matters linguistic, are you?

A waiter there told me that during the war, people who came in had a hard time choosing the right word when they wanted to order coffee. The word coffee, he explained, is different in Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, and every innocent word choice was fraught with threatening political connotations. “To avoid trouble,” he’d said, “people started ordering espresso, which is a neutral Italian word, and overnight, we stopped serving coffee here and served only espresso.

Croatia, with hundreds of thousands of Serbs within its boundaries, was not ready to accept such an outcome. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had long dreamed of establishing Croatia as an independent country. But the boundaries of his “country,” drawn originally by Tito to define the republic within Yugoslavia, would contain areas in which Serbs had lived for centuries. In the brief war in Slovenia the Yugoslav Army seemed to be defending the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia; when that same army went to war only a few weeks later against Croatia, it had become a Serb army fighting for the Serbs inside Croatia. The Croatian-Serbian war began with irregulars and local incidents, and escalated rapidly to full-scale fighting. In August 1991, an obscure Yugoslav Army lieutenant colonel named Ratko Mladic joined his regular forces with the local irregulars—groups of young racists and thugs who enjoyed beating up Croats—and launched an attack on Kijevo, an isolated Croat village in the Serb-controlled Krajina. There had been fighting prior to Kijevo, but this action, backed fully by Belgrade, “set the pattern for the rest of the war in Croatia: JNA [Yugoslav] artillery supporting an infantry that was part conscript and part locally-recruited Serb volunteers.”12 Within weeks, fighting had broken out across much of Croatia. The JNA began a vicious artillery assault on Vukovar, an important Croat mining town on the Serbian border. Vukovar and the region around it, known as eastern Slavonia, fell to the Serbs in mid-November, and Zagreb was threatened, sending Croatia into panic. (The peaceful return of eastern Slavonia to Croatia would become one of the central issues in our negotiations in 1995.) After exhausting other options, the European Community asked the former British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington to take on the task of bringing peace to Yugoslavia. Carrington, an urbane man of legendary integrity, told me later that he had never met such terrible liars in his life as the peoples of the Balkans. As the war in Croatia escalated and Vukovar crumbled under Serb shells, Carrington put forward a compromise plan

An old Croatian proverb Adam had learned in college applied here: “The hunchback sees the hump of others—never his own.

Hravat is the Croatian word for “Croat” and it’s where we get the word cravat. So Croatia means “tie land.

NAREDNIK: Vidi se, davno tu nije bilo rata. Pa kako da onda bude morala, pitam se ja? Mir, to je pusta zbrka, tek rat stvara red. Čovječanstvo u miru buja kao zelje. Posvuda koti ljudi i stoku kao da to nije ništa. Svatko ždere što ga volja, gromadu sira na bijeli kruh pa onda još na taj sir krišku slanine. Nitko ne zna koliko u ovom gradu pred nama ima mladića i dobrih konja, nitko ih nikada nije prebrojavao. Prolazio sam područjima u kojima rata nije bilo možda sedamdeset godina, ljudi nisu još imali imena, nisu se ni poznavali. Samo ondje gdje je rat ima i urednih popisa i registratura, cipele vezuju u bale i žito skupljaju u vreće, uredno se prebrojava i odvodi ljudstvo i stoka; jer se zna: bez reda nema rata!

The magic of America is that we're a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.” Quote by Madeleine Albright, Former Secretary of State. Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová on May 15, 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996 and was confirmed unanimously by the Senate to become the first woman to hold a Cabinet post as Secretary of State. She currently serves as the Chairperson of the Albright Stonebridge Group and is a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. In May 2012, Secretary Albright was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Aside from English she speaks French, Russian, and Czech; she also understands Polish and Serbo-Croatian.

An old Croatian proverb Adam had learned in college applied here: “The hunchback sees the hump of others—never his own.” Three

As a student enrolled at Southern New Hampshire University, Andrej Oljaca showcases fluency in Serbian, Croatian, and Spanish. This diverse linguistic ability distinguishes him in professional environments and enhances his prospects for future careers.

Modern visitors were often surprised to learn that the names and ages of the children were changed, three children were deleted from the story, and that “Edelweiss” was not a traditional Austrian folk song but was written by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1959. Those who consulted a map would ask how landlocked Austria had a navy and learn that the real-life Georg von Trapp had been a World War I submarine captain in the navy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which controlled the port city Trieste (now part of Italy) and the Slovenian and Croatian coasts. Tourists would also learn that escaping Nazi-dominated Austria by hiking to Switzerland is not an option, as the border is roughly two hundred miles away. In fact, locals chuckled at the film’s closing scene, as the family is depicted hiking in the direction toward Germany and the Kehlsteinhaus, known to Americans and the British as Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest.

I’m convinced that the best things in life are: Red wine, honey, Croatian olive oil, being self-employed, love, old books, the Bialetti Moka pot, sunsets, and living in a neighborhood that wasn’t planned by modernist architects. Anything else is strictly unnecessary.

It was right during the period when Karadžić was the most vocal champion of absolute separation along “cultural border-lines” that I happened to thumb through the 1991/92 Sarajevo phonebook. Under the family name Karadžić, I found twenty-one entries. In addition to the aforementioned poet, the rest of the entries could be fit under the following ethnic rubrics: 10 Muslims, 9 Serbs and 1 Croat. The most curious aspect of these lisings is the fact that the only Croat, Mate Karadžić, carried the same first name as the leader of the Croatian nationalist party, Mate Boban. And amongst the Muslims, I found Ale Karadžić, Ale being a term of endearment for Alija, the first name of the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović.

This aspect of sentimentality also has its cultural forms. The Croatian sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic has described the postmodern condition as 'postemotional.' Drawing on the works of David Riesman, Emile Durkheim, George Ritzer, George Orwell, and others, he contends that emotions are the primary object of manipulation in postmodern culture. Emotion has increasingly been divorced from the intellect and judgement, and thus from responsible action: 'postemotional types,' as he puts it, 'know that they can experience the full range of emotions in any field, domestic or international, and never be called upon to demonstrate the authenticity of their emotions in commitment to appropriate action...Today, everyone knows that emotions carry no burden, no responsibility to act, and above all, that emotions of any sort are accessible to nearly everyone.

It was when she thought about Nino that Margaret lost her courage, “became a coward”: “It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves.” At night she “imagined every thing.” Perhaps Nino would be killed by troops massing outside the city, as she had heard the Croatian soldiers fighting for Austria in Lombardy had massacred babies; they might set fire to Chiara’s house and Margaret would not be there to save him. Giovanni could be killed in the fighting; Margaret herself might not survive the French assault. What would become of Nino then? Since Nino’s birth, “my heart is bound to earth as never before.” But she could not leave, she “could not see my little boy.

Ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia were the first Volksdeutsche (or folksdojčeri, as they were called in Serbo-Croatian) who were able to freely emigrate from a socialist country to the West, and they did so in comparatively large numbers.

From July 1959 onward, the screening of mixed families involved proving the German partner—regardless of gender—had been the primary source of cultural influence in the family. In several documented cases, mixed families were not accepted into West Germany because the German Volkstum of the one partner had not been found to be dominant. In practice, this was assessed by checking whether the family spoke German at home or used another language, usually Serbo-Croatian or Hungarian

For example, in 1965, the family of Josef K.—who, according to the BVA, was an ethnic German born in 1927 to two German parents—was not granted an entry visa because his non-German wife, Djurdja, did not speak any German and the children had “typically Slavic first names.”37 The fact that past applicants from their hometown Sokolovac in Croatia had had a good knowledge of the German language was held against this candidate. In a similar case in 1964, Emil S. and his wife, Jelka, from Slavonian Vukovar were denied entry despite the “typically German” first names of their three children—Josef, Emmerich, and Karl—because Jelka’s Croatian Volkstum was judged to be dominant in the family.38 In contrast, Stefan V., a Hungarian German man from Czerwenka (Crvenka) in Serbia was accepted, even though he had his father’s typically Hungarian surname and was registered as Hungarian in his Yugoslav identification. His son Tibor bore an equally Hungarian first name. Yet Stefan and his children spoke excellent German and, according to the embassy in Belgrade, “made a very good impression.” Therefore, their application was granted without hesitation.39

Contrary to the idea that anyone with even remotely German descent would be recognized as ethnically German, German ancestry at times counted for very little compared with language skills in the family. This can be seen in the case of Barbara and Marko K. from Komletinci in Croatian Syrmia. Their first application, filed in 1963, to relocate to West Germany with their four sons was rejected even though both partners had German mothers and Barbara even spoke German quite well. Over a year after the family had filed their application for the second time in 1968, they received a letter from the BVA explaining that they were in fact not German Volkszugehörige, because this required a Bekenntnis. And the “most reliable evidence” for this Bekenntnis—according to the BVA—was the use of the German language in the family. Since the consulate in Zagreb had revealed that the family spoke Croatian at home, they had to be considered ethnically Croatian and were therefore denied permission to immigrate.40 This outright identification of language and Bekenntnis, which was not covered by section 6 of the BVFG, had become common administrative practice for Germans from Yugoslavia. In the overall system of co-ethnic immigration to the FRG, it was not until the large-scale Russian German immigration of the 1990s that language skills obtained such an important status.

Nevertheless, by the time the Ustashi collapse came, the Croatian Catholic hierarchy had blood on its vestments from years of tacit cooperation with genocide in the Balkans.26 Worse, the Vatican compounded its blunder by indiscriminately assisting thousands of Ustashi criminals to escape to Italy and South America; many of these men were, by any standard, among the most heinous criminals of the war.

Most of these requests were straightforward and not particularly controversial: They sought the cabinet officers of the genocidal Croatian puppet government that the Germans had installed during the war, for example; leaders of the primitive clerical-fascist Ustashi organization; commanders and guards of the Jasenovac concentration camp; wartime security police officers; and similar suspects.25 But the defeated anti-Tito factions in Yugoslavia had powerful friends abroad, not the least of whom was Pope Pius XII.

Rijeka literally means ‘river’ in everyday Croatian. Growing up, it never seemed strange to me - only after we moved, and I was surrounded by other languages on a daily basis, did I realize it was like naming a town Forest or Hill without using an old-timey word to do it.

I looked around their small, modest, unfinished home, filled with other people’s ragtag, twenty-year-old furniture. Zorica’s Croatian house had been taken from her; her family had also been persecuted for their ethnicity. She’d battled cancer. Milos didn’t want to fight in the war. He was driving a cab to keep this roof over their heads. They were victims too. •

Croatian

My mother calls once a year to ask when I’m going back to studies. This is Croatian slang for “the money’s up.

The king of chess YouTubers? One fairly average Croatian player named Antonio Radic, otherwise known by his screen name, agadmator. He has 407,000 subscribers. Not views. Subscribers.

French is the perfect language for love,” Monique said. “Je t’aime.” She stared straight at Tomas. That was subtle. He thought about telling her to fuck off in Croatian but decided not to risk it in case she assumed it was a compliment.

Kako su žalosne sadrene Hygieje po prašnjavim ljekarničkim izlozima! Kao lim dječjih igračaka, tako su tanke i prozirne i besmislene sve ograde ljudskih shema, kojima se ljudi ograđuju od životne istine i od istinite životne stvarnosti. To su zapravo sve pločice dječjih igračaka, religija, božićnih bedastoća, idila koje uznose kult čiste laži, a iza svega proviruje roba: kupujte margarin, čokoladu, naranče, vaniliju, sukno, gumije! Ljudi su izmislili tapete, sagove, parkete, cijevi s ugrijanom vodom, staklena vrata, zlatne ribice, kaktuse i čitave izloge knjiga po svojim stanovima, koje nitko ne čita. Ljudi su nagomilali pod svojim krovovima kitajsku majoliku, akvarele, damastne stolnjake, svilene čarape, krzna i dragulje. Ljudi lakiraju svoje nokte kao perverzni istočnjaci, kupaju se u mramornim kupaonicama, voze se u ugrijanim kočijama, piju gorke želučane likere, ali pojma zapravo nemaju što je to životna stvarnost i kako bi trebalo živjeti.

You’re sure you’re okay?” Luka looked wary as we walked to the Trg, like the sight of the city might set me off crying. We spoke Cringlish, a system we’d devised without discussion—Croatian sentence structure injected with English stand-ins for the vocabulary I was lacking, then conjugated with Croatian verb endings. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just having culture shock.” “You can’t get culture shock from your own culture.” “You can.

The Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the Serbian/Croatian attacks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the massacres against the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, the first Palestinian uprising—these were all cited as proof of a widespread, international conspiracy to exterminate Muslims.

Yeah, but I’m a Croatian Catholic. There’s nothing religious about that. It only means you go to church two times in your life. When you marry and when you die.

Although Bush is not mentioned, it is clear from Sadleir’s memo that the Republican leadership had taken precautions to hide its campaign association with Fascist groups, particularly the Croatians. Sadleir was told by his State Department counterpart that “prominent” federal, state and municipal American politicians were discreetly advised by the Nixon administration to stay away from Croatian gatherings on April 10, because that was the day they celebrated Hitler’s establishment of Ante Pavelić’s “puppet State of Croatia,” an artificial nation under the complete control of Nazi Germany.36

Many others, including the Croatian study cited earlier, have found thyme to be very effective against mold, more so than many other oils tested. The Croatian study also found that an extract of thyme oil called thymol was even more effective than thyme oil itself, suggesting that other plants containing thymol are probably effective. Oregano is another source of thymol, so it is no surprise that oregano often tests strongly against mold. The tropical plants cinnamon, clove, and lemongrass also show up in study after study as being effective against a variety of molds. In fact, in a study from India17 testing 75 essential oils against Aspergillus niger, the researchers concluded that the most effective were cinnamon, cassia, clove, and lemongrass.

showcased their best basketball, defeating the Croatian team