My Dubrovnik Story in Pre-War Yugoslavia

It was a spring evening in 1988 when I stood on a hilltop to catch the sun setting on the Adriatic and wait for the city lights below to appear. A colleague from our seminar had told me of the view. The image of scenic beauty was an easy enticement to climb the path up the steep and rugged limestone hill.

A stiff breeze crossed the fortress we chose as our vantage point. We bundled up against the cold as we took in the orange sun dropping into the blue-green water, mingling its rays with the Adriatic and the city’s hills. My companion spoke the history of the stone walls which provided us with some shelter against the wind. Centuries of foreign invasions had amazingly left the 800 year-old city untouched. The region’s most recent encounter with danger fifty years earlier was still distant enough to evoke a mood of security together with the calm scene before me.

The future seemed as bright and promising as the lights beginning to glow in the homes of Dubrovnik. In fact, the future was more real since that was the subject of the seminar my companion and I were attending -- the World Futures Studies Federation with futurists from around the world. Urgent issues were discussed during our two weeks in Dubrovnik with much time spent within the comfort and warmth of the thick stone walls embracing the city. Our intense intellectual discourse and techniques for forecasting the future gave me a security in our abilities to sense the trends and flow of future events.

With the ethnic onslaught of the nineties, my memory stands now a schizoid thing bounding between incongruent images. The setting sun would become incendiary fragments igniting the city. The small lights dotting the streets would become people scurrying for protection or fleeing the city altogether. It would be fellow countrymen who would instigate the brutality against their own citizens and historic treasures.

The fortress, which had seemed so solid and secure as I enjoyed a gleaming Adriatic sun, would become a major staging area for the target below. Time was the stone floor beneath my feet that was yanked out from under my memory, my sense of perception. The past and future had been a smooth continuity despite intellectualized studies which warned me to the contrary.  We think time moves at a measured pace but the unpredictability of human activities can be as devastating as an earthquake.