A cultural/historical guide to the Zagora (inland) region of Split-Dalmatia County ZAGORA THE DALMATIAN ZAGORA (INLAND) Joško Belamarić THE DALMATIAN ZAGORA (INLAND) A cultural/historical guide to the Zagora (inland) region of Split-Dalmatia County 4 Zagora 14 Klis Zagora 24 Cetinska krajina 58 Biokovo, Imotski, Vrgorac 3 Zagora THE DALMATIAN ZAGORA (INLAND) A cultural/historical guide to the Zagora (inland) region of Split-Dalmatia County Here, from Klis onwards, on the ridge of the Dinara mountain chain, the angst of inland Dalmatia’s course wastelands has for centuries been sundered from the broad seas that lead to a wider world. The experience of saying one’s goodbyes to the thin line of Dalmatia that has strung itself under the mountain’s crest, that viewed from the sea looks like Atlas’ brothers, is repeated, not without poetic chills, by dozens of travel writers. To define the cultural denominators of Zagora, the Dalmatian inland, is today a difficult task, as the anthropological fabric of the wider Dalmatian hinterland is still too often perceived through the utopian aspect of the Renaissance ideal, the cynicism of the Enlightenment, or the exaggeration of Romanticism and the 18th century national revival. After the fall of medieval feudalism, life here has started from scratch so many times - later observers have the impression that the local customs draw their roots from some untroubled prehistoric source in which the silence of the karst on the plateau towards Promina, behind Biokovo, the gurgling of the living waters of the Zrmanja, Krka, Čikola and Cetina Ri- vers, the quivering of grain on Petrovo, Hrvatac and Vrgorac Fields, on 4 Zagora the fat lands along Strmica and Sinj, create the ide- al framework for the pleasant countenance, joyous heart and sincere morality of the local population of which many have written, each from their own point of view: from abbot Fortis and Ivan Lovrić during the Baroque period, Dinko Šimunović and Ivan Raos not so long ago to Ivan Aralica and, in his own way, Miljenko Jergović today. 5 Zagora NAME AND GENERAL HISTORY “Dalmatia” comes from the name by which the Romans called their province of Illyricum from the start of the 1st century AD (initially Delmatia, for example in Pliny and Dionysus), after the warlike tri- bal community of the Delmata, mentioned in historical sources as inhabiting the area between the Krka and Cetina rivers. This tribe was called this after their capital of Delminium, whose name has in turn been preserved in the name of the Dumno or Duvno Field (around modern day Tomislavgrad). The Delmata offered such great resistance that the Romans equated them with other tribes in the region, which explains the significantly wider breadth that province’s frontiers had in comparison with the original Delmata territory. Their name, just as much as the thousands of stone tumuli on the mainland and the islands, indicates their chief activity: Delm or Dalm in ancient Illyrian means herdsman, shepherd, herd, sheep; hence Delminium = a grazing place, a pasture, and delmë or dalmè to this day means sheep in the Albanian language. They were, howe- ver, also renowned sailors, pirates, and the entire area of Illyricum was to Rome at the close of the antiquity what Prussia was for Ger- many in the 19th century – a source of soldiers and emperors who, 6 Zagora like Diocletian, tried to renew Rome’s rigorous discipline and original virtues. Some of the most significant pages of early Croatian history, from the 9th to 11th centuries, were written in the Dalmatian Zagora area, to which preserved monuments from the source to the mouth of the Cetina River bear faithful wit- ness. Dalmatia’s territorial frame has seen signi- ficant changes, as has its Zagora part, especially towards the highlands. Over two and half centu- ries, Christian and Islamic spiritual domains met here at the close of the Middle Ages. The largest part of Zagora in Split–Dalmatia County is made up of former core of the Dal- matian Krajina—regions of continental Dalmatia that were once the centre of Croatian statehood, including Knin, Sinj, Imotski, Klis and the Ma- karska seaboard, then, from the start of the 16th century under Ottoman rule and finally annexed to the Venetian possessions in Dalmatia after the Venetian-Turkish wars of the 17th and early 7 Zagora 18th centuries. An important role was played in these wars by the local populace, under the leadership of their Serdari, Harambaši and Knezovi (princes). A new demarcation line (1699) saw Dalma- tia staked out towards the Turkish dominions by a series of strategic points and forts from Zvonigrad, over Knin, Vrlika, Sinj, Zadvarje and Vrgorac to Čitluk on the Neretva River. In renewed military operations from 1714-1718, the Turks (having won Vienna) had to give up Strmica, Trilj and the Imotska region in the Croatian coastal inland. The new demarcation line (1721) gave Dalmatia’s interior its present day shape. The return of life to the Zagora area, for decades systematically ra- vaged from both sides, was not at all simple. By its Acts of 1755 and 1756, Venice bestowed large tracts of land to its deserving indi- viduals in the territories of its “new and newest acquisitions”, and two “Padova camps” of cultivatable land to every peasant, under the condition that it be passed down along the male line, but wit- hout the right to sale and with the obligation to give a tenth of their production as a fee for the use of the land. Peasants were obliged to plant at least 4 fruit, olive or mulberry trees. There was an evident desire to anchor this inconstant nomadic Vlach people to the land in the same way as had been done in ancient Roman times with 8 Zagora war veterans. Historiography has yet to give its final appraisal of these Acts, perhaps under the suggestive influence of a saying of the time: La proclama zaratina, dura de la sera a la matina (“The Zadar Proclamation holds from evening to morning”). Domestic academics (Radoš Ante Michieli Vitturi in particular, founder of the Agricultural Academy in Lukšić), criticised the Act, saying it did not give enough conside- ration to the crude Vlach mentality, and that it did not allow for the rational enlargement of landholdings. Nevertheless, marshlands were drained around Knin, Sinj, Nadina and Ostro- vica and later on around Vrgorac, Rastoke and Imotski – employing thousands of peasants. Villages and small towns gradually took form (it was proposed that they be modelled after those in the Lika region!); the construction of roads and bridges was launched, the first industries were established and mines were opened. A si- gnificant impetus to development was made by 9 Zagora roads built during the French administration at the start of the 19th century when Dalmatia already had a population of 308,108—com- pared to only 50,000 in 1650 or its 108,090 inhabitants in 1718. The demographic growth of the eighty years that followed the Požarevac Peace came out to as much as 150 percent, despite as many as seven lean years out of every ten! In the second half of the 18th century, Zagora was revealed not only as an untapped economic resource, but also as a kind of endemic civilisation in the heart of enlightened Europe – one needs only to recall the reports of Albert Fortis and his detractor Ivan Lovrić. Venetians referred to the people of continental Dalmatia (outside of the villages and small towns) as Morlacco – after the Morowal- lachian, a distinct group of Vlach whose name has its roots in the black colour of their clothing. The name would, by way of Fortis, be adopted across Europe, where the Morlacco became one of the more important pre-Romanticism discoveries undefiled by the con- ventions of civilisation. It was long one of the most backward and impoverished of the Venetian, and later Austrian, possessions. The all-prevalent patriarch heroic ethos that had defined the highlander mentality through the centuries received its quintessential articulati- 10 Zagora on in the works of folk writers like friars Filip Grabovac and Andrija Kačić-Miošić. Inland Dalmatia, up to the borders of Lika and Bosnia & Herzegovina, lives to this day as a part of the wider Dinaric ethnic whole. The most frequently depicted of the older customs is the abduction of unmarried girls (umicanje – usually a mock play-act); blood vengeance (the umir or vražda) existed up to the 19th century; Hajduci (outlaws); Ojkanje—a kind of singing that draws its roots from the oldest ethnic substrate—that of the ancient Mediterranean and Balkans. The characteristic division of settlements into larger and smaller family tribes (fraternities made up of groups of close relatives of the same surna- me) still functions in many places. Small towns, burgs of the compact type, are typical of Zagora, sprouting chiefly on the main fields, always at the foot of one of the old fortresses (Knin, Drniš, Sinj, Imotski, Vrgorac) and having a central mar- ket square. The significance of these centres of 11 Zagora administration and economic activity was best seen at the Sunday fairs, but declined between the two World Wars with improvements to road connections to the coastal cities. Also characteristic on the other hand are the “scattered” types of villages distributed into neighbourhoods (komšiluk) of tribal denomination, often with small huts, once built without mortar, as straw-thatched dry-stones, and located on the edges of fields or along the flysh belts. Life was based on animal husbandry, olive tree growing and viticultu- re. There was an upturn in the development of Zagora in the second half of the 19th century with the boom in Dalmatian wines.