God and Croatia

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy week on the Christian calendar. Instead of traditional palm branches being distributed to parishioners on Palm Sunday, Croatians - at least in Dalmacija - get olive branches. While we do have lots of palm trees here, it doesn't even come close to the number of olive trees. So...olive branches, we get.

When you enter the church, there is a box with hundreds of these olive branches. Each parishioner is meant to take one olive branch. However, rather than one olive branch, it's a common sight to see people taking 5-6-7 branches or more...and rifling through the box to find the biggest and best branches like they're picking through potatoes.

I've lived here long enough to know the thought process:

My {husband, sister, son, daughter...etc..} doesn't go to church but because they are my kin, they are still very good Catholics. I will take branches for {so and so} and it's just as good as if they went to church.

or possibly,

I'm having the entire family over to my house for Easter next weekend and I want everyone to see how Holy I am...

Whatever the thinking, we saw old bags who looked they were hauling entire olive trees around with them!

The Pope once called Croatia the ˝Bulwark of Catholicism˝ - meaning, Croatians throughout history have lived and regularly died in defense of the faith - through invasions, conquests, etc... More recently, Croatia went from the scandal and persecution of being openly Catholic under the communists to it being a sign - perhaps THE sign - of Croatian patriotism. I say, with no doubt, that TV cameras will all point towards whomever is running for office in the local elections next

Nowadays, I often here that Croatia is culturally Catholic and people nod their head, like that actually means something. In fact, you're either Catholic or your not Catholic. You can't sit in church on Sunday morning and then take bribes on Monday and still call yourself a Catholic.

So, I see the old bags dragging their blessed olive trees and I wonder where the Bulwarks of Catholicism all went. Maybe these are the same people who's families stopped going to church the very second that the Communists came into power so that they could still get the good jobs...the big apartments that would be denied the openly faithful for their defiance of the party. Maybe now, in their twilight years, they regret their own cowardice and want God and all of us to be witnesses to the fact that they were really Catholic all along.

I don't know. I do know that, this year and from now on, we will quietly cut branches from our own olive trees.

A Zadar Cheese Story, just a taste...

I'm not going to tell you the cheese story - that's for a different post - but I will share a picture of the particular wheel that was the source of so much strife.

...you'd think the thing was made of gold...

Good Fences Don't Always Make Good Neighbors

So we're walking to the police station to update Husband's ID card. About a block away from the police station, we notice that all of the spindles from this guy's stainless steel perimeter fencing have been cut.

We asked a friend of ours who knows this guy, what happened? Aparently, during the night - someone came and cut all of the spindles and stole them. The fence had been there a week or two.

I guess that whoever stole them felt that they deserved the pieces more than the ONE WHO PAID FOR THEM!

The thinking might have been along these lines:

Neighbor A can afford a stainless steel fence;

I can't afford/don't want to pay for a stainless steel fence;

Since neighbor A bought a stainless steel fence once and if I take some of the pieces....he probably has enough money to replace them

Ergo...everybody wins.

On the issue of crime in Croatia...I would say that it is relatively low. I had a much higher chance of being wacked on the head by a lead pipe while we lived in Washington DC than I do here - where it is almost nil.

When crime happens in Croatia - it's almost always of the white collar variety (read: ripping people off for 1 kuna or 1 million kuna). The logic: You have a lot....and I have little (but somehow manage to have properties all over the county), therefore, you should give me what you have.

I'll give you another recent example.

In February, Croatia hosted the World European Handball Championship and Zadar was among the list of cities which held the games. While one would think that this would be a big deal for a small town....thousands of foreigners descending in the off-season...in fact, most restaurants remained closed (because it's the off season, silly). So, thousands of tourists were roaming around...had nowhere to go....nothing to see. That's the backdrop.

A little restaurant/bar that we frequent discussed their plans with us for capitalizing on the event. The Plan: Charge the tourists 10 euros for what costs the locals half. The rationale that they gave us....˝well, Germans are used to spending that on lunch...˝

Meaning, you have more....therefore you should pay more. I have less....therefore I should pay less....

Welcome to peasant economics.