By Kate Hogan

When visitors step through the medieval gates of Dubrovnik, Croatia, their first sight is sun-washed limestone streets, orange terracotta rooftops, and, depending on where you enter, the glittering Adriatic Sea just beyond the city walls. It is peaceful, eternal, and postcard-perfect. It’s hard to imagine that barely three decades ago, those same streets were strewn with shrapnel and charred by fire. Or that the people who lived here once survived off rainwater and bread baked from the city’s last sacks of flour. Or that bombers once circled above, and sirens were a staple of childhoods. 

I visited Dubrovnik this past summer with my mom, a trip we had been planning for years, drawn by its turquoise coastline and medieval charm. We spent our days wandering the marble streets, swimming in the clear Adriatic, and climbing the walls of the city that once served as protection against invaders. It’s easy, amid the sun and sea breeze, to only see the idealized version of Croatia. But beneath it lies a story of survival, one that still lives in the people who call it home. 

Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Photo credit: Nikola Kojević.

In June 1991, when both Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, it ignited one of Europe’s most brutal conflicts since World War II. The Yugoslav People’s Army besieged Dubrovnik, even though it was not a military target, but a centuries-old city of artists, scholars, and families. The assault stunned the world: a walled city with no military value was shelled for seven relentless months between October 1991 and May 1992. More than 2,000 shells rained down on Dubrovnik’s Old Town, killing about 200 civilians, displacing around 33,000 people, and damaging 68 percent of its buildings. Palaces, churches, and homes were shattered, and the city’s historic skyline was consumed by smoke. 

Despite its UNESCO World Heritage protection, the “Pearl of the Adriatic” was cut off from the world, its people melting snow for water, burning furniture for heat, and hiding in candlelit basements as artillery fire echoed throughout the hills.

Ivana Radić doesn’t have to imagine it, however. She lived it. 

Now a tour guide in her native city, she was a child who survived the Siege of Dubrovnik.

My mom and I met Radić when we booked her for a walking tour of Old Town. She greeted us in the lobby of our hotel, smiling at the beautiful day ahead of us—a woman so full of warmth it is hard to imagine the darkness she had once lived through.

The first thing she told me when I asked about that time period was that she “doesn’t remember everything from that time.” The war carved a hole in her memory between the ages of seven to fourteen, a “form of amnesia” created by shock. Radić can recall memories from after the war, saying, “It was as if my head had finally popped out of the surface of the ocean in the 7th/8th grade, and I existed again.”

Her memories did eventually return, “gradually,” in her twenties, as “very acute screenshots in a whole lot of vagueness.”

But some moments can never leave her. One of those is what occurred on October 1, 1991, the day the siege began. Radić and her mother were on a routine errand when the sirens started. Fighter planes bombed the iconic white cross on Mount Srd that overlooks the city; “the opening salvo,” as she described it. People panicked around them. She remembered her mother crouching down and telling her, “I know you have many questions, but now you have to do as I say, and I’ll explain later.”

Radić recalled running up “so many stairs in such a short amount of time before the planes could circle in for another attack” that it must’ve been “an adrenaline rush[ed] insane feat of physical effort.”

She wasn’t looking at “the black smoke coiling up from the damage” of the bombing; she was looking at her mother’s face: “the shock, the outrage, the disbelief of war actually becoming reality.” 

And then, as a child, she noticed something else—her mother swearing. When Radić pointed it out, her mother answered, “simply, seething, ‘You can swear at them. It’s an exception.’” She “had no concept of war or bombs or politics that brought us to that point,” but her mother’s vulgar language told Radić something irreversible had begun. 

For seven months, Dubrovnik was cut off from the outside world. Between 1991 and 1992, the city endured shelling and blockade by the Yugoslav People’s Army. 

Power failed, water became scarce, and supplies dwindled. The only lights in the blackouts were candles and gas lamps, which Radić said she “can hear the hiss of its light even now.” Everyone contributed what they had “to optimize their resources” and limit “the waste” so that her grandmother could cook “for the whole building,” rationing every grain, every drop. 

People waiting to get water during the siege. Photo credit: Peter Denton.

Radić remembered carrying buckets of seawater up four flights of stairs “to flush the toilets.” Rainwater collected in “tarp funnels” on her balcony became drinking water. 

Bread was sacred. Bakeries had sworn that “the city will never be without bread,” and they kept that promise, even when store shelves were bare. Radić recalled “long lines at the grocery store,” and when the “supplies finally arrived, it was mostly empty shelves and some green ham.”

Radić’s mother “jokes to this day that in the war,” people could eat “something moldy” and never get sick because it was all they had, and their “body was in full-on survival mode.” But it was when the fighting ended, and “the people slowly managed to relax,” that the damage surfaced in the form of “autoimmune diseases” and chronic stress disorders. “Doctors sometimes have to remind people that they’ve been through a lot, and that it left permanent consequences on everyone’s health,” Radić said. 

What Radić remembers the most vividly isn’t the sights of bombs falling, but the sounds: “the sirens, the low-flying planes, or, worst, the sound of missiles mid-air. The whistle brings the dread of the pending impact.” She remembers  huddling in the darkness, “surrounded by fear” with others in bomb shelters, “counting how long the middle is taking, judging its pitch so we know which neighborhood it’s headed for.” 

Even decades later, she can’t step into the war museum she took my mom and me to without her body tightening. “When I hear those sounds,” she told me, “it feels like coming to work naked—too exposed.”

Life in the cellars during bombardments was strange. Radić shared that she remembers “friendship bracelets, a lot of knitting, card games, and sounds of a guitar.” Adults were either “very silent or overly cheerful,” masking their fear for their own sake or for the children’s; she isn’t sure.  She felt, even then, that “people saw kids as a treasure” that must’ve been guarded, “maybe as a little bit of joy and hope.”

“People vanished from my life at random intervals,” Radić shared. Her father left to fight in the war. Her grandfather went to Rijeka for medical treatment and never came back. He passed away from “cancer, which got treated too late because of the whole mess” of the war. She “never got either of them back, not really.” By the end of the war, Radić and her father “were strangers.” 

Her best friend growing up, her neighbor’s German shepherd Bart, “died of stress” before she “got to see him again.” Radić said, “It became one of those strange regrets that stab you randomly throughout life.”

There was more pain caused by the war than just the obvious: “the ache of being apart from your family and everything familiar, indefinitely, not knowing what was happening to those who remained back home, the feeling of being a burden to the people who sheltered you. Even if they never thought of you as such, of being unrooted and adrift, not belonging, being pitied.” 

When the siege was lifted, Dubrovnik was battered but still standing. Its people rebuilt. Rooftops were replaced. Walls were cleaned. But for those who lived through it, the city was never the same. 

“The war bared the spirit of the city for me,” Radić said. “Yes, it’s beautiful, but I know it’s more. It’s the pride and tenacity of the people.”

When the fighting finally ended, life slowly resumed. For Radić, that meant trying to build a future from the fragments of a childhood stolen from her. She went on to study archaeology at the University of Zagreb (Sveučilište u Zagrebu), earning both her undergraduate and master’s degrees between 2002 and 2009. Her studies combined historical research with field excavation and even a Japanese language course. 

After graduation, she spent nearly a decade as a field archaeologist, managing excavation sites, analyzing artifacts, and publishing research. In 2011, she worked with OMEGA Engineering on the excavation of The Church of St. Stephen’s inside Dubrovnik’s Old City. 

Then, Radić turned her expertise toward sharing her home. In 2015, she founded GOT2DU Dubrovnik Sightseeing & Walking Tours, working as a licensed freelance tour guide and designing interactive themed tours, inviting tourists, like my mom and me, to see her city through the eyes of someone who experienced its past. Her work is similar to the journey of her country, as it rebuilds its identity and finds pride in what it has endured. 

But survival also means change, which was inevitable, perhaps even without war. In the decades since independence, Croatia has rebuilt not only its cities but its identity. The country joined the European Union in 2013 and adopted the euro in 2023, marking its firm place in the European community. Tourism became the backbone of its economy, turning once scarred coastal towns into some of the Mediterranean’s most sought-after destinations. 

Maia Anzulovic Bality, a translator hired by the U.S. Department of Defense who worked with NATO during the postwar peacekeeping years, saw these transitions firsthand. “When I first arrived, it was four years into the war,” she told me. “There was the Dayton Peace Accord, basically step-by-step instructions on how to end this war.”

While in Dubrovnik, she translated for military generals and government officials. “Some days there was no translating to do,” she said, “and others, I was interpreting for the head general and the president. I rode in tanks and helicopters. I went to NATO meetings. I watched the process of peace literally being built in real time.” 

Damage from bombing during the siege. Photo courtesy of Maia Anzulovic Bality.

Bality recalled watching families rebuild their homes, destroyed in the war, “exactly as they were before,” without “construction in a modern sense.” Families—“brothers, uncles, and fathers,”—helped one another. “Everyone pitching in to put the pieces back together,” she described. 

She saw a country “stopped in time,” she said. “It felt nostalgic—every neighborhood had a little shop for everything, most goods were made in Croatia or Italy, and people lived simply. Poor, but happy. They had what they needed and didn’t notice they needed more.”

Now, she said, “big grocery stores are replacing the mom-and-pop ones.” 

Dubrovnik, in particular, has transformed. “The older generations have started to die out,” Radić said. Newcomers arrived, drawn by opportunity and beauty. Cruise ships began to anchor daily beneath the old stone walls, spilling thousands of visitors into the narrow streets. “Dubrovnik the postcard” became a global image, “artificially preserved in this UNESCO resin snapshot,” she said, polished and beautiful for tourists. 

Tourists at the beach in Dubrovnik. Photo credit: Matthew Klint.

The city that once fought for survival now thrives on its own allure, its economy booming each summer with visitors who come for the same sea and stone that once sheltered its people from war. 

Radić is proud of this aspect of Dubrovnik, but worried too. “Some people no longer cherish the city,” she said. “They just want to exploit it. The disrespect hurts the same way the bombs did, just sneakier.” 

Tourists on Main Street in Old Town. Photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar.

Today, as a tour guide, she walks strangers like my mom and me through the same cobblestone streets she once ran across in fear. She teaches visitors about medieval fortifications, Renaissance diplomacy, and seafaring glory, but she also teaches them about the war. “The archaeologist in me won’t allow skipping context,” she said with a wry smile. “History is a crowdsourced resource. Every stage has a lesson to teach.” 

She told me she doesn’t want Dubrovnik to be defined by its trauma, but she balances it with a refusal to let that trauma be erased. “Someone’s trauma is never their whole identity,” she said. “Most tourists have vaguely heard of the war.  Why would they know the details of something that happened half a world away thirty years ago? Our duty is to educate those who care, and maybe those who don’t.” 

I understood that sentiment in a new way later when I spoke with Collegiate Upper School history teacher Shannon Castelo, who visited Croatia in 2024. 

Castelo was in high school during the Yugoslav Wars. “In my mind, Croatia was bombed out and unsafe,” she told me. “So when people told me it was a top vacation spot, I was shocked.”

Walking through Split with her daughter a few years ago, she saw something very different: a vibrant, bustling country, alive with pride. “Everyone was incredibly proud to be Croatian,” she said. “I could feel the nationalism, but not in a hypernationalistic way. People wanted us to see their country as it is now, not as we remembered it from the news.”

Castelo also noticed the generational divide. The older generation, especially those who had lived through the war, holds a fierce protectiveness of their identity. While the young Croatians born after the war carry their nationalism more lightly. 

Bality recalled “taxi drivers, shop owners, these big tough men–they all wanted to share their war stories.” 

“It reminded me how people of my generation feel about the September 11 attacks,” she said. “It shaped us in a way younger people can’t feel viscerally.”

For Castelo, visiting Dubrovnik and Split reminded her that places evolve beyond the images the world and history books freeze them in. 

She told me something her mentor, Old Dominion University professor of geography Dr. Donald Zeigler, used to say: “The best way to understand a place is through the soles of your feet.” Dubrovnik isn’t just history in the books we read in class; it’s a living memory, kept by brave people who have chosen to tell their story. 

“Don’t trap a place in its past,” Castelo said. “Be open to the fact that spaces and people change. Go talk to people. Don’t just trust a photo from 40 years ago.” 

This idea, of refusing to let a place be defined solely by its scars of history, is woven through everything Dubrovnik’s survivors are trying to do. Yes, they carry the weight of their past, but they are also determined not to be reduced to it. 

When asked what she hopes visitors take away from the beautiful city that is Dubrovnik, Radić said: “Our values,” especially libertas—liberty—which has been etched into Dubrovnik’s stones for centuries, long before the war of the 1990s. 

She hopes that people leave not just with photos of her scenic city, but with an understanding of what liberty means to Croatians. “Liberty to live well. Liberty to adapt. Seeking understanding by experiencing different perspectives. Uplifting the community.”

But liberty is not the same as forgetting. “The privilege of living in peace gives one an enormous blind spot,” she said. “We were robbed of that. The effect is a warning alarm that never turns off. War is possible. People are capable of horrific things. We can’t unsee that.” 

When I asked her what lessons Dubrovnik might offer places experiencing war today, her answer was one of perseverance. “If we had given up, Dubrovnik would have been lost,” she said. “Don’t ever give up trying to make things better. Even if it seems useless. Especially then. One stubborn straw at a time.”

This summer, when I stood with Radić on sunlit stone walls, looking over the calm blue sea, I tried to imagine this city in flames. It felt impossible. And yet, I knew it had happened, and that the person beside me, along with 58,000 others, had lived it.