Day 43: Croatia

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/hr.html

Discuss.

[DanielX]

My aunt is the grand-daughter of Croatian immigrants. She's only 5' tall, almost as wide, and she's one of most pugnacious women you'll ever meet. She manages to boss around her 6' tall husband (admittedly, Uncle George isn't the most strong-willed of men), and is perhaps the most stereotypical 'New Yawker' in my family, including accent (the only oddity is that she doesn't like the Subways that George adores. She prefers the bus). She's also the only person I know who went to a catholic school taught by actual nuns - and apparently there was some pressure for her to become one. Didn't happen, she now bosses around the geeks in the New York Trash Bureau or some such (whoever controls the gargantuan amounts of garbage in NYC).

Also, Croats fought on the wrong side of WWII, in part because they hated the Serbs (Including ol' Marshall Tits). Not a good thing in my book, but the Serbs weren't always the nicest folks in the universe either.

Almost the only Catholics in the Balkans. Everyone else south of Poland and east of Slovenia is either an Orthodox or a Muslim.

Capital is named Zagreb. Not quite as reverse-alphabetical as Zebra, but close.

The only country, pretty near, that looks like  boomerang. The southern folks are actually called 'Dalmatians'. One of the cities there is called Split. It also serves as to almost completely deny a coastline to Bosnia. Dalmatia started off Venetian, then became Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav, Italian/Croat divided, Yugoslav again, and finally Croat.The rest of Croatia, btw, basically passed between Hungary, the Ottomans, and Austria-Hungary before Yugoslavia came to exist.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Tito was half-Croat/half-Slovene. And he had the support of all the different ethnic groups.

The Ustashe (Croat fascists)'s atrocities were so horrible, even the Nazis were shocked by them! They actually had Nazi advisors of all people trying to get them to tone down their brutality.

[WMS]

Their government has moderated in recent years since the nationalists were ousted in free and fair elections and they're much more pleasant now. During the nationalist years, they first fought on the side of the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims, basically), then against the Bosniaks (and actually lost that war), then on their side again. Sometimes they did both at once. The Serbs would shell whichever side was stronger during the Croat-Bosniak scraps. Weird-ass war.

Also, despite European-UN pressure and condemnation, their successful 1995 assaults on Croatian Serb areas (and, then, on Bosnian Serb areas in conjunction with the Bosniaks) did, basically, lead to the end of the "Wars of Yugoslav Devolution", in contradiction to a lot of European establishment opinion which said only giving in to every Serb demand would bring peace. Idiots.