A FEW YEARS AGO, we holidayed in Istria, on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Once part of the Roman province of Illyria, today the area is Croatia’s leading tourist destination, with its sunny summers, good infrastructure and wide variety of good hotels, national parks and traces of its ancient past. The food is good, too, with (for me) better Italian food than you’ll get in much of Italy itself – perhaps from being occupied by the Italians from 1918 to 1945.
We stayed in Porec, which is probably the heartland of Croatia’s tourist dream, and travelled around the region, by bus and, sometimes, by boat. A few days into our holiday, my son and myself headed for Pula, the major town on the peninsula, and about 25 miles from Porec. We travelled by bus, going “around the world for sport”, but eventually, after a couple of hours, getting into Pula.
Pula is magic – today an industrial and shipbuilding town, it was once the Roman city of Polensium, and it shows. Its Roman amphitheatre is one of the finest still standing, and in use to the present day. The old – inner – city follows Roman layout and design. We visited about four museums in the town, its fine cathedral, which traces its building back to the 5th century. It’s also a great town for monasteries, convents and squares. Given its history: over the centuries it was ruled by an eclectic group of empires, from the Romans, to the maritime empire of Venice, to Napoleon’s attempts to create a “greater Europe”, then the Austro-Hungarian empire and, finally, after the first World War, the Italians.
All these empires left their military marks: the town has bastions heaped upon citadels, linked with gun emplacements, barracks, defensive walls and moats.
The town was bombed heavily in the second World War, and one of its landmarks, the Temple of Augustus, from about AD14, was destroyed (it was rebuilt by about 1947). The town was, probably unfortunately for its well-being, the major naval base for the Austro-Hungarian navy, and was in use in both world wars. After we had covered as much as we could, we had a good fish lunch in the town’s main square, the Forum.
Afterwards we dandered through the town and eventually came to the Arch of Sergius, which has been around since 27BC, and marked the edge of the original Roman town. And then we saw the Caffe Uliks. Outside the cafe was a statue of James Joyce. So we went in, and found it to be a little haven of Joyceiana – pictures of Dublin from 1900, images of Jimmy himself, and the family too, of course. I had a local Karlovacko beer, my son had cola – Caffe Uliks does stock a fair range of Irish hooch, but we were supporting local (in this case Croatian) produce.
We spoke to the barman and, telling him we were Irish, we were introduced to some Dutch tour guides, who proceeded to regale us with tales of James Joyce – all of which they read from the captions under the pictures of Joyce’s Dublin.
When we’d finished, we left Caffe Uliks, and headed back to the bus station, and Porec.
Checking afterwards on the Joyce connection, we found the Caffe Uliks is in the same apartment building where Joyce taught English to the officers of the Austro-Hungarian navy, from October 1904 (soon after he’d left Dublin with Nora Barnacle) until March 1905. When Joyce left, he had hoped for a job teaching English in Trieste, but nothing was available so, rather angrily it appears, he went to Pula for work.
After March 1905 he returned to Trieste – it seems that he never returned to Pula. Perhaps his true feelings about Pula, and indeed Istria, were those which he wrote in a letter back to Dublin: “Pola [Pola was the spelling under the Austro-Hungarian rule] is a back-of-God-speed place – a naval Siberia – 37 men of war in the harbour, swarming with faded uniforms. Istria is a long boring place wedged into the Adriatic peopled by ignorant Slavs who wear little red caps and colossal breeches.” It’s changed a bit since then.
However, that was our meeting, so to speak, with Mr Joyce. But some weeks after, when we worked out the exact day we’d been to Pula, we found that it was, in fact June 16th – Bloomsday. And so we had celebrated the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora, albeit unwittingly, far away in Istria. I wonder if he would have appreciated that? Probably only if we’d bought him drink.