Geographically Dubrovnik is to 1991 Croatia what Florida and Alaska are to the USA, at the fringes. As for Serbian ethnos and Orthodoxy, let the following letter speak for itself:
THE REPUBLIC OF DUBROVNIK
Letter to the Editor, Belgrade newspaper Borba. Thursday.
3 October 1991, from Stijevo Brandzulica, Molfetta (Italy).
Just a few days ago I read in your esteemed newspaper Borba of 24 August 1991 an article about the founding of the Dubrovnik Republic. As an old Dubrovniker who has been living and working in Italy, I would like you to publish my reflections, tardy though they may be.
Dubrovnik has for ages been a special city, a city of peace and freedom, a special symbiosis of Romano-Slavic life. The Slavic element stems from the surrounding countryside, whose inhabitants for thirteen centuries have been primarily Serbs.
Dubrovnik was under Byzantium when medieval Italian culture came into flower. The majority of families were Serbs, who remained in the Orthodox faith but were under the constant pressure of the Catholic Church to convert.. This is the story of my own lineage. My family have over the years all become Catholics. Because of this mixture we now feel ourselves to be neither Serb nor Croat, but distinctly the people of Dubrovnik.
The language of Dubrovnik is based on the Serb dialect of East Herzegovina, which still has a Serb Orthodox population. Catholic Serbs make up a goodly part of the population of Dubrovnik. And regardless of the present-day situation, truth to tell, all through the nineteenth century Dubrovnik was linked especially to Serbia, because alone of the South Slav peoples she then enjoyed statehood; she protected us and finally liberated us from Austrian captivity.
The most distinguished of the Serb Catholics was Matija Ban, who held that the Serbs and Croats were a single people with the same language, but with two different names. Dubrovnik was the proper place of that symbiosis and of the successful communal coexistence of the two.
It must be said also that the Catholic Church has done much to destroy the unity of these two traditions. Another truth is that today Dubrovnik is dominated by Croats, unfortunately of an extremist Croatianism, whose bearers are not from the old Ragusan lineage, but uncultivated, half-civilized West Herzegovinian rednecks.
Dubrovnik used to be a separate republic. Dubrovnik can be that again, to the advantage of all its inhabitants. Until 1800 Dubrovnik had a multi-ethnic character and was recognized as a separate state, until this condition was destroyed by Napoleon. He turned Dubrovnik over to the Austrians, the first occupiers in her history.
The younger generation should know that it was only in 1939 that Dubrovnik entered into the Croatian world. And it was only in 1941 that Dubrovnik for the first time in its history was incorporated into the fabric of a Croat state, the ill-famed Nazi “Independent State of Croatia”. And in 1945 Dubrovnik was attached to Tito’s Socialist Republic of Croatia.
If we know the history of Dubrovnik we cannot tolerate modern falsifiers of history and the historical untruths they manufacture. I see Dubrovnik as a Yugoslav and multi-ethnic city with open borders. If anything of Dubrovnik’s traditional intelligence and diplomacy had remained, Dubrovnik today would today be a city state just like San Marino and Liechtenstein. I am convinced that Dubrovnik can find her salvation only in her individuality and that she must once again become the Republic of Dubrovnik. Those who favor this concept and desire a Republic of Dubrovnik, as I have found out, have been put under arrest in Croatia. Since this is so, democracy has not triumphed, but an occupation has taken place more perilous than war, and more tragic.
I implore my fellow citizens to sit down at the table and cool-headedly work things out. For Dubrovnik the most profitable thing would be for Dubrovnik to belong to no one else but to Dubrovnik alone.
Could Dubrovnik ever suffer more tragic days than to have its streets mined and barricaded? Who are Croatia’s forces “protecting” Dubrovnik from? The answer is clear, from the people who actually built Dubrovnik, the Serbs of Eastern and Southern Herzegovina and Monte Negro. These have been Dubrovnik’s builders, never her destroyers. — The Serbo-Croatian saying goes “If the goat lies, the horn doesn’t”. Herzegovinian Serbs were never, to use the Serbophobes’ own buzzword, a “disruptive factor” for Dubrovnik.
The shoe is on the other foot: the “disruptive factor” are really the people who have figuratively and literally sandbagged Dubrovnik into her present isolation.
Dubrovnik must, in the words of her great 17th century poet Ivan Gundulic, reclaim her “golden freedom”. This can be only when Dubrovnik is again a free and independent republic.
Translator J. P. Maher, Chicago, February 1992.
PS: 14 April 1992. Wall posters were put up overnight in the Old City demanding the withdrawal of all military formations and a plebiscite on Independence for Dubrovnik.
This echos what a friend of mine's father, who was raised there pre-WWII, said. When I asked him if he would return to Dubrovnik for a visit, he said, "No. The place I was raised doesn't exist anymore. I was raised Catholic but I am not a Croat, I am & always will be a Dubrovcanin."