Croatian Apartment Windows: The Dearth Thereof

Notably, Croatians on the Dalmatian coast do not seem at all like Mediterranean people. Their skin and features look more Slavic and Central European. Aside from an occasional fish, their diet is definitely Central European. I'm talking potatoes, mutton, cabbage, dried beans ... often boiled to the point of mushyness (and beyond) with lard or vegetable oil and no identifiable spices. And you won't see any delicate greens in salads. It's your choice of cabbage, cucumber or tomatoes and that's it.

The architecture is the same way -- little about it suggests you are living in a land of sunshine and crisp, clean air. Sure, most everyone has a balcony, but that's used for hanging laundry and storing a few extra bags of potatoes from the family farm that didn't fit in your woodbin in the basement downstairs. Balconies are generally not deep enough for tables or sitting out - and I've never personally seen any Croatians (aside from my husband) relaxing on their balcony to enjoy the pleasant weather.

If they own a house, aside from a tiny grape-vine shaded terrace, the rest of the yard is usually 100% dedicated to growing cabbages, potatoes, brussel sprouts, carrots. Maybe you'll see an olive tree too and some rosemary hedges, but no other herbs or flowers and certainly not a lawn.

It's as if coastal Croatians are essentially in denial about their location. If they can't live in central Europe, at least they can eat, live, and garden like they do.

The window situation is the most galling for me. Stingy, stingy, stingy. Nearly invariably the architects allot only one window per room, unless that room is a bathroom, in which case there is no window at all. You don't get any cross-ventilation, and depending on the time of day, a limited amount of sunlight. Plus, the windows themselves are only moderately sized -- no sheets of glass to invite the outside in. No French doors, no sliding glass doors. Lastly, the permanent shades, built onto many windows, slide down from the top and are impossible to lift entirely out of the way. So your view will always be 50% or more obscured.

If you don't have shades, you solve that terrible problem by hanging drapes in front of all your windows, preferably floor to ceiling, and keeping them closed at all times. (My mother in law and I have a little game. I pull the drapes aside for a little air and light and then the second I turn my head or blink she nips across the room and yanks them closed again. It's amazing how quickly a woman who badly needs a hip replacement operation can move when she's motivated.)

So, here you are in nature's playground, and nature is definitely not invited in. The oldest buildings sometimes do have larger windows, but then their ceilings are so high that the rooms are fairly gloomy anyway. A few of the most expensive new buildings - the real upmarket stuff priced at 3000-35000 Euros per square meter - have modern-style larger windows. But, these are rare and only foreigners or local millionaires can afford them. The rest of us who want to live in this wonderfully sunny place to get away from northern winters are doomed to windows that make the worst of the situation.

Luckily, we've discovered a solution. A de-construction company called Dijamant-Rez have these huge saws they can bring to your building to cut holes in your walls for additional windows. You can also use them to change your floorplan or join two small apartments together.

As I've mentioned in the past, Croatian buildings are nearly always made with concrete which is reinforced throughout with mesh screens of thick steel wires. This is normally next to impossible to cut because you need one sort of saw for concrete and an entirely different saw for steel. The Dijamant Rez people have solved the problem with a new kind of saw - there's a demo on their Web site. Unfortunately the saw uses a lot of water (to cool the sparks from cutting steel), but we met the Zadar operator Josip Matic who told us his water vacuum minimizes any damage your floors might sustain.

The cost didn't seem too bad to me - perhaps $500 per day. That's a lot, but compared to the chintzy window situation it's well worth it.

By the way -- oddly the flats in Belgrade are window-laden. Loads and loads of big windows, even in the bathroom. So, if you are in Yugoslavian flats in central Europe, there's plenty of windows, the complete opposite of the south. Dumb but true.

Our Winter Apartment in Pokhara Nepal

Two months ago, to pass the time during an all-night bus trip from Zadar Croatia to Sombor Serbia, I pulled out my little notebook and began to draw a picture just as I used to as a child in boring school classes. The picture, as always, was a blueprint of my dream home. I fussed for an hour or so with where precisely the bathrooms would go, indoor-outdoor kitchen layout and very satisfying things like that, and then fell asleep.

Imagine my surprise when waking two months later in a hotel room on another continent to push the heavy curtains aside and see my dream house across the alley, glistening in the sunshine!

It is in fact, a small guesthouse serving tourists in Pokhara Nepal who come to trek the Annapurna circuit. I am certainly no trekker (a fact amply proven to my embarrassment yesterday afternoon when I stood heaving chest and thumping heart to one side of a local path so as to let a tiny child carrying a 4'x5' foot bundle of hay pass me on his way up the hill.) However, I am married to a Serbian trekker always dreamed of mountains beyond Montenegro and Croatia.

So, now we are all moved in -- I to my dream home which will serve all winter as our "Base Camp Pokhara" as my husband goes off on a series of his dream treks. Our apartment is in the top left corner of the picture. It's filled with light and air. There is no TV, no landline phone, no heating system. And hot water showers are best taken in late afternoon when the sun's had time to warm up the rooftop tank. Don't plan on washing your hair on cloudy days. I guess next time I fall asleep with blueprints dancing in my head on the bus from Zadar to Sombor I should be a bit more explicit about the amenities!

Vojvodina Farm House Pics

Just like downtown Sombor, when you're driving in this typical Vojvodina village the whole thing looks like one tall wall punctuated by doors and windows. All the houses are attached together down the street and round the corner and so on. But when you open the solid high gate (too high to look over) and walk inside it's a whole other world.

This is a shot of the courtyard and side of a farm house (remember that "L" shape I talked about in my last post?) once you step in the front gate. The living part of the house is on the right. Then the long wing going down the right side is a series of rooms that only open out to the court-yard, not to each other. Each is for some type of specific storage: firewood, garden produce, farm equipment, and of course the all-important still and home-made brandy supply. (That was the only side room I saw evidence of human activity in, there was one lone plastic chair inside. Naturally I cracked a joke about it which all enjoyed.)

Along the back of the courtyard are what used to be stalls for horses, oxen and wagons. Now the family uses them for various cars and vans of all ages. Many families do still keep horses and wagons here as well though. The area is famous for it.

The wall to the left side, which you can't see in this photo, is of course the next door neighbor's side wall for her wing of storage rooms, and so on and so on.

In the far corner of everyone's inner courtyard is a door out to the back garden which you can see open here:
When you step through, you are again in a whole new world. It's a huge garden plot complete with fruit trees, tomatoes, cabbages, hot red peppers, mild red peppers (no one grows green bell peppers here which I think is really weird in what is practically the pepper capital of the planet.)

Here's the other funny thing: see those rooftops at the end of the garden? Those are the neighbors on the other side of the block. You see the whole block of houses is like a group of covered wagons circled for the night. From the outside they present one closed wall to the world from all directions. As you climb inside the wagon there is your private space. But then when you climb out the end of the wagon, there's this vast open space of light, land and life. There are no formal boundaries to mark where one neighbor's garden ends and the next one begins. Everyone just sort of knows.

The women socialize out here as they work their individual kitchen plots. (The men socialize like Greek men do, sitting quietly at little neighborhood cafes watching the world go by - or not - for hours.) As we were standing out here (I was greedily stuffing little tiny ripe tomatoes the size of the tip of my pinky into my mouth), one of the neighbors came strolling by. She peered up at me, and wanted to know who is this? I showed off my four or five words - pointing to a huge pumpkin saying "Big, Beautiful, Good!" several times in Serb, feeling like an idiot, but hey it's about all I can say yet properly besides hello and swearwords. Satisfied, she gave me one last sharp look and marched off to see to her own household's dinner.

Typical Sombor, Serbia House Photos - Honestly

For my sister Rachel who emailed asking "What do houses look like in Serbia?". This NOT our house. Our house is the same size, shape and brick-faced but without the froo-froo details. About half the houses in downtown Sombor look like our house and the other half look roughly like this. They're all mixed up together, not segregated like they might be in a US city.

This particular house is about a block from ours. I took the picture of it because I was thrilled to see a local cat stroll casually across the roof and dive into the dark hole you can see up there. (It's a vent space for the attic.) The house layout is typical of many here:

- one story (only newer houses, apartment buildings and rich people's mansions are higher)

- three-four tall street-side windows. (This photo is only of about 60% the front of house.)

- two entries on the street, the front door and the carriage (now car) door.

- firmly attached on both sides to other houses. However, there's usually an "l" shaped tail out the back that's not touching any other house. It forms a private courtyard in the back for you, with your neighbor's house wing forming one of the walls of that courtyard.

Note: Everyone is VERY careful not to put windows on the side of the wall that look out into their neighbor's courtyards... they may have a tiny window up high for light, but nothing low enough to look through.

- tiled roofs. These are the old tiles which were originally "yellow" (I'm not sure how vivid, probably not terribly). Newer houses are all built with those red-orange tiles. When you look out of the plane circling Belgrade, it's a sea of orange tiled house roofs. Which feels odd at first so far North.

- butts right up next to the sidewalk. Zero land, not one blade of grass, between the sidewalk where quite a few people are walking (this is town center, it's better to walk than drive). Many houses do have small front yards, BUT even then, the public sidewalk is right next to the house. My husband says that's because you used to have the town septic run through the front yard so you didn't want that near your windows... there's also a grassy drainage ditch there now. Anyway, this shows you why the whole curtains thing happened. Your neighbors are an inch from your window as they walk by.