Free The Fracture Zone by Simon Winchester Page A

passport stamps written in) Cyrillic script.
    So they may have been Slavs; they may have been, until 1991, part of the Federation of South Slavs that was called Yugoslavia, but they were not, in any sense, Serbs. The Serbs were EasternOrthodox by belief, and such were their fraternal links with the Slavs of Russia they used Saint Cyril’s script as their own. In all other ways—except for their given names, which reflected their alternative pantheon of saints—the Slavs who were Serbs were the same people as the Slavs who were Slovenes, as here, or the Slavs who were Croatians, and whom we would encounter when we crossed their frontier in few hours’ time.
    And this was one of the abiding complex absurdities of the Balkans: that almost all the people who have been so horribly at odds with one another are all, in essential ethnic terms, the selfsame people. This does not include the Albanians, as we shall see; but elsewhere, the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatian and Slovenian Catholics are of essentially the very same ethnic and genetic makeup as the Orthodox Christian Serbs—a people of whom, until lately, they were true and literal Yugoslav—south Slav—compatriots.
    These Maribor Slovenes were more properly linked with their coreligionists far away than with their ethnic kin here at home. These people, to judge by their crucifixes, worshiped, if they did so at all, at the same churches as did their brother and sister Slavs in dominantly Catholic Slavic countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and neighboring Croatia, as well as some of their number in Ukraine and Belarus. They worshipped in the same churches as their Germanic cousins did in Vienna, too, or in south Germany. But they did not worship in the same churches as their compatriots and brother and sister Slavs in Serbia—and there, sad to say, is the rub.
     
    I would like to say it was the great Gothic Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary that dominated my view of the Croatian capital when we finally stepped down from the train at Zagreb station later that night. It was not. Its two towers, illuminated by golden floodlight, pierced the night sky from the top of the low hill on which they and the old Archbishop’sPalace stood. But it was the ordered magnificence of the structures in the square outside the station that first caught my eye. This was Vienna, I thought, all over again. Some of the buildings were faux-Renaissance, some art nouveau, still others born of that Viennese radical architectural school that grew out of—and was, in part, a reaction to—nouveau and was called the Sezession. This may have been a Slav city, but the stylistic influence on its center was pure Hapsburg, from the station itself to the boxy and colonnaded Esplanade Hotel, which loomed fortresslike and severe, to the left of the imposing square. It had been commissioned by the Wagons-Lits company, someone said, for passengers coming in from Paris on the Orient Express (it was always assumed that anyone of any class who arrived in Zagreb would be bound to do so by rail).
    The hotel and the cathedral, both of which are relatively modern structures (the first cathedral was knocked down by a furious earthquake in 1880), have something in common—a feature that offered us the first terrible glimpse (and so soon beyond the comforts of Vienna!) of the true horrors of the Balkans.
    The imposing, green-washed Esplanade Hotel, as darkly imposing and majestic inside as its outside suggested it should be, turned out, according to the staff, to have been the headquarters during World War II of the Gestapo. And the cathedral, half a mile away, was in some sense a spiritual refuge for those Croats who were committing dreadful crimes either at the behest of the Gestapo or on their own frighteningly warped initiative.
    Croatia in the days following the German and Italian invasions was run as a supposedly self-declared and notionally independent fascist state; and