On the map, Croatia has the shape of a dragon, rampant and in profile with wings outstretched. They’re proud of that. They’re also proud of how they stood up to the Serbian army in the 1990s, during the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. The Danube is the border between the two countries.
A Viking Longship in Budapest. Photo / Viking
We join a small afternoon trip, just a handful of us in a minibus. It’s the War of Independence tour and the first stop is a decommissioned air force barracks. A man in military fatigues stands shyly by a beaten-up old Antonov aeroplane. He wants us to go for a ride.
Our guide Josip is as surprised as the rest of us: this wasn’t planned, but he’s got the cargo door open for us.
It’s a new “attraction”. We sit in the tin can of a plane, clamp on some virtual headsets, with a viewer and headphones, and off we go. Everything is roaring and we can see the city below us on fire. We’re under attack from artillery and machine guns and one of the pilots appears to have been hit. Turning ‘round, we watch a couple of soldiers pushing crates of supplies out of the hatch.
This is one of the actual planes that flew relief missions in the 87-day seige of the town in 1991. This is what it was like for them, night after night, except we weren’t going to die and they knew they probably would.
Later, in a large hangar, we walk slowly around a photographic exhibition of the war wounded. Life-size photos, larger, of men in their uniforms, staring at the camera in vivid colour as they present their stumps for legs, the deep scars carved into their bodies.
They’ve kept the trucks that became tanks, covered with welded pieces of sheet metal. A bus, decked out the same way, that became a mobile hospital. The Serbs invaded with 36,000 soldiers and fired up to 12,000 shells and rockets into the town every day; the Vukovar defence comprised 1800 lightly armed soldiers and civilian volunteers.
Eighty-seven days. At the hospital, at the end of the resistance, 240 people took shelter in the basement: patients, hospital staff, just people who’d come in seeking safety. When the Serbs arrived they forced them into trucks and drove them to a farm at Ovcara, south of the city, where they beat them for hours and then executed them in groups.
The barn where the killings took place is now a memorial. Cartridge shells are embedded in the concrete floor, photos of the victims appear and disappear on the walls - overhead there are 240 pinpricks of light. You stand there and you just don’t know what to do with yourself.
The Vukovar town square. Photo / Getty Images
The next evening, our cruise arranged for a Serbian historian to come aboard and “put the other side”. But he didn’t really do that. Instead, he explained the larger historical context.
During World War II, he told us, when every other country in the region sided with Germany, Serbia did not. They paid a terrible price: the fascist Croatian regime, backed by Germany, killed up to half a million of them. By 1945 when the war ended, Serbia had lost 60% of its men aged 18-65.
“We were the good guys,” the historian said. “Right through the 20th century, we were on your side, we resisted, we stood for something better. Except for that one time, when we voted for Slobodan Milosevic, and he was a tyrant, and now that’s the only thing anyone knows about us.”
During the evening in Vukovar, we visited the water tower. The tower had no utility value during the war - it had long been converted to a restaurant - but a Croatian flag flew from the top. It was bombed every day, said Josip, and every night the flag went back up.
Today, the tower has been left in its bombed-out state, but reinforced.
You go up in a lift and then there’s a steel gantry inside the reservoir that takes you on a zig-zagging route up and out on to the roof, its irregularity intended as a symbol of the hardships of the war. You sit there and, as Josip puts it, watch the city “starting to thrive again”.
It was the gantry that did it for me. Halfway along, trying to watch my step and thinking about all I’d seen and heard that day, I burst into tears.
It’s called war tourism, I guess. You can do it at Flanders Fields, on the Mekong, at Auschwitz. Perhaps it sounds peculiar, but I wouldn’t swap that day in Vukovar for anything.
Checklist: Budapest to Bucharest
GETTING THERE
Qatar Airways flies from Auckland to Budapest with a stopover in Doha.
DETAILS
Viking offers river cruises on all the main waterways of Europe, including several on the Danube. The full Danube experience runs from Amsterdam in the west to the Black Sea in the east, but for those seeking a shorter trip, there are stages that begin or end in Paris, Budapest and various German cities.
