Day 39 - Bilje to Vukovar (28 miles)

Today was a day of relative quiet, long straight roads and frustrating headwinds. And I don't care what the meteorologists say, when you are cycling a heavily laden bike on an exposed road there is nothing 'moderate' about a constant fifteen mile an hour plus wind blowing in your face.

The first six miles of straight road took me to Osijek, a town that sits on the Drava, a river that flows into the Danube a few miles to the east. The first thing you see as you cross the Drava into the city is Tvadra fortress, built in 1687 after the Austrian Habsburgs drove the Turks from Hungary. The fortifications of Tvadra are built around Osijek old town and it was to there, amongst its peaceful cobbled streets and open squares, that I headed to look around and find a quiet cafe for breakfast. 

Osijek

Nemetin Memorial 

From Osijek it was a long stretch parallel to the river and through an area that was a heavily fought over front line during the Yugoslav Civil War.  Other than a few small villages there was little to see although Nemetin, five miles from Osijek, was the site of a big prisoner exchange during the war and a small memorial stone by the route commemorates the event. Not far from where the Drava links to the Danube I started the last few miles to Vukovar and by two o'clock I was cycling into the outskirts of the city on a road between the Danube and a rail line. This was the front line of fighting around the city and even now, decades later, a few ruined buildings stand testimony to the war. 

Back on the Danube - Vukovar

The Road into the City

Vukovar is an interesting place. The outskirts seem to have a lot of modern industrial units which I assume replaced ruined buildings from the war, but some of those ruins still stand there amid the modernity as a reminder of what took place. In the city centre there seems to have been rebuilding or repairs on many buildings and the occasional incongruous modern structure suggests a few replacements too. But amongst all this, many buildings still bear the scars of conflict with pockmarks of bullet and shrapnel and seemingly no efforts to repair them having been made.

Scars of War

One of the things I wanted to see was the Vukovar water tower, standing with the damage it incurred as a reminder of the conflict. When I read about it I liked the symbolism it seemed to represent and today I found out you can go up it which was an added treat. Just before I visited I had been to a military museum which has a lot of mostly Croatian military hardware from the war - it was literally around the corner from my accommodation - and I found the regular references on the exhibits to 'Serbian aggressors' a little disturbing, especially so as coach loads of school children, the next generation of Croats, were also visiting: impressionable minds being exposed to a tiny hint of nationalism, small seeds of a malevolent knotweed that are easy to plant but hard to eradicate. There was a sense of the same at the water tower - and more school children - with the displays inside its immense structure on the 87 day battle for Vukovar pointedly highlighting the Serbian burning of a village, the murdering of civilians, the prevention of medical aid delivery into the besieged city. Yes, such unacceptable acts need to be exposed in the interests of a long term stability for this region of delicately balanced politics but that should always be in a broader context, weight and counterweight: a number of Croats, including their commanding General, were also convicted of war crimes, something on which all Croatian information boards were sadly silent. And then there is the tower itself, proudly flying an immense Croatian flag and standing by the Danube overlooking Serbia. I could not help but think it is as much a raised finger to Serbia as it is a symbol to the folly of war. All this, with now having having read that Vukovar is still an ethnically divided city with distrust between the resident Croats and Serbs, and I sadly do not get the sense that these two nations, one EU and the other an EU candidate, have yet to fully settle their differences.

View of Danube and Across to Serbia