Dubrovnik is a place in Croatia that so many associate with gorgeous weather, calm seas and an enviable climate. While this is true during the warm (alright, agonisingly hot) summer months, autumn and the winter can bring with them some incredible weather, and the southeastern jugo wind, with all of its power, is just one of them.
As Morski writes on the 13th of November, 2019, owing to its location at the extreme southern tip of the country, the City of Dubrovnik has always been on the radar of some of the more violent jugo winds, or šilok, as the people of Dubrovnik sometimes call it.
They didn’t construct such mighty walls for no reason, and while these giant structures were built from the 13th to the 17th centuries for defense purposes, as Dubrovnik was always under the watchful eye of the jealous Venetians, the walls also protected the city’s inhabitants from the gigantic waves jugo winds often churn up and produce. For the sake of ease of reference when it comes to the size of these waves, they are 1,940 metres long, up to 25 metres high, 4-6 m thick when near the mainland, and up to 3 metres thick towards the sea.
The old people of Dubrovnik had a stipulation that they never convened and made any important decisions when jugo, or perhaps better to call it šilok when speaking about Dubrovnik, was blowing. People believed the adverse weather affected people mentally, and therefore they couldn’t come to a rounded official decision on something when influenced by these mighty winds.
Two storm chasers and photographers from Dubrovnik, Boris Bašić and Daniel Pavlinović, took some utterly spectacular photos of the waves that literally spilled over the ancient city walls. dramatic waterspouts (pijavice) were recorded, and Bašić filmed the usually peaceful rocks (grebeni) located just in front of Lapad, through and over which strong waves in a sea churned up by jugo violently swept.
You haven’t truly experienced jugo (šilok) until you have experienced it in Dubrovnik, if you’d like to see why, watch the video below:
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