October 22, 2018 – Continuing our look at Croatia as it once was through online videos of yesteryear, a visit to the oldest continuously inhabited town in Europe back in the 1960s – Vinkovci.
Writing about Croatia these last few years has been a joy for many reasons. Apart from being an amazing place to experience, the lack of information in English outside the main tourist hot spots made me look a lot better than I am when writing about them. The island of Hvar, for example, and where I started the Total Croatia project – one of the world’s most beautiful islands, yes, but even I didn’t know until I started researching for my guidebook that Hvar was the home of organised tourism in Europe, home to the oldest public theatre in Europe, the island with the most UNESCO heritage in the world, and with an olive tree which dates back 2,500 years, making it one of the ten oldest in the world.
As with Hvar, so with Croatia. The oldest continuously inhabited town in Europe is in Croatia?!? Really? Dating back some 8,400 years, birthplace of two Roman Emperors, has a proven beer-drinking culture dating back 5,000 years, and its railway heritage was immortalised in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
Vinkovci.
It was a town I am embarrassed to admit I had never heard of until three years ago, just one more undiscovered gem in continental Croatia.
And Vinkovci is the subject of today’s look back at Croatia as it once was, back in the 1960s, when Vinkovci was just 8,350 years old.
Croatia is slowly coming round to the tourism potential of Vinkovci, and the first major tourism conference will take place there in 2019.
