Latest articles

27.04.2023.

White Horse: the 1923 Cup Final, my Grandfather and Me

How one man's road to Wembley went through Egypt, East Africa and beyond

17.12.2022.

Balkan Trails

How independent travellers discovered the former Yugoslavia

17.12.2022.

Bookpackers

Do travel books really deserve a place in your luggage?

17.12.2022.

Welcome to the New Croatian Weird

An emerging group of writers are providing Croatian literature with a disturbing new flavour

17.12.2022.

Reading the Territory

The best books from Southeastern Europe in English translation in 2022

17.12.2022.

Stardust Soundtracks: Bowie, Britain and the Seventies

David Bowie's performance of Starman on BBC's Top of the Pops in July 1972 is one of the most mythologized four minutes in the history of British television.

10.07.2022.

Vinyl Idols

Released forty years ago, Odbrana i poslednji dani by Belgrade band Idoli has long been touted as the best Yugoslav album of all time.

10.07.2022.

Last Train to Kupari

Czechoslovakia's Shangri-la on the shores of the Adriatic.

10.07.2022.

On the Road Again

A journey through the career of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, winner of this year's EBRD Literature Prize.

10.07.2022.

Three Kings

The strange, subversive tale of the Vilnius Jazz Trio

06.07.2021.

Opatija Noir

It wouldn’t be a seaside town if it didn’t have a dark side

06.07.2021.

A Life in the Woods

Felix Salten, Bambi the Deer, and Twentieth-Century Vienna

26.05.2021.

Empire in Crumbs

Dominique Kirchner Reill’s new book The Fiume Crisis takes an iconoclastic new look at the history of Rijeka after World War I

26.05.2021.

Iron in the Soul

It is forty years since Andrzej Wajda’s epoch-defining Man of Iron walked away with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

17.12.2020.

4 x fiction, 4 x fact

Eight books that made a difference in 2020.

17.12.2020.

The Nativity Scene

A short story by Jurica Pavičić

17.12.2020.

Jazz Messenger

Komeda: A Private Life in Jazz by Magdalena Grzebałkowska tells the story of Poland’s most talented musician of the jazz generation, and reveals what exactly jazz meant to a Polish society in the throes of rapid change.

27.10.2020.

Utopia

Marko Tomaš reflects on autumn, Split, and the fate of the independent bookshop

14.10.2020.

The Nowhere Man

With the late Bekim Sejranović’s award-winning novel From Nowhere to Nowhere appearing in English for the first time, we look back at the career of an extravagantly talented writer

14.10.2020.

Kovač Through the Looking Glass

Marc Casals takes a look at Mirko Kovač‘s novel The City in the Mirror, a classic of post-Yugoslav literature that is yet to appear in English translation

17.06.2020.

Buried Alive

A short story by Maša Kolanović

17.06.2020.

Living the Dream

Central Europe, Milan Kundera and Yugoslavia

17.06.2020.

José Saramago: “Writers are no longer authors, but content providers”

Croatian journalist Adriana Piteša interviewed the Nobel Prize-winning novelist shortly before his death in 2010. He didn’t pull any punches.

17.06.2020.

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Višnja Vukašinović looks back at a classic modernist novel about holidays gone horribly wrong

12.05.2020.

Dropping the baton: Tito, youth culture and the Slovene syndrome

Tito’s cult of personality prevailed for a few years following his death in May 1980. By the end of the decade, however, this legacy was in a serious state of dissipation.

11.05.2020.

Stalker at Forty

Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1980, Tarkovsky’s meditative masterpiece continues to cast its spell

13.12.2019.

Torpedo Town

The world’s first fully-operational torpedo was developed in Rijeka by Bolton-born engineer Robert Whitehead

13.12.2019.

Fiction, non-fiction, truth and lies

2019 in eight books

04.11.2019.

Rebel Rebel

The time is ripe to rediscover the work of cult Croatian writer Janko Polić Kamov

04.11.2019.

The Battle for Rīga

It is 100 years since a combined force of Germans and Russians were beaten back by a nascent Latvian army, backed up by British and French warships

06.09.2019.

Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Culture of Violence

Was the Italian soldier-poet a liberator? Or a warning of the dark times to come?

06.09.2019.

Futurama 79

If London had been the birthplace of punk, northern England had become the incubator of whatever it was that was about to happen next.

24.06.2019.

Yugoslavia in the Year 2000

Throughout 1960, Globus magazine ran a series of articles about what they thought the country would look like in the year 2000. Casting their eyes over existing plans for concrete suburbs and high-rise cities, Globus’s writers were essentially saying that, thanks to socialism, the future was already here.

16.06.2019.

Robert Smith Rewound

In May 1996 I had the good fortune to interview Cure frontman Robert Smith. And then, with the interview still untranscribed, I lost the tape. It took me 23 years to find out what on earth I had done with it.

12.09.2018.

Journey to Russia

Miroslav Krleža’s masterpiece of mid-Twenties reportage is a compelling hybrid of travelogue, personal memoir and political essay

11.09.2018.

Caution, Futurist Approaching

Marinetti, World War I, and why he ended up in Rijeka in 1919

10.09.2018.

The Elusive Emperor

Few people are so central to the history of Split as Roman Emperor Diocletian. And yet it’s surprising how little we know about the man.

27.10.2017.

Vampire Holiday

The time is ripe for Croatia to regain its rightful place on the European horror map

06.06.2017.

What is a song without a sleeve? Jugoton’s place in art and pop

Zagreb record label Jugoton didn’t just nurture a unique music scene. It also set new standards in Croatian design

05.01.2017.

Man in a Suitcase

Why we should be rereading Joseph Roth in 2017

14.12.2016.

Sachertorte, Sacher-Masoch

So what is it that makes Vienna the capital of sex?

25.11.2016.

Hoochie Coochie Hoću Kući

Is Milan Manojlović Mance’s Man from Katanga the greatest Croatian album ever made?

22.9.2016.

Subversive Soundtracks

Forty years ago members of Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe were put on trial for playing music that the country’s communist rulers didn’t like the sound of.

22.9.2016.

(Come on Baby) Light my Choir

Traditional choral festivals provided a natural focus for the so-called Singing Revolution, which swept across the Baltic States in 1987-1990.

14.6.2016.

Apoksiomen Superstar

One of Europe’s most breathtaking new museums is on the Croatian island of Lošinj

12.6.2016.

Šibenik C’est Chic

Few destinations on the Adriatic have reinvented themselves so thoroughly as the central Dalmatian city of Šibenik.

09.5.2016.

Rijeka Rock City

It was the port city of Rijeka that led the way when it came to Croatia’s relationship with the electric guitar, and it is Rijeka that preserves most in terms of rock and roll heritage today.

25.4.2016.

Welcome to Hofbauerland

Few graphic artists are as closely associated with the Zagreb urban landscape as illustrator, poster designer and graphic novelist Igor Hofbauer.

25.4.2016.

Zadar Modern

Although rarely celebrated, it’s Zadar’s rich stock of Sixties-era architecture that gives the city so much character.

12.4.2016.

Awesome Orson

So why is there a statue of Orson Welles in the Croatian City of Split? 

11.4.2016.

Throwing Shapes

Siluett was one of the most seductive fashion magazines of the 1960s. And it was produced in Soviet-occupied Estonia.

10.4.2016.

We Play World War: Karl Kraus and the end of Austria

Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was one of the few people who wrote against World War I from start to finish: not because he thought there was anything wrong in defending one’s flag, but because he saw how patriotism was hijacked by the mass media.

9.4.2016.

Axe the Ex

Check in to Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships for some partner-replacement therapy

2.4.2016.

A History of Zagreb in Ten Buildings

Forget the about the cathedral and St Mark’s Square, Zagreb’s real architectural strength lies is its status as a crucible of the modern

16.3.2016.

Crucif*cked: the extraordinary career of Egon Bondy

Outside Czech-speaking circles, underground writer and philosopher Egon Bondy remains almost unknown; however it’s hard to see where the Czech literary scene would be without him

15.3.2016.

Power Ballads: Marta Kubišová and the Velvet Revolution

The story of Marta Kubišová’s song A Prayer for Marta reveals much about the power of popular culture - and the desire of those in government to place it under control.

10.3.2016.

Ruritania returns

The time is ripe for a rereading of Gregor von Rezzori, one of Central Europe’s most distinctive voices

5.3.2016.

Station to Station

Yevgeni Voishvillo and Yuri Kiselev: two of the best sci-fi illustrators you’ve probably never heard of

15.6.2015.

Death, metal: Ernst Jünger and Germany’s 20th century

The German author of Storm of Steel was the greatest writer to come out of the trenches of World War I. It’s almost exactly a century since he first saw front-line action.

10.6.2015.

Radiator man

Croatian artist Julije Knifer spent the best part of 45 years painting endless variations on the theme of the meander. But did he ever intend so many of his meanders to be exhibited in the same gallery all at once?

4.6.2015.

Brushed off

Parts of the mural-covered wall running along Zagreb’s Branimirova ulica were demolished at the end of May 2015. The news was greeted by a wave of public indifference, despite the fact that the wall is one of the city’s defining visual landmarks.

9.5.2015.

Vojin Bakić

Few artists exemplify the former Yugoslvia’s modernist heritage quite so much as Croatian sculptor Vojin Bakić

4.5.2015.

Man paints Dog

Artist Miroslav Kraljević was the great hope of Croatian painting until his early death in 1913

27.4.2015.

Coast of Thrones

The more popular the Croatian Adriatic becomes, the less control it exerts over its own narratives

26.4.2015.

Fire burn, cauldron bubble

Home to the devilishly spicy fiš-paprikaš stew, the Baranja region is fast becoming one of Croatia’s prime gastronomic destinations.