Croatia: neighbours

Krupa, Croatia, a village with a Serb majority and mostly depopulated after the 1995 Operation Oluja (Storm). This is where the story of two women – neighbours, friends and activists – unfolds: one is Serbian and the other Croatian

To get to Krupa, a small village of about 50 inhabitants in the hinterland of Zadar, you have to leave the state road 27 that connects Gračac and Obrovac and go down a steep and narrow road that leads to the river. After a few hairpin bends, you arrive at the oldest Serbian Orthodox monastery in Dalmatia, built in 1317 right on the Krupa River.

This is the first trace of the town, with a Serb majority, which is located a few kilometres further upstream, near the source. There is no real entrance or even a central square. Krupa is a group of houses connected by a few strips of pale grey asphalt or a few dirt but passable paths. There is little or no signal, while what is omnipresent is the gurgling of water, alternating with the chirping of cicadas.

We arrived in Krupa to meet two women, two friends: Milica Gužvica and Silvana Čeko Jurišić. Milica is Serbian, originally from the Krupa area, while Silvana is Croatian, born in Šibenik, and moved here a few years ago.

In today's Croatia, where nationalist rhetoric continues to dig deep trenches between Croats and Serbs, the story of these two women and their friendship is news in itself. But Milica and Silvana are also two activists, who are working to improve things in this region, forgotten by the authorities in Zagreb and increasingly depopulated.

There are many initiatives: during the pandemic they distributed masks and disinfectants to the inhabitants, more recently they organised an English course for women in the area. To paraphrase Milica's words, the two women simply want "young people to no longer have to flee these lands".

Milica's story

"Silvana and I get along very well and we solve the problems here in the village together, as much as we can in this crazy state. Until she and her husband arrived, there were only old people here. It's wonderful to have someone your own age to talk to", says Milica Gužvica, whom we meet in the house that once belonged to her father.

Milica was born in 1979 nearby, in Obrovac, and grew up around here, regularly visiting the village where she lives today. "Krupa is my paradise. During the Yugoslavian era, when we lived in Obrovac, my father took us to Krupa every weekend", Milica recalls.
With the end of Yugoslavia, the situation changed drastically. In August 1995, when Operation Storm (Oluja) began, Milica and her family had to leave this region in a hurry and joined the column of Serbian refugees fleeing from Croatia.

More than 200,000 people left the so-called Krajina, the region that in 1991 had rebelled against Zagreb and proclaimed itself an independent republic. “We were on the road to Petrovac. Many people were killed. All dead on the side of the road”, Milica says through tears, “then we arrived in Vojvodina, but we only stayed three or four years because my father couldn’t stand those plains”.

While her parents returned shortly after the end of hostilities, Milica returned to Krupa in 2001, the year of her father’s sudden death from a heart attack. Milica and her husband Miki, also originally from these areas, then found work in a local water bottling company. Little by little they started their lives from scratch, starting with the renovation that was necessary for both homes.

Both Milica’s family home and Miki’s were in fact burned down during the war. But if the couple managed to make her house habitable again, his, located a few metres from the river, had to wait (“we had two small children who went to school, we would never have made it…”, explains Milica), until it was put up for sale a few years later.

Silvana’s story

It was at that point that Milica and Silvana’s paths crossed. It was 2015 and Silvana Čeko Jurišić, born in 1974, who for years had been dreaming of leaving Zadar (where she had lived for years with her husband and daughter) to go and live in the countryside, was on the verge of taking the big step.

“Our daughter had grown up, so my husband Toni and I could finally choose to go wherever we wanted. One day, we heard that this house was for sale, we came to see it and we immediately fell in love”, says Silvana, sitting on the terrace of her beautiful home a stone’s throw from the Krupa River. The house in question is the one once owned by the family of Miki, Milica’s husband.

Silvana, a trained pedagogue and now an independent psychotherapist, thus began her gradual move from Zadar to Krupa. Initially the house was supposed to serve as an investment, a small villa to rent to tourists. But as the work progressed and the building became habitable, Silvana and Toni changed their minds: they would be the ones to live here.

“From our house you can constantly hear the sound of the river, the breeze passing through the branches of the trees, the swallows that live with us… in short, everything is green, calm and serene. Honestly, I don’t miss the city”, says Silvana, who had to install Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite Internet, to be able to follow her clients online. In fact, there is never any signal in Krupa.

The arrival of Silvana and Toni in Krupa initially caused some discontent. After all, this is a Serbian village and the new arrivals were Croatian. But the distrust did not last long.

“I knew this was a Serbian village. Downstream from Obrovac there are Croatian-Catholic villages, upstream there are Serbian-Orthodox ones”, explains Silvana, who adds “I had no idea, but people let you know right away. In any case, for me and my husband this is not a problem and never has been”.

The inhabitants of Krupa – she says – “are fantastic”. “They helped us a lot right from the start, when we bought the house and started the work”, the woman recalls.

European funds and activism

In recent years Milica and Silvana have launched several projects. Milica has found a way to bring the small farm that had belonged to her father back to life. Thanks to European cohesion funds, she has purchased donkeys and agricultural equipment and today she raises about ten donkeys and sells milk to order.

“I decided to buy the donkeys especially for my daughter, who has suffered from allergies for a long time. Since she was two years old, she has had problems every year in spring and autumn. For years we have been buying donkey milk in Bjelovar and when we decided to keep animals, we immediately thought of donkeys because of their milk, which is a natural antibiotic”, Milica explains.

The tender she participated in two years ago is the so-called “6, 3, 1” formula of the Croatian Ministry of Agriculture, financed by European cohesion funds and aimed at supporting small farmers.

Thanks to that funding, Milica bought four donkeys, surveillance cameras, an electric fence and agricultural machinery to harvest hay with a tractor. In the future, Milica would like to expand her farm, but she admits that access to European funds is difficult for small farmers like her. The requirements, she says, often exclude people like her who do not have the capital to advance while waiting for reimbursements.

Together with Silvana, Milica has launched several initiatives to improve the lives of the inhabitants of Krupa. Often their activism makes up for the shortcomings of the State.

“I just wish my children didn’t have to flee like all the other young people from our country and the places where they were born and raised”, says Milica.

“I would say that the state doesn’t care about this region. It only does the bare minimum. Just think about the fact that all the villages upstream from Obrovac, despite being built along rivers, have no running water”, complains Silvana.

A predominantly Serb village and largely depopulated, Krupa – like the rest of Krajina – is certainly not at the top of the Croatian authorities’ concerns. Milica says she does not want to believe that the lack of infrastructure here is due to the fact that the local population is ethnic Serb, but admits: “Sometimes I think about it”.

As the anti-Serb far-right came to power in Zagreb, forming an alliance with Prime Minister Andrej Plenković after the April 17 elections, the climate of renewed nationalism has also reached the isolated Krupa Valley.

For example, a young Croatian farmer, who claims to be an Ustasha, lets his herd graze freely through Serbian villages, causing damage to gardens and orchards and insulting and threatening those who question him.

Milica and Silvana have repeatedly alerted the authorities and even called the television  to do something about it. But so far nothing has happened.