Krk diary 2009 Number 1: Y-tong and Krk village culture

Well, our house is almost there. As ever with construction, people are telling you that it will be “about two weeks” for about (say) three months, and costs escalate and what have you, but we saw it yesterday, and the view from what will be the terrace is fantastic – Cres and the blue Adriatic in the distance, just over or through our little Olive grove. It is heaven.

Well, sort of. At least the old Yugo (ca. 1978) is no longer sitting without tires in the property next door, there seem to be fewer wild dogs and children running around than before. Sadly, we heard that the funny old guy who used to walk shirtless and smoking with his flock of twenty goats met his maker a few months ago (we don’t know what became of the goats), which is disappointing for our dog, but she’ll survive.

And maybe I’m just getting used to it, but the gastarbeiter houses look a bit less thrown together. This is something one gets used to in this part of the world. Those who left home 20-30 years ago, worked usually in Germany or Austria, and then returned home, bearing a big Mercedes Benz, a wide-screen TV and enough money to build the dream house. The problem is they normally build it themselves, and often the gastarbeiter (i.e. Guest worker in German) mentality doesn’t go along with a good sense of the aesthetic. Big, modern box-like constructions are favored – I guess because they are easiest, and provide the most room for the whole family, plus a complement of paying guests to bolster the retirement income.

Anyway, in our tiny Krk village, there are fewer houses like this, and indeed many signs of a kind of Western European gentrification: more tastefully renovated old houses (including ours I would like to think), and fewer cinder block monstrosities; tidier rubbish bins, and even better roads. Though the village lacks running water (apparently in a year or two), but now has DSL internet. I’ve got mixed feelings about all of this, I suppose. On the one hand, I think that it will be nicer to live in the village as it is becoming, but on the other, I feel we’ve somehow contributed to the destruction of this little way of life: what was once a village of Krk old-timers and refugees is now a village of well-off former Croatian ex-pats, Austrians, Slovenians and ourselves. I think we and the others really are restoring some kind of traditional Kvarner look-and-feel to the place, but perhaps we lose something more than Y-tong and bad-brickwork in the process. Ah, progress.