“Republika” - documentary about Dubrovnik

Several years ago Croatian TV created the most exciting documentary that I have ever seen made locally - it was done with great care and effort, in visual style closely resembling “National Geographic” documentaries, with lots of special visual effects, historical costumes and 3D computer animations that reconstructed long gone castles, fortresses and places. The name of this documentary is “Hrvatski kraljevi” (The Croatian Kings) and its really, really surprisingly good - I have heard about it before from some co-worker but never thought it would appeal to me so much and I am catching up with it right now. As it happens, the new documentary made by exactly same team just started showing on our TV and last night I saw the first episode, it is called “Republika” and this time its all about ancient city of Dubrovnik, which we mostly take for granted as something that was always there, but in fact it have wonderful story and the guys from Croatian TV team really know how to make good documentary (praise to author Domagoj Burić).

Judging by first episode, “Republika” is visually and thematically very close to earlier documentary, as expected - again we are treated with spectacular scenes of huge ships, historical costumes and interviews with historians from Cambridge and such. We are all familiar with majestic, walled medieval city but in reality we hardly know anything about its first days - at least I have no clue when this main competition to Venezia actually started - so it was truly interesting to see what was there before Dubrovnik. The very first time we hear about the city is just after Roman Empire fell and the whole area was part of newly formed Byzantine Empire, the documentary actually shows stone fortress that was at this spot in early medieval times, before the place became known as Ragusa (strangely enough, on my journeys I have encountered another Ragusa in Sicily, built by sailors who came from Dubrovnik). What I didn’t know is that merchants from Dubrovnik successfully sailed and sold their products all over the place, as far as Southampton and in fact, the first coffee house in London was owned by someone from Dubrovnik! There were also some beautiful scenes of people in historical costumes walking trough famous main promenade Stradun where I walked so many times, its fascinating to think how much history this place has. Documentary naturally talks about fierce and proud citizens always being independent, but in reality we can’t ignore the fact that they traditionally paid taxes to invaders to be left alone - somehow I thought that city walls were enough, well apparently Turkish Sultans got better deal of receiving gold, silver and gifts from Dubrovnik than destroying it. The independence ends up in 1808 when after brutal siege, the city was invaded, destroyed and occupied by combined forces from Russia and Monte Negro (imagine that, same people who will attack Dubrovnik again in 1990s) and after initial push & pull between big powers, the city eventually fell into hands of Hapsburg empire. So this very first episode was indeed very interesting introduction to everything that future episodes will show in greater details - I expect stories about its famous citizens, artists and poets, along with anecdotes about everyday life in medieval city that had no rival on Adriatic sea except much bigger Venezia. The documentary is so good that I even think many more Croatian cities could be described this way.