Primosten, Sibenik

The very old town of Primosten at first looked like it was on an island, but it’s really on a small peninsula. We parked and walked through the arched gate, and into the market place.

Several narrow walking streets radiate from this square, but one truck driver was not walking. Scraping buildings on one side, then the other, he drove his dump truck down one of Primosten’s narrow streets, a street only an inch or two wider than the truck. At one place he had to back up, ram ahead, try again, but finally made it, with stone chips flying off the building walls. No one seemed to care, and we could see those buildings had been chipped and scraped many times in the past.

There is a long, long stairway leading to the church high above the town, on the top of the hill. The tread of the steps measure maybe eight or ten feet wide, but someone had poured two little “ramps” of concrete at each step to make it possible for vehicles to climb this gentle slope. Well, people do live here, and must have a way to get from here to there, everything can’t be for tourists. As we have seen elsewhere, the paving surface of this stairway to the church was paved with a special stone, different from the regular walkways.

While we walked around town, the church bells rang and rang. People by the dozens, many women in black dresses and black shawls, were walking up the stairs and other walkways, headed toward the church, most carrying a small clutch of flowers. We never discovered what the holiday, the celebration, or perhaps it was a memorial, was all about.

The Yugoslavian coast is just one bay, inlet, or stream after another. Because of the twists and turns, each mile as the crow flies, covers eight to ten miles of actual shore line, and there are 1,000 islands off the coast, in the Adriatic Sea. By now it was raining very hard, so we drove past Sibenik, with buildings clustered around a castle. WCSTA (we can’t see them all).

They were digging a ditch along the highway for a sewer or utilities of some kind, and the material removed from the ditch is 90% stone. They can’t just dig out dirt with a scoop, but have to use a special machine to break through the stone. Makes us wonder how anything grows in this area. It takes an unimaginable amount of work just to dig a post hole, but there are trees, bushes, flowers and grass growing everywhere.