Sue's Travels: Zagreb, Croatia

Zagreb City Tour

We drove through the downtown area, which has a serious graffiti problem and a lot of buildings need repairs in that the finish is falling off the buildings.

Our first stop was in the city of Zagreb cemetery, which contains graves of people of all religions including Jews. There is a holocaust memorial dedicated to the victims of the holocaust. People light candles in addition to placing stones on the monument.

There are about 1,500 Jews in Zagreb split into two communities; one ‘liberal’ and the other orthodox and apparently they don’t get along.

We headed to the hill of the old city called Graditz (sp?) which was a free city in that artisans didn’t have to pay taxes. The other hill was occupied by a city called Capitol (sp?), which was where the church was in control and owned most of the land. At one time the people of the two cities fought each other and the street between was called the bloody bridge. We saw the vegetable market and from there we went to the Cathedral, which is under restoration. There was a major earthquake in Zagreb in 1880 where many buildings were destroyed including the Cathedral, which was rebuilt at the time. Unfortunately the stone that they used was relatively soft and is damaged by pollution. They are trying to replace it was a harder stone that is more resistant to the elements.