Balkan Liverpool is back in the limelight

It has hardly gone to plan, but the Croatian port of Rijeka is making the most of what’s left of its year as a European Capital of Culture. Linda Cookson salutes the city’s gritty resolve

Your heart has to go out to Rijeka. The start of the year saw Croatia’s third-largest city brimful of optimism and confidence. After unexpectedly pipping both Dubrovnik and Split to the post to be designated the country’s first European Capital of Culture (Galway was also a winner), the port was poised to dazzle new audiences with a show-stopping programme of events. Instead, with the spent firework cartridges from February’s exuberant opening ceremony barely swept up from the quayside, the pandemic rained suddenly and catastrophically all over Rijeka’s parade. Lockdown restrictions, border closures and the cancellation of public events threatened to bring the party to an end before it had begun.

Yet Rijeka 2020’s organisers and partners have rallied to keep the show on the road. Performance videos were streamed throughout lockdown and, as restrictions eased, they reconfigured events to accommodate social distancing rules – many in outdoor locations. Now, as city life begins to return to normal, Rijeka is getting ready to steal the show once more.

If you haven’t heard of Rijeka (pronounced “Ree-ecka”) until now, don’t worry, you won’t be alone. Although it’s only 15 minutes away from the opulent coastal resort of Opatija, and is directly connected by road and ferry to some of Croatia’s most beautiful islands, the city has never been an obvious tourist destination.

My first visit, back in 1973, wasn’t exactly encouraging. I was on the last leg of an Interrailing trip and having not done any research whatsoever on what was then Yugoslavia, I simply stuck a pin in a map and expected to find myself somewhere a bit like Dubrovnik, which I remembered from a postcard.

Ah, the follies of youth. Instead of the bijou little resort of my imagination, I arrived in a hulking industrial port, forested with rusty cranes. And, even though it was early September, the rain lashed down unrelentingly. I took the first train out of town.

And that, I thought, was that. But fast-forward nearly 40 years and the news of Rijeka’s impending European Capital of Culture status was enough to make me pause for thought. Perhaps I’d missed something about the city all those years ago during my grand sulk? Or maybe things had changed?

I decided to risk it – perhaps it would be love at second sight – and mixes art exhibitions with live concerts and jazz jams. Further along the Rjecina river, funkily-furnished Zivot (meaning “life” in Croatian) is a popular party-till-dawn destination.

But you don’t need to be in your early-20s to “get” Rijeka. For one thing, its convivial café culture is a delight. The broad sweep of the city’s Habsburg-designed Korzo is lined with grand fin-de-siècle establishments, decked with heaving trays of sticky confectionery that wouldn’t look out of place in Vienna. More beguiling still, if you veer off the beaten track, are the small, formerly derelict Old Town squares that have been transformed by urban regeneration projects into multipurposed meeting places. Pavlinski Trg (“Pauline Square”), near Rijeka’s medieval kosi toranj (the city’s own “leaning tower”), combines a vast

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kvarner.hr. did discovering a life jacket from Titanic (salvaged by an 18-year-old Rijeka-born steward serving on the rescue ship Carpathia), displayed in the city’s Maritime and History Museum in the former Governor’s Palace. And then there was my visit to the Peek & Poke Computer Museum, a geeks’ wonderland stuffed with vintage tech nostalgia.

At the top of the list of bizarre oneoffs was a trot down to the dockside to clamber aboard Galeb – the former naval ship that became the official “yacht” of Yugoslavia’s President Tito (1892-1980). He sailed it up the Thames in 1953 to meet Winston Churchill, and hosted numerous foreign dignitaries and Hollywood luminaries on board over subsequent years.

Renovation of the yacht as a museum ship is to be a highlight of Rijeka’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. At the time of my visit – just before it left harbour for works in Kraljevica shipyard – it was a ghost ship: a flaking grey rust-bucket, stripped of its furnishings and without a hint of its illustrious past. Yet exploring the echoing silence of its decaying below-deck stateroom was eerily stirring.

Galeb – the name means “Seagull” – is due to wing her way back to Rijeka, restored to her former glory, at the end of this year. Despite the unavoidable delays to the reconstruction works, friends in the city assure me that people are still crossing their fingers that she’ll at least make her way home before the Capital of Culture baton is handed over to its successors next February.

Restoration and repurposing (rather than flashy new builds) are at the heart of Rijeka’s 2020 celebrations. A brick-built former factory has become a “Children’s House” with a library and puppet theatre. In midJuly, with the events programme starting to get back on track, the city’s exquisite art nouveau fish hall, vaulted like a cathedral, became the setting for a digital image and sound composition created to evoke the presence of the sea. Early paintings by Gustav Klimt on the ceiling and a sidestage box of Rijeka’s neo-baroque National Theatre are being restored and will be showcased in a major exhibition in 2021. Rijeka has gone for substance and style.

On my final day in the city, as penance for my narrow-mindedness back in 1973, I climbed the 500-plus stone steps to hilltop Trsat Castle to bid farewell-for-now to Rijeka from the romantically turreted lookout tower. The view out to sea over verdigris cupolas and terracotta roof-tiles was a cracker – even with some less-thanbeautiful cranes, 1970s high-rises and a distinctly soupy-coloured river. Rijeka, I decided, is my kind of a place, and my return ticket is already booked for later this summer.