The bachelor lives of Croatian island guys

I’ve always enjoyed a summer story, a genre of lighter fare during the slow days of late summer when the sensible decamp from their offices. The summer holiday is a sacred European tradition. The continent moves in synchronization with entire nations putting on auto-responders that they’ll get to your email in four or six weeks, or not at all. Today, a postcard from the Balkans. 

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The Balkans are a reminder that life is complex and unlikely to be given over entirely to reason anytime soon.

I’ve been coming to the region for 17 years now and immersed in what I call Srpski Mir for longer. I studied Balkan history and international relations at the time of the wars that tore apart the region. I long ago recognized one thing: My American mind cannot truly understand this place.

Inat is a critcal Serbian word. It means to cut your nose to spite your face but is something deeper and more rooted in obstinate defiance as the defining cultural characteristic of people who have been resisting subjugation for much of their history — and sometimes doing the subjugating themselves. “It’s complicated,” I’m frequently told in a way that tells me to change the subject.

In 2009, I drove for eight hours from Belgrade to the Croatian coast because there wasn’t an air connection between Serbia and Croatia, even a quarter century after their war ended. Looking at a map, I could see going through Bosnia was more direct and would give me a shot at seeing the Mostar bridge from Ivo Andrić’s classic, The Bridge on the Drina. I imagined a romantic Dame Rebecca West saga, ideally without typhus. The Belgrade airport rental car guy, who was smoking, was firmly against the idea. “They will see your Serbian license plate and put an axe through the car,” he said flatly in Serbian while exhaling cigarette smoke. Main highway around Bosnia it is.

This is one of the places you feel like history is still alive, often in unromantic ways that don’t fit with easily with modernity. They’re complex countries, sometimes with dysfunctional and quasi-authoritarian governments. Prepare yourself if you ask a Serb the throwaway, “How are things in Serbia?” You’ll need a rakija or three and will end up a smoker by the end of the discussion.

Still, it’s worth understanding how soft authoritarianism coerces the population through a web of corruption, crooked judiciary and government cronyism. The insidiousness of this infiltration in every manner of societal sphere is a warning. I’ve spoken to actors and directors who are blackballed for speaking out against the government and professors who are leaving the country because grant money suddenly dries up after supporting protestors. 

One night in Split, I happened in one of those lovely seaside European squares, ringed by humming outdoor cafes, bars and restaurants. Around the corner is an incongruous Homeland War exhibit, which told the story of Croatia’s war with the remnants of Yugoslavia to gain independence and unify the country, culminating in the US-backed Operation Storm, which took back an area from a breakaway ethnic Serbian “protostate” as the exhibit called it.

There’s no mention of Storm’s ethnic cleansing of the areas just outside of Split, where Serbians lived for centuries in the Krajina. That part of the narrative doesn’t make it through the editing every nation does.  The Croats’ heroic defenders are Ustaša to Serbs. And Serbs are Četniks to Croats. And on and on. As an outsider, you accept you’ll never understand. It’s complicated.

Just beyond the Homeland War exhibit, there’s a Game of Thrones museum and money to be made. There’s even a Game of Thrones-inspired festival where people dress up as their favorite characters. A local told me they don’t judge: These people spend money, even if they’re dressed as a Lannister.

When I was first in Hvar in 2009, I was a curiosity. There weren’t many Americans who came here. The crowd at my favorite beach bar in the world, Falko, found my name very amusing for unclear reasons. You don’t run into a lot of Brajans in the Balkans. That’s changed. Hvar is now a global destination, with massive yachts clogging its harbor and a high-end summer scene similar to Capri.

Hvar is now through an awkward stage where it relied on Ryan Air travelers and emerged as a luxury destination. This is the gap to leap since low-end tourism is a path to nowhere. Capital is concentrated. Better to go for the rich people in media or tourism. You want yachts in the harbor, not cruise ships or Brits on a stag do.

Hvar’s unique because of its combination of Adriatic, pine forests and lavender. They’ve managed the development far better than many places, even if the prices are ahead of the service. That’s in large part because the regulation free marketers rail against ends up saving these kinds of places from going too far. Most of the island is still agrarian. You eat vegetables grown on the island, fish caught around it and drink wine from local vineyards. A local konoba promised the boar on the menu was hunted in the nearby woods.

Tourism is an afterthought in an economy like the U.S. In Croatia, tourism’s total economic contribution is up to a quarter of the economy. The minister of tourism job here is like the Treasury Secretary.

I had dinner with a Croatian news publisher while in Hvar. If you think building sustainable models for news is life on hard mode in a huge, rich market like the U.S., come to a country of 4 million with a GDP a third of the U.S. 

Over fresh-caught fish and blitva, she ticked off a dozen different business lines. Multiple events a week, membership, niche, B2B, content marketing, awards, music concerts, you name it. They saw auto ads dry up, so they act as an eat-what-you-kill reseller instead. 

There’s no easy path for publishers. It takes a particular type to be a Media Person, no matter the market. 

I’m always reminded in this part of the world that irrationality is part of the human experience. Bezos says bet on things that won’t change. I’m long irrationality.

A local real estate developer told me the story of Palagruža, a tiny island 75 miles off the Croatian coast that has just a lighthouse on a craggy cliff. The lighthouse is maintained by two guys who spend a month at a time there, fixing the lighthouse, doing various tasks, and living mostly off the land and sea. This is a part of the world where you see schools of fish everywhere in the clear waters. 

They catch the fish they then grill. They tend to their chickens. They have gardens for fresh vegetables. There’s another island somewhat nearby supposedly where a guy lives with a flock of sheep. “It’s like when one son would become a priest,” I was told. The sheep are particularly tasty because they have salty grass. The lighthouse guys sometimes visit the sheep guy for a hang. American men build man caves in their McMansions. The Balkans are different.

Like media, this is a very impractical way to make money and arguably live a productive life. But it’s part of their heritage, and that has value off the spreadsheet.

You can’t technically visit Palagruža, although this is the Balkans, so if you know a guy or a guy who knows a guy, you can get there and eat fish with the guys. One guy got the invite because his guy once rescued one of the island guys from deep depression at sea by commandeering a government boat to take the depressed guy to a Hajduk Split soccer game – and probably burned about 10,000 euros in fuel in the process.  I’m glad guys are still doing this. 

Rob Wilk, CRO of Yahoo, joined me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO, to make the case that 30-year-old Yahoo is in the middle of a genuine business turnaround, not a nostalgia play.

Rob breaks down Yahoo's first-party data advantage across search, email, and content (with 75% of users logged in), why he calls competitors' data "a fish stew" of third-party signals, and how that data now powers Yahoo Scout — the company's first new search product in 17 years, built using a rented LLM alongside Bing's grounding API and Yahoo's own first-party data.

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