Slunj

Slunj grew up around Slovin, a fortification of the Frankopan family above the meeting of the Slunjčica and the Korana. In the 16th century the Ottoman wars ravaged the town and turned it into an outpost of the Croatian Military Frontier; the castle was developed into a fortress and became the headquarters of the commanding general of the area. The chronicler Johann Weikhard von Valvasor described the fortified town, a bridge and a mill in 1689, and the first picture of the mills appeared in 1789. After the Treaty of Sistova in 1791 people resettled the area in growing numbers.

Under French rule from 1809 to 1813, Slunj enjoyed a boom: streets, storehouses and mills were built and vineyards and mulberry trees planted, and the house of Marshal Auguste de Marmont, governor of the Illyrian Provinces, still stands. Until 1918 it remained a Military Frontier town of the Habsburg monarchy. Electric mills and heavy emigration after the two world wars later brought a steep decline in the milling economy of Rastoke. In 1963 the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer set the climax of his novel The Waterfalls of Slunj here.

The Second World War brought occupation and killings of local Serbs by the Ustaše. In November 1991, during the war of independence, rebel Serb forces took Slunj and its Croat population was driven out; Croatian forces retook the town in August 1995. The war left widespread destruction, and rebuilding houses and infrastructure came first, followed by a slow economic recovery that continues today.

Slunj is the cultural and social centre of Kordun, the hill country near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Rastoke is its emblem. The hamlet's way of life once revolved around the mills and the water: millers passed the trade down in families for centuries, many falls carry the names of mill owners, and the people of Rastoke also wove cloth from flax and hemp grown locally and soaked in the Korana. They even used the current to wash clothes, in a rotating barrel with holes turned by the water.

The town's folk ensemble, KUD Korana, keeps up local music and dance, and the town has many sports clubs for its size, from football to bowling. The Korana's rapids host the Croatia Open rafting competition, part of the European rafting cup.

The 1990s war remains part of living memory. Rastoke's houses were damaged in August 1995, when retreating forces tried to blow up the road bridge over the Korana, but they have been repaired so carefully that little damage can now be seen. The restoration of Rastoke as a place of natural and ethnographic heritage is treated locally as a pilot project for the economic revival of Slunj and Kordun.

At the 2011 census the town of Slunj had about 1,700 people and the wider municipality about 5,100, most of them Croats, with a Serb minority of about a tenth. The municipality is classed by the Croatian government as an area of special state concern, the category for its underdeveloped areas.

Tourism linked to Rastoke and to traffic on the road to the Plitvice Lakes is the main hope for the local economy, with guesthouses, restaurants and private rooms run by local families, alongside farming and small businesses. Post-war reconstruction, first of homes and then of the economy, shaped the town for many years.

Life is quiet and seasonal. In summer the main road and the Rastoke car parks are busy with travellers heading to and from the coast and the national park; in winter the town returns to its own small rhythm of school, church, cafés and the football club.

Slunj sits between the cuisines of Kordun and Lika, the cooking of the continental hills rather than the coast. Croatian cooking counts farmers' cheese, škripavac, and curd cheese among the products of these two regions, and the area's tables run to dairy, cured and roasted meats, stews of vegetables with a little meat or sausage, known as varivo or čušpajz, and fresh pasta or potato dumplings.

The mills gave Rastoke its own speciality. Most millstones here ground "black corn" — maize, rye, barley, millet and oats — and the bread of Rastoke, rastočki domaći kruh, made from freshly ground wheat, maize, barley, rye and millet, was known across Croatia.

The restaurants in Rastoke and the upper town serve this hill cooking in gardens and mill houses by the water. As elsewhere in continental Croatia, a meal may end with strudel filled with apple or curd cheese, or plum dumplings rolled in buttered breadcrumbs.