Slavonia & the East

The loess bank of the Danube at Vučedol, just below Vukovar, gave its name to a Copper Age culture of around 3000 BC whose best-known relic, a bird-shaped ritual vessel, is now the town's emblem. Rome held the plain as part of Pannonia: Mursa stood at Osijek, where rival emperors fought one of the bloodiest battles of the 4th century in 351, and Cibalae at Vinkovci, birthplace of the emperors Valentinian and Valens. Medieval Slavonia belonged to the Hungarian-Croatian crown; Đakovo became the seat of the bishops of Bosnia in the 13th century, and Nicholas of Ilok, Ban of Slavonia from 1457 to 1463, fortified his Danube town in the 15th.

After the battle of Mohács in 1526 the Ottomans held the region for some 160 years; Suleiman the Magnificent had a wooden bridge about seven kilometres long built across the Drava marshes at Osijek from 1526. Habsburg armies returned in 1687, and the empire rebuilt the country to its own design: the fortress town of Tvrđa at Osijek from 1712, the star fort at Slavonski Brod on the Sava frontier, vast estates for the Eltz, Odescalchi, Pejačević and Prandau families and for Prince Eugene of Savoy, and settlers — Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks, Rusyns, Serbs — for the emptied land. Josip Juraj Strossmayer, bishop of Đakovo from 1850 until his death in 1905, used the diocese's income to build his cathedral and to found the academy and the modern university in Zagreb.

The German minority was expelled in 1945. In 1991 the war began here: twelve Croatian policemen were killed at Borovo Selo in May, and Vukovar fell on 18 November after an 87-day siege that levelled it, followed by the murder of more than 200 patients and prisoners at Ovčara. Osijek, Vinkovci and Slavonski Brod were shelled, western Slavonia was retaken in 1995, and the Danube strip returned peacefully under UN administration in January 1998. Since EU entry in 2013 emigration has done what the war did not, and emptied the villages.

Slavonia's old Catholic Croat population call themselves Šokci, and their culture — white linen embroidered in gold thread, necklaces of ducats, tamburica string bands and the bećarac, a teasing, often bawdy sung couplet on UNESCO's intangible heritage list — is kept up with real enthusiasm. It fills three large festivals: Đakovački vezovi in Đakovo at the turn of June and July, Vinkovačke jeseni in Vinkovci each September, and Brodsko kolo in Slavonski Brod, the country's oldest folklore festival. At Gorjani, near Đakovo, girls in men's hats carrying sabres go from house to house at Pentecost as ljelje, another UNESCO-listed custom.

Horses are part of the identity. The state stud at Đakovo dates from 1506 and has bred Lipizzaners since the early 19th century, a second stud works at Lipik, and carriage teams and mounted wedding parties still appear at village feasts. So is the Slavonian oak, from forests such as Spačva near Vinkovci, which is sought by coopers as far away as Italy.

The east is also the most mixed part of Croatia. Hungarians, many of them Calvinist, live in the Baranja villages around Kopački Rit; Serbs in and around Vukovar, Borovo and Dalj; Slovaks at Ilok; Rusyns at Petrovci; and Osijek, the old Esseg, was a largely German-speaking town for much of the 19th century and keeps the Secession architecture of that world. Relations in Vukovar remain delicate — children attend separate Croatian and Serbian classes — and 18 November, when tens of thousands walk in silence from the hospital to the memorial cemetery, is a national day of remembrance. Elsewhere the manner is famously easy: Slavonians are teased by other Croats for their slow speech and praised for a hospitality that begins with plum brandy and rarely stops at one helping. The winter kolinje, the family pig slaughter, and the autumn distilling of rakija are social events.

About 665,000 people live in the five counties — roughly 140,000 fewer than in 2011. Osijek, with some 96,000 residents, is Croatia's fourth city and the east's university, hospital and administrative centre, with trams, a long Drava promenade and a growing software industry. Slavonski Brod has about 50,000 people, Vinkovci 31,000, and Đakovo, Vukovar and Požega between 22,000 and 24,000 each; Vukovar has less than half its pre-war population. The villages between them are long single streets of low houses set gable-end to the road, each with a yard, a maize crib and, increasingly, a closed gate.

This is the country's granary. Maize, wheat, sunflowers, soya and sugar beet cover the plain in fields far larger than anywhere else in Croatia, worked by agricultural companies such as Belje in Baranja and by family farms; pigs, plums, vineyards and oak forestry fill in the rest. Industry has shrunk since Yugoslav times: the Borovo shoe works at Vukovar, which once employed more than 20,000 people, survives at a fraction of that size, as does the Đuro Đaković engineering works at Slavonski Brod.

Days start early, and lunch, not dinner, is the main meal. Coffee is drunk on the square, Saturdays belong to the market and Sundays to mass, football and a long family table. The concerns are demographic: young people have left for Zagreb, Germany, Austria and Ireland, schools have merged or closed, farms struggle to find workers, and outbreaks of African swine fever since 2023 have forced culls in villages near the Sava, threatening the backyard pig-keeping on which the local cuisine depends. EU funds earmarked for Slavonia have rebuilt roads, schools and water mains, but have not yet reversed the flow.

Slavonian food is pork, paprika and river fish, in quantities that assume the eater has spent the day in a field. The emblem is kulen, a thick sausage of the best pork, garlic and a great deal of red paprika, stuffed into the pig's blind gut, cold-smoked and matured for half a year or more; both Slavonian and Baranja kulen have protected status, and the thinner version is kulenova seka. Around it come čvarci (crackling), smoked bacon and švargl brawn, all products of the winter pig slaughter. The festive dishes are cooked outdoors in a cauldron, the kotlić, hung over an open fire: fiš paprikaš, a fiery red stew of carp, catfish and pike served with broad noodles, and čobanac, a shepherd's stew of several meats, often including game, simmered for hours. Baranja adds šaran u rašljama, carp split and roasted on a forked stick beside the embers, and catfish perkelt in the Hungarian manner.

Baking is Central European: makovnjača and orahnjača, rolls of poppy seed and walnut, noodles tossed with poppy seeds, plum dumplings, and salenjaci, flaky pastries made with pork leaf lard and filled with jam.

Graševina, the country's most planted white grape, is at its best around Kutjevo, where Cistercians dug a cellar in 1232 that is still in use. Ilok, on the last spur of Fruška Gora, is known for Traminac, which its cellars like to recall was served at Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953; Baranja's growers at Zmajevac and Suza keep their barrels in old hillside cellars; and Feričanci makes red Frankovka. The spirit is šljivovica, plum brandy, distilled by most rural households, and the beer is Osječko, from a brewery that dates itself to 1664.

Osijek spreads along the south bank of the Drava. Tvrđa, the Habsburg fortress town of 1712–21, keeps its baroque grid around Holy Trinity Square and its plague column, with the Museum of Slavonia and the Water Gate; upriver, past the Secession mansions of Europska avenija, stands the red-brick neo-Gothic co-cathedral with its 94-metre spire, and a pedestrian suspension bridge crosses to the river beach. North-east of the city, Kopački Rit Nature Park is the floodplain where the Drava enters the Danube, flooded each spring and home to some 260 breeding bird species, among them white-tailed eagles and black storks, as well as red deer and wild boar; boats leave from a landing near Kopačevo, a boardwalk crosses the marsh, and Tikveš hunting lodge, used by Habsburg archdukes and by Tito, stands in the woods. Beyond lie Baranja's wine villages of Zmajevac and Suza and the monument at Batina, where the Red Army crossed the Danube in 1944.

Đakovo, south-west of Osijek, is dominated by Strossmayer's brick cathedral of 1866–82, with its twin spires, and has the Lipizzaner stud's stables in town and its pastures at Ivandvor. Vukovar has rebuilt its baroque arcades and the Eltz manor, now the town museum, but kept the shell-holed water tower as a memorial, along with the hospital's basement museum, the Ovčara memorial and the white crosses of the war cemetery; six kilometres downstream the Vučedol Culture Museum is built into the hillside of the excavations. The road ends at Ilok, Croatia's easternmost town, where medieval walls, the Odescalchi castle and rare Ottoman remains — a domed tomb and a bathhouse — stand above the Danube, and the wine cellars of Ilok run beneath.

To the west, Slavonski Brod has its vast star fort on the Sava, Požega a baroque square, and Kutjevo its Cistercian cellar below Papuk Nature Park, a UNESCO Global Geopark of beech forest with the Jankovac waterfall, the volcanic rock columns of Rupnica and the ruined castle of Ružica above Orahovica.