Festive atmosphere in Dubrovnik has started weeks ago and now, just 20 days before Christmas, snow has covered all the festive stands placed on Stradun! Ok, we admit, it's fake snow but it brings that winter touch – it's hard to get the Christmas feeling since it's so sunny and quite warm. Take a look how the stands were decorated in photo gallery and video made by Dubrovnik Winter Festival. We are sure they have many more surprises hidden in their sleeve!

The first weekend in December was marked with bright sunshine, not really a Christmas feel, but at least the Old City has its festive face on.

The Dubrovnik Winter Festival has certainly helped attract more citizens to the historic core this winter, every day the festive stands throughout the city are busy.

Check out our photo gallery from this weekend

Father Christmas visited Dubrovnik early this year and handed out “sweet presents” to the awaiting children. And he arrived in the Old City in style not in a sleigh being pulled by Rudolph and the rest of the reindeers but in a shining red old-timer.

With a bellowing “Ho-Ho-Ho,” children quickly gathered around the festive visitor and were soon treated to handfuls of sweets and chocolates. Presumably Santa won’t forget Dubrovnik when he delivers more presents on the 25th of December.

Check out our Father Christmas in Dubrovnik photo gallery

As you drive along the coastline of the Dubrovnik – Nertva County you are greeted with a sign post from the local tourist board and a photo attracting you to spend time in the area. Now from village of Orasac, to the north of Dubrovnik, are hoping that the aerial photo on their sign will attract even more attention.

“We had realised that the old sign was in need of changing and were looking around for alternatives,” commented a representative of the district of Orasac. “We knew that Craig Derrick from the photo studio Adriatic Images had once lived in the village and we asked me for help. He kindly agreed to help and provided a few images of which we selected one fantastic aerial photo of the whole village,” he added. Concluding that Derrick had donated the aerial image free of charge and that he believed the photo would catch the imagination of passing tourists.

“I was only too happy to help the village and only hope that my image will help attract even more tourists to this special destination,” commented Derrick to The Dubrovnik Times. Maybe more tourist boards and destinations will now follow suit and upgrade their photos to aerial views.

New aerial view for Orasac 

Whether winter or summer Dubrovnik is attracting more and more celebrities, especially in the world of Bollywood. The latest celeb to use the city as a backdrop for a social media post is the Indian actress and model Asmita Sood.

However from the comments on her Instagram account the beautiful star obviously visited in the warmer summer months. “Time to look back at the beautiful memories 2016 gave me...,” wrote the Indian actress to her 134,000 followers on Instagram.

The 26-year-old started her career in modelling and was a finalist at the Miss India beauty pageant before concentrating on acting. Could her appearance in Dubrovnik mean another Bollywood blockbuster is in the pipeline? The city has already been the backdrop for two Bollywood films, Fan and the recent “Khaidi No. 150.”

A photo posted by Asmita Sood (@asmita_s) on Dec 1, 2016 at 10:33pm PST

There’s a phrase that goes something like – the deeper you dig the more you find – can’t remember it exactly but we get the drift. I wasn’t really digging, more like scrapping the surface but I soon uncovered a hidden treasure.

Is it me or are there more foreign voices on the Stradun than in previous winters. What do you think? I have been spending more time in the Old City recently and I seem to be bumping into much more foreign tourists than I had expected. Maybe it is the Winter Festival effect or just the general mild weather we have been having, I don’t know but for sure there is an improvement.

But it also seems that there is more room for improvement. I received an email from a lady in Manchester the other day which troubled me. She is a regular guest to Dubrovnik and after seeing all the images of Dubrovnik at Christmas thought it would be a nice idea to see a different side of the city, away from the sunshine and summer crowds. However she very quickly ran into a problem. Lack of flight connections. So I wrote back to find out what the problem was, after all the UK is our most important tourist partner.

“We would love to see the city in winter when there are (probably) less crowds but mainly to see the city decorated for Christmas,” opened her reply to me. It turned out that she had visited Dubrovnik over half a dozen times before but only in the summer. “I have had difficulty finding flights in December, NONE at all from Manchester and I have not found any from London where we can return home before Christmas Day. We have been in May and October this year, yes we would visit more out of the summer season,” she concluded. So a loyal guest to the city who try as she might couldn’t find a connection to bring her in the winter.

It soon turned out that she was not alone. As soon as I published her story a whole host of other people started contacting me. The idea of me actually organizing a special charter flight for all these people flashed through my mind.

“We have been coming to stay in Cavtat twice a year for the last 10 years and would love to come in the winter to see the Dubrovnik winter festival but we just can't get flights from Manchester. It is such a shame,” read the next comment. Quickly followed by “I would love to visit outside of the May to October period. Direct flights UK to Dubrovnik year round please.” I wasn’t even digging and the comments were flowing in. Ok, I know that we have more flights than ever before, I think around 14 international flights, through the winter but it would seem that there is a demand for more. And if we really want to get to the level of the Advent in Zagreb then making it possible, no easy, for foreigners to get here must be the key.

“Now that there are so many more events going on out of the main summer season I'm sure it would be beneficial for an airline to start running regular flights from the UK to Dubrovnik. After all, I'd imagine there are a lot of people who want to come but are put off from visiting in the summer due to the sheer number of people and the heat,” was a section of the next comment. One can only assume that the more events that this reader was talking about is the winter festival.

And to compound the bad luck the one international destination that we do have regular flights to, three times a week, is Istanbul. A country and a city that is so politically unstable that it makes marketing to Turkish tourists a challenge, to say the least. “It’s such a shame the winter service is so scarce as I think many more people would visit if they could especially from the north of the UK,” was the next in the line of comments. I can understand, the weather in the UK at the moment, well every winter, is terrible.

The sight of bright sunshine, even though an image can’t show the bora, must be very tempting for UK tourists. Add in a Christmas market and decorations and it would seem like we have a recipe for success. With the completion of Terminal C at the airport expected to be finished by next spring it would also seem a perfect opportunity to add to our winter repertoire. To rewrite the great William Shakespeare “Now doesn’t have to be the winter of our discontent.”

As Christmas rapidly approaches the Old City of Dubrovnik is slowly turning up the volume on the Christmas entertainment. After the concert by one of the most popular vocal choirs in Croatia in the heart of Dubrovnik last night this morning was the turn of the folklore ensemble Lindo to entertain the packed crowds.

The Dubrovnik Winter Festival has organised a busy calendar of events in the build-up to the festive season and this morning saw the popular dancing and singing of Lindo. And with the cobbled streets bathed in warm December sunshine the first weekend of December it is turning out to be a weekend to remember.

Occasionally, I get to read from my books to groups of Czech tourists in Dalmatia. They find me exotic. In fact, as one of the tourists expressed it, they find my case disquieting. I will tell you what he said, and warning!, this is by no means a way to brag about myself (I was brought up in communist Czechoslovakia, where saying anything positive about your random achievements earned you nothing but public contempt), but to get a bit of context over here.

“Correct me if I am wrong,” the man said in a voice on the edge of fatherly and bossy, “but you were born in Prague, got your degree in Oxford, had a glamorous legal job at an international court in France, and you voluntarily exchanged all that for a life in a village in Dalmatia, marrying a local fisherman and writing books?” He particularly stressed the books, as if that was the most pathetic of all my choices. “I mean – tell me – what on earth possessed you to do that?”

Although I could have been the man’s daughter, I looked at him in manner of a mother or a guru, and said: “Love, my dear. It was love.”

He protested: “Of course! You fell in love with your husband, and – “

He was going to point out the risky business behind international marriages, warn me about how love in the initial stage of a marriage quickly transforms into routine, until you finally realize that there is an avalanche of things you hate about your husband, and spend the rest of your life in the horror of dealing with them, daring to call this love.

I stopped him: “Not this kind of love,” I said. “The love I mean has been with me since I was eight - since the day I first came to Pelješac. It is my love of Dalmatia, the feeling that I belong here, that all I did in my life so far were just steps on a ladder rising up here.”

“So the village of Brgat is higher on the ladder for you than Strasbourg and London?” the man asked in sarcastic disbelief, making everybody in the audience giggle.

“In a way, yes,” I approve. I feel the audience stiffen (did she really say that? Is she, like, completely nuts?). There is a whole bunch of things I mean by that, myriads of emotions and pictures that come to mind, the urge to explain that a lawyer living between four walls of his office tiled with countless cases would be surprised if he spent one single evening on the bench in Brgat, watching local men argue over a game of boće, eating grilled fish and sipping beer, hearing people sing, spontaneously, just like that, their voices melting into the heat of the summer night. Not worrying. Not hurrying. Maybe it would occur to him that there is more to life than sitting at an ergonomic chair, serving a purpose you have long forgotten, and being paid a fortune for it month after month.

Or maybe not - maybe the lawyer would not understand anything.

I finally start reading a chapter about a Dalmatian wedding, because that’s why the people came here at the first place. To hear me read from my humour books about the Adriatic Bride. They laugh. They sometimes lift their eyebrows, learning surprising things about life in Dalmatia through the story. In the end, they clap and some of them buy the books. Some of them later send me a message over Facebook. Not long ago, I got a message from a Dalmatian woman who is fluent in Czech, so she could read my books. She wrote: “There is so much love in your books that it brought tears to my eyes. I know that you are not the protagonist of your novels, but you do love Dalmatia like you were married to it.”

I gave it a thought: yes, that was it. In a long sequence of memories stretching over quarter of a century, I recalled my Dalmatian marriage. All the joy and pain, all the enchantments and disappointments I lived up to here, all the violent internal arguments I had with this place, misunderstanding or disapproving of local culture, the heart-breaking temporary split ups, escapes to Prague, and then the crushing loneliness and panic fear that I might not go back, ever. The frantic happiness of returns. The forgiveness. The lasting passion. Love.

The world doesn’t function in a way to understand this, nor is it designed to support this kind of attachments. Success is measured by the digits at your pay check. Civilization is Europe and America, and if you want to make it anywhere in your profession, you will inevitably end up living in London or New York. Not Pelješac, for god’s sake. An arbitrary diversion from the path of success is regarded unreasonable. Random people, who think they fell in love with Bali and went to live there are generally considered lunatics (unless they become, like, presidents over there). You can, of course, go through your rites-of-passage backpacking thing and live in Bali for three months, but then you better return back home, to the big city that gives you so much more possibilities – of what? Of, well, success.

Dalmatia gives me more possibilities of happiness, though.

I try to capture this happiness in my books. They are my love letters to this corner of the world, to its people, its culture of pomalo. Slowly. Dalmatia and I had our ups and downs, but if anybody asked me, whether I wanted a change, I'd scream "nooo!" After all these years, the spark is still there.

As I write this, I am freezing my butt off in the “Narodna knjiznica,” the library in the old town, wearing a wool hat and a pair of gloves, hating the cold and wondering, why nobody puts the damned heating on here. The librarian, cold and sick, just smiles. School kids on their tour of the library point their fingers at me: who is she? - "That's Blanka, our writer," the librarian explains, with a hint of pride in her voice. The kids raise their eyebrows (thinking either that I am a total freak or a secret celebrity).

In any case, it seems Dalmatia wants to keep me, too.
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Blanka Pavlovic a.k.a. the Adriatic Bride is a Czech writer. She studied law (Prague) and creative writing (Oxford). As a lawyer, she specialized in international human rights law, first working for the European Court of Human Rights, then for a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. She wrote five books, among them Total Balkans, The Handbook of the Adriatic Bride or The Return of the Adriatic Bride. She now lives with her family between Dubrovnik and Donji Brgat. More information and English translations of her work are available through www.blankacechova.com.