In the beginning, Dubrovnik was an island, but about a thousand years ago, the citizens got tired of the inconvenience this meant for trade and other necessities, so they dammed up and filled in the strait between the mainland and Dubrovnik.
This was the beginning of Dubrovnik’s glory days which lasted 600 years. But then, one morning in 1667, everything ended in a matter of minutes. A terrible earthquake devastated large parts of the city, and the following tidal wave annihilated their large and successful merchant navy in one fowl swoop.
The city got some sort of renaissance for a period after the 2nd Word War, during the Tito era, when Dubrovnik was used as a retreat for high ranked Eastern European party officials. That might have continued had it not been for the Serbs who, as the story goes, out of sheer jealousy sieged and started bombing this beautiful city. Their accuracy was “so-so” and the first human victim of the bombings is said to have been a Serb writer, and the first structural was the Serbian-Orthodox church. Today, only the sharp-eyed might notice signs of the devastation, some of tiles and stones are of a slightly brighter shade.
There are places you should visit at least once, and Dubrovnik is definitely one of them. After you’ve done that, we would not be surprised if you want to do it again, and again.