Belamarić Joško: Dubrovnik sa starih razglednica

Joško Belamarić: Dubrovnik from old postcards

Reproductions of old postcards (black and white, toned, in color).

The book was written in parallel in Croatian, German, Italian and English.

Taken from the preface:

The second most beautiful place in the world, if the place where you were born is excluded, is undoubtedly Dubrovnik. If you were born in Dubrovnik, you are doubly privileged because Dubrovnik is twice the most beautiful city in the world for you. It is not just about beauty that is subject to the influences of time, taste or the eye that observes it. It is about the beauty where the word stops, leaving to the soul those means of expression that do not need translation, that do not need an interpreter, because Dubrovnik stands before you as a city-dictionary of all key terms, as a city-interpreter that, interpreting itself, also reveals the secret of your own being, which you get to know more and more the more you get to know that city, without which the puzzle of the world would be incomplete for the cube around which is inscribed the fairy circle of magic that lasts even when all others have passed.
In this city there is nothing that will disappoint you at any place, at any time, for any reason. You can only be disappointed with yourself, with your dissatisfaction, which, if you carry it in the baggage of your soul, prevents you from seeing the luxury in simplicity, the whole in every part that is not always emphasized, the spaciousness in narrowness, the illusion in reality, the reality in the semblance of reality that lies before you like an album of old photographs of people and times of which you have no experience, but the feeling does not deceive you: everything is close to you, even when it is completely different from what shaped your view, taste, thought, dream and a dreamer. Didn't you build a city like this on the sand of the coast of your youth, weren't you in it a prince and a princess who stay awake at night listening to the lute; wasn't this city a monastery to which you flee, didn't you come to it suddenly one night, wandering desperately through the flowing, endless, hot desert of your torturous dream. This is the City that life created for itself as a favorite toy, a castle and a doll, a box and a horse, a necklace and a purse, similar to those women's purses in which there is always more than is needed for human needs and lovely vanity. If you don't find what you were looking for in it, you will find what you need, without which you will no longer be able to live.