Saturday: Battle Scars

We left Osijek this morning after a walk through the Old Town - it really was a little gem of a place.  After leaving Osijek, we drove to Vukovar, which was the main purpose of this visit east.

Vukovar is a place of great meaning for Croatia.  I certainly remember it clearly from the time of the Balkans War when it was on the news for months.  We wanted, in particular, to visit the memorial centre that had been sent up in the hospital.  .  It took us quite some time to find, despite the fact that we were in the right place, because we mistakenly thought that we were looking for a museum.  It turns out that the hospital has been fully rebuilt and is fully functioning, but has a memorial centre in the basement.  It is very well done.........

Vukovar is being rebuilt over time but a lot of the houses still bear the battle marks.  It has, however, come a long way from this..

From there, we went to Ilok, a lovely medieval fortress town high on a hill overlooking the Danube river.  From the walls of the fortress, we could look into Serbia which is just on the other side of the river.  Ilok was also well worth visiting.

And now we are back home - it was just a little overnight trip but entirely worth it and a real eye-opener.  I struggled with what to post today so I might try and upload some more photos to Flickr tomorrow.