Korcula, Croatia – The spelling of the town isn’t entirely correct. I cannot find the symbol I need which is a small v over the c in Korcula, making it sound like Korchula. As we once said, whatever….
Korcula is like Dubrovnik in miniature, or as the locals here say, Dubrovnik is like an oversized Korcula. The main difference is it isn’t crowded here. The streets are narrow, often with steps, everything is built of limestone from the same quarry so it all has much the same color, a sort of warm gray or grayish tan. No need to make bricks when limestone is everywhere. The other DrC says these places look like Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter books, I agree.
Apparently limestone is soft and easy to work as they’ve done some fantastic carving from it: statues and beautiful building trim – door and window surrounds, gargoyles for the churches. The building and paving blocks they cut from limestone are quite rough, on purpose. However, limestone can be polished to look like marble – smooth and buttery.
The streets in Dubrovnik have been walked on so much that they look and feel like marble. Yet over next to the buildings you see they started life rough and were polished smooth by hundreds of thousands of shoes. We’ve not heard that air pollution is damaging the limestone; perhaps the sea breeze in these shoreside cities keeps the air clean.
It is interesting that in the two Croatian cities we’ve visited we’ve seen no civil war memorials commemorating war heroes and the honored dead. Such memorials certainly exist in the U.S. which had its own traumatic civil war. Perhaps we’ve been steered away
