Reading West’s description of Gruz brought the place back alive within me. Gruz offers a reminder of a much more normal world than the one found within the Old Town’s walls. I could not help but feel a certain kinship with West since Gruz is where my wife and I have stayed on two different visits to Dubrovnik. This outlying district was where she and her husband stayed. In the first of two sections in her book devoted to Dubrovnik, West begins in Gruz. Rebecca West, author of Black Lamb and Gray Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, also had misgivings about the Old Town. Nonetheless, something about it does not feel right. Dubrovnik is one of the finest examples of the impulse for historic preservation and structural restoration. It has reached such a level of refinement that it does not feel quite real. There is something a little too perfect about the walled Old Town for my taste. Nothing could be more pleasant than the Old Town’s magical splendor in these moments, but it can also be spectacularly unnerving. Areas in the later afternoon that become consumed by shadow are the settings of refinement and repose. As blinding rays of sunlight strike the Dalmatian stone, radiance in its purest form becomes apparent. The quaint grandeur and sophisticated monumentalism of its historic structures are beyond compare. It is a town sized spectacle sculpted in stone. Dubrovnik leaves me with a range of complex and contradictory feelings.
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