59 Fun Facts About Croatia

What is the capital and largest city of Croatia?

Zagreb: it grew from two rival hilltop towns, the clergy's Kaptol and the merchants' Gradec, which feuded for centuries before merging into one city in the 19th century.

Croatia's coastline lies on which sea?

Adriatic Sea: Venice, at its northern end, ruled much of Croatia's coast from 1420 until 1797, when Napoleon handed both the city and its shore to Austria.

Croatia declared independence from which country in 1991?

Yugoslavia: Croatia and Slovenia both declared independence on 25 June 1991, and the fighting that followed in Croatia did not end until 1995.

Which menswear item derives from a garment worn by Croatian soldiers in the 17th century?

The necktie: French fashion copied the knotted scarves of Croat cavalrymen in the 1600s, and 'cravate', from the French word for a Croat, became the garment's name.

Which explorer does the Croatian island of Korčula claim as its native son?

Marco Polo: Croatia's tourist board bills Korčula as 'the island of Marco Polo', though most historians say the great traveller was born in Venice.

Which dog breed is named after a historical region on Croatia's coast?

Dalmatian: named after Dalmatia, the breed won fame abroad as a coach dog, trotting beside horse-drawn carriages and fire engines as escort and guard.

Which currency replaced the Croatian kuna on 1 January 2023?

The euro: Croatia switched at a fixed 7.5345 kuna to one euro, and for the first two weeks of 2023 shoppers could still pay in either currency.

The kuna, Croatia's currency from 1994 to 2023, was named after which animal?

Marten: a medieval tax here was paid in marten fur, and local silver coins carried the animal from the 13th century, long before the modern currency took its name.

On 1 July 2013 Croatia became the 28th member of which organisation?

The European Union: Croatia applied in 2003 and joined ten years later, after neighbouring Slovenia spent ten months blocking the talks over a disputed sea border.

Roughly how many islands, islets and reefs lie along Croatia's coast?

About 1,200: surveys run from 1,185 to 1,246 depending on what counts as a rock or a reef, which is why Croatia calls itself the land of a thousand islands.

Which two islands, each around 405 square kilometres, are Croatia's largest?

Cres and Krk: equal in size, the neighbours could hardly differ more, since Krk has a bridge to the mainland and Rijeka's airport while Cres is reached only by ferry.

Which delicacy set a world record in 1999 when a 1.31 kg specimen was found in Croatia's Istria region?

White truffle: Giancarlo Zigante found the giant near Buje and, instead of selling it, had it cooked for a celebration feast, keeping only a replica.

Croatia's territory around Dubrovnik is cut off from the rest of Croatia by whose coast?

Bosnia: its short strip of coast at Neum splits Croatia in two, so in 2022 Croatia opened a 2.4 km bridge that carries traffic around the gap without leaving the country.

Which Roman emperor built the seaside retirement palace around which the city of Split grew?

Diocletian: he gave up the throne in 305 and retired to his palace to garden, and when urged to rule again he is said to have replied that his cabbages mattered more.

Which Croatian city's Roman amphitheatre, built for 23,000 spectators, now hosts a summer film festival?

Pula: finished around AD 80 for gladiator fights, its arena has swapped combat for cinema as the open-air home of a summer film festival launched in 1954.

By what historical name was Dubrovnik known as capital of an independent maritime republic?

Ragusa: the little republic kept its independence for 450 years under a flag reading Libertas, until one of Napoleon's marshals abolished it in 1808.

The walls of Dubrovnik and Fort Lovrijenac stood in for which fictional city in Game of Thrones?

King's Landing: the first season shot the capital in Malta, but from season two the crew switched to Dubrovnik, whose sea walls gave them a ready-made medieval city.

Which national park, Croatia's oldest, is famed for a chain of terraced lakes linked by waterfalls?

Plitvice: its sixteen lakes spill into one another over tufa barriers that the lime-rich water itself keeps building, so the natural dams are still growing.

The Croatian flag's shield shows what pattern?

A red and white checkerboard: its 25 squares took the place of the communist red star on the flag in 1990, a year before Croatia declared independence.

In which team sport did Croatia's men win Olympic gold in both 1996 and 2004?

Handball: the national team has competed only since 1991, yet five years later it was Olympic champion in Atlanta, and it added the 2003 world title before winning again in Athens.

Croatia lost its first FIFA World Cup final, in 2018, to which country?

France: Croatia had survived two penalty shoot-outs to get there, only to lose 4-2 to the same nation that had knocked it out of the 1998 semi-final.

Which Croatian striker won the Golden Shoe at the 1998 World Cup with six goals?

Davor Šuker: he scored in every match in which Croatia found the net, and his winner against the Netherlands secured third place at the country's first World Cup.

Who in 2018 became the first player other than Messi or Ronaldo to win the Ballon d'Or since 2007?

Luka Modrić: he spent years of his childhood as a war refugee in hotels in Zadar, learning the game in their car parks, and in 2018 he captained Croatia to the World Cup final.

In 2001 Goran Ivanišević became the first man to win the Wimbledon singles title as what?

A wild card: ranked 125th after a shoulder injury and beaten in three earlier finals, he needed the organisers' invitation just to play, then won the final 9-7 in the fifth set.

Croatian basketball star Dražen Petrović had his number 3 shirt retired by which NBA team?

New Jersey Nets: Petrović had just become the team's top scorer when he was killed in a car crash in Germany in 1993, aged 28, and the club retired his shirt that same year.

Which Croatian athlete won three gold medals at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City?

Janica Kostelić: Croatia had never won a Winter Olympic medal before her combined gold, and within days the skier had added the slalom, the giant slalom and a super-G silver.

Which famous inventor was born in Smiljan, a village in present-day Croatia?

Nikola Tesla: born to Serbian parents, he left for America in 1884 and built the alternating-current system that powers the world; his birthplace is now a memorial centre.

Croatian engineer Slavoljub Penkala registered a 1906 patent for what?

A mechanical pencil: he called it the automatic pencil, patented a fountain pen a year later, and his factory was soon shipping both to some 70 countries.

Croatian-born Ivan Vučetić, who emigrated to Argentina, pioneered which police technique?

Fingerprint identification: in 1892 his method exposed Francisca Rojas, who had killed her two children and blamed an intruder, the first murderer caught by a fingerprint.

Faust Vrančić's book Machinae Novae included Homo Volans, an early design for what?

A parachute: his engraving shows a man drifting down under a cloth sail on a square wooden frame, though the tale that the ageing bishop tested it himself from a Venetian tower is unproven.

Who is regarded as the first king of Croatia, named as such in a letter from Pope John X in 925?

Tomislav: he is credited with uniting the Croatian lands into one realm and with defeating the army of the Bulgarian ruler Simeon, which is why so many streets and squares bear his name.

In 1102 Croatia entered a personal union with which kingdom, a bond that lasted for centuries?

Hungary: its king Coloman was accepted as Croatia's ruler too, yet Croatia kept its own parliament, the Sabor, and its own viceroy, the ban, rather than being absorbed.

In 1527 the Croatian Parliament elected a king from which dynasty, whose heirs ruled Croatia until 1918?

Habsburg: the nobles met at Cetin and chose Ferdinand of Austria, who promised in a sealed charter to respect the kingdom's old laws and freedoms.

The Baška tablet, one of the oldest monuments of the Croatian language, is carved mainly in which alphabet?

Glagolitic: other Slavs gave up this early script in the Middle Ages, but Croats kept writing it into the 19th century; the stone itself records a king's gift of land around 1100.

The World War II puppet state installed by the Axis in Croatia was run by which fascist movement?

The Ustaše: led by Ante Pavelić under German and Italian protection from 1941, they built camps such as Jasenovac and murdered Serbs, Jews and Roma in the hundreds of thousands.

Which town on the Danube fell in November 1991 after a siege of almost three months?

Vukovar: the siege left the town in ruins, and its shell-scarred water tower was deliberately preserved rather than rebuilt, as a memorial to the defenders.

Which August 1995 offensive retook the rebel-held Krajina region and effectively ended the Croatian War of Independence?

Operation Storm: launched at dawn on 4 August, it was over within days, and an estimated 200,000 Serbs fled the region in its wake.

Who won Croatia's first multi-party elections in 1990 and served as its first president?

Franjo Tuđman: a wartime Partisan who rose to general under communism, he turned historian and dissident and was jailed by the regime he had served, years before leading Croatia to independence.

Which naval weapon did engineer Robert Whitehead first build in the Croatian port of Rijeka in 1866?

The torpedo: a local naval officer, Ivan Lupis, brought Whitehead a clockwork explosive boat steered by cables, and Whitehead reworked it into a self-propelled weapon his factory mass-produced.

Roughly how many people did Croatia count at its 2021 census?

3.9 million: that is some 900,000 fewer than the 1991 peak of nearly 4.8 million, a slide driven by emigration and by deaths outnumbering births.

Which faith did about four in five people in Croatia declare at the 2021 census?

Catholicism: 79% declared it, and the faith has long doubled as a national marker, since in the 19th century Catholics here came to call themselves Croats and Orthodox believers Serbs.

Which Croatian island is known for its lavender fields and more than 2,700 hours of sunshine a year?

Hvar: beyond the sun and the lavender, its townspeople opened a public theatre above their naval arsenal in 1612, one of the first anywhere in Europe.

The Sea Organ in Zadar makes music by means of what?

Waves pushing air through tubes under marble steps: architect Nikola Bašić built it in 2005 to draw people back to a seafront that hasty post-war rebuilding had left a blank concrete wall.

Zlatni Rat, the beach whose shifting shape is a symbol of Croatian tourism, is on which island?

Brač: the pebble spit near Bol is reshaped by wind and current, and a strong gale can swing its tip right round to point the other way.

Croatia's prized Paški sir, from the island of Pag, is made from which animal's milk?

Sheep: the bora wind dusts the island's thin pastures with sea salt, so only tough aromatic herbs survive, and the small local sheep that graze them give salty, strongly flavoured milk.

Zagorski štrukli, a pastry from northern Croatia, is classically filled with which ingredient?

Cottage cheese: mixed with eggs and sour cream and rolled in thin dough, the same parcels can be boiled or baked, sweet or savoury, a soup garnish or a dessert.

The Dubrovnik republic built the 'Great Wall' at Ston in the 14th-15th centuries chiefly to protect what?

Its salt pans: salt was among the republic's most valuable goods, so it ringed the pans with kilometres of wall and dozens of towers, and the pans are worked to this day.

Which 19th-century viceroy's statue was removed from the capital's main square under communism and returned in 1990?

Josip Jelačić: as ban in 1848 he abolished serfdom and brought the Croatian language into schools and offices, and his statue came back on the eve of independence.

According to the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII, the Croats won their homeland in the 7th century by defeating whom?

The Avars: in his telling, the emperor Heraclius invited the Croats down from what is now southern Poland, and they overthrew the Avars and stayed.

Krapina, a town in northern Croatia, is known for one of the richest finds of the bones of which early humans?

Neanderthals: palaeontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger dug their bones from a hillside cave from 1899, and his reading of them made him a founder of the science of human origins.

Croatian scientist Andrija Mohorovičić discovered the boundary between the Earth's crust and which layer beneath it?

The mantle: studying a 1909 earthquake, he noticed that its shock waves sped up below a certain depth, and the boundary he worked out is still called the Moho after him.

In 1997 a Croatian programmer wrote AMP, a pioneering software player for which digital music format?

MP3: two American students adapted Uzelac's decoder for Windows and released it as Winamp, the free player that carried MP3 music onto millions of home computers.

The bridge that has linked the Dubrovnik area to the rest of Croatia since 2022 is named after which peninsula?

Pelješac: a Chinese contractor built the 2.4 km bridge across the bay to the peninsula, so the drive south to Dubrovnik no longer means leaving the country and entering it again.

Croatia joined NATO on 1 April 2009 together with which other country?

Albania: the pair were invited together at NATO's 2008 Bucharest summit, where a third hopeful, Macedonia, was left out because Greece objected to its name.

The 1593 Battle of Sisak brought a lasting halt to which power's advance into Croatian lands?

The Ottomans: a Croatian and Austrian relief force surprised the besieging army where the Kupa meets the Sava and killed its commander, and the long westward conquest stopped there.

Which religious order ran the academy, raised to university rank in 1669, that grew into Croatia's largest university?

The Jesuits: they taught there for more than a century until the Pope dissolved the order in 1773, and three years later Empress Maria Theresa refounded the school as a royal academy.

Which eastern region, a fertile plain bounded by the Sava, Drava and Danube, is Croatia's main farming belt?

Slavonia: the plain holds much of the country's best farmland, and its kitchen shows it, built on pork, spicy kulen sausage and river carp rather than the olive oil and sea fish of the coast.

The 2018 sequel to the musical Mamma Mia was filmed on which Croatian island, standing in for Greece?

Vis: it had stayed unspoilt partly because it was a military base closed to foreign visitors until 1989, so it could pass for a quiet Greek island.

In 2021 the Croatian electric-car maker Rimac took control of which historic supercar brand?

Bugatti: Rimac had begun barely a decade earlier as one man's garage start-up, yet its group took 55% of the merged company and founder Mate Rimac became its chief executive.