So, how does Motovun feel after three months in Zagreb? This morning I went to the only store in the old town itself to buy a few things I needed. Then I went to a café for my morning coffee. Amazingly, I returned home more than three hours later. I stopped to talk with so many people that I started wondering when I would get back home. Only one woman I met pleaded with me edgily to stop greeting her from now on. A few people from the same family I stopped greeting a few years ago. On their instigation, I hasten to add. Everyone else was most pleased to see me and to share with me so many things that have happened in the last three months. In short, it feels really good to be back in Motovun. Minus a handful of people, it is a wonderful place. Alas, no place is perfect!

Addendum (November 28, 2015)

The woman who pleaded with me edgily to stop greeting her was Đurđa Ivašić (Addendum III to “Friends, Enemies,” June 17, 2010). Led by Klaudio Ivašić, Đurđa’s son, the entire family stopped greeting me just before the municipal elections of 2009. At the time, Klaudio led the local branch of the leading party, Istrian Democratic Assembly. I was opposing the party on account of its enthusiastic support of golf development in Motovun and many other places in Istria, as well as elsewhere in Croatia. Of course, golf development was part and parcel of the global real estate boom that led to the financial crisis of 2008. In fact, it was about apartments and villas with swimming pools rather than the posh sport. At any rate, Klaudio and his wife Leila stopped greeting me first, followed by his sister Tatjana Sutera and her husband Giacomo, and ultimately Đurđa herself. Only Dea, Klaudio and Leila’s daughter, regularly exchanges greetings with me through all these years. I have experienced this sort of behavior never before, and I was thus quite surprised by it. Indeed, not greeting people on account of political differences baffles me to this day.