In the Summer of 1975, I worked as a tourist guide in Dubrovnik (I started working very young). Dubrovnik is, as many people know, a beautiful city on the Adriatic, on the Croatian coast, that throughout the Middle Ages was a very active port, with contacts throughout the then known world. Venice was its competitor and eventually dominated it; it the end however both the Venetian and the Dubrovnik (Ragusan) republics were abolished by Napoleon in 1797-1806. The existence of Dubrovnik as an independent republic, surrounded on all sides by the powerful Ottoman Empire, was somewhat of a miracle. Ottomans might have regarded it as a useful Hong Kong of the time and never mustered the will to conquer it. Dubrovnik always remained proud of its freedom. In its red flag it emblazoned the golden letters of “Libertas”.

A couple of times that Summer, I went, in the warm and sweet lavender-filled evenings, to watch plays performed at breathtaking spots in the fort overlooking the harbour. The plays were part of a summer-long Dubrovnik festival. The opening of the festival was always accompanied by the raising of the “Libertas” flag. I did not think much of it then but the flag ceremony with the appropriately rousing music was taken by me to hail back to Dubrovnik’s steadfast resistance to foreign invaders. Since Yugoslavia in 1975 was a free country, not ruled by foreigners, or as it was said then, beholden neither to “imperialists” (the United States), nor to “hegemonists” (the Soviet Union), I thought it only normal that the flag of “Libertas” be hoisted and cheered.

About ten years later, in a conversation with a friend who watched the same festival, and with communist rule already crumbling, he mentioned how excited he and everyone were seeing the fluttering flag of freedom every year; to him it presaged the end of communism and the return of democracy. I never thought of that then, and, without telling him, I believed that he either made up that feeling ex post (1985 was very different from 1975) or that he simply imputed to others what might have been the thoughts of a tiny minority.