Photos of People of Croatia, Croatia

These photos were taken in the late 1960s when Croatia was still very rural and quiet as part of Yugoslavia. It was also much more peaceful in the places of interest, like the Plitvice Lakes National Park, where local people would sell strawberries in bark baskets, bread and cheese and homemade yoghurt. Donkeys and horses, and carts were still common.

Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito (1892-1980), was a communist revolutionary, the leader of the Yugoslav Partisans, Prime Minister and, since 1953, President of Yugoslavia. He was born in 1892 to a Croat father and a Slovene mother in Kumrovec, Croatia; although authoritarian, his policies maintained a peaceful coexistence between the different ethnicities. I took these photos of him in Split in 1965; he walked freely with his wife, Jovanka, and people seemed pleased to see him, shouting, “Tito, Tito”. He left in an open Rolls Royce!

The people of Croatia identify almost 92% as Croats and over 3% as Serbs; their languages are practically identical; Croats, being mainly Roman Catholic, write in the Latin script, while Serbs being predominantly Serbian Orthodox, prefer a Cyrillic script. According to a census held in 2011, 95.6% of citizens declared Croatian as their native language; there are three major dialects, distinguished by the words they use for "what": Štokavian, the standard dialect, spoken by most; the others are Čakavian and Kajkavian, spoken mainly along resp. the Adriatic coast and in the northwest of Croatia.