The days leading up to Shrove Tuesday have been a time for dressing up and playing the fool ever since the medieval era, when the carnival period was the one time of year when the lower orders were allowed to make fun of their rulers without being locked up. In Croatia this satirical tradition still lives on, with many locals opting for carnival disguises which satirize personalities who were in the news over the course of the previous year.
This year’s Dubrovnik carnival spans four days, kicking off on the morning of February 18th in front of Saint Blaise's Church with the šporke makarule cooking competition - in which chefs from the city’s hotels compete in preparing the traditional dish of the title. Literally “dirty macaroni”, šporke makarule consists of locally-made pasta drenched in delicious beef-goulash sauce. It has long been a mainstay of every self-respecting Dubrovnik housewife’s culinary repertoire, even if it hardly ever appears on local restaurant menus.
Over the next three days a series of fancy-dress parades weave their way through the Old Town, and charity balls are held in Revelin Fortress. The carnival culminates with the main parade on Tuesday 21st, when groups of locals (including school-children, work colleagues, and sports teams) file along the Stradun dressed in disguises that they may well have been working on for the whole of the previous year. For most of the participants this is a thoroughly modern exercise in fancy dress, although recent years have seen the re-emergence of some of the more ritualistic carnival characters of old – strange, shaggy-haired monsters such as the gaping-mouthed Coroje and the long-necked Turica are unique to the Dubrovnik region.
Info: Dubrovnik Tourist Board D-2, Brsalje5, tel. (+385-20) 32 38 87, info@tzdubrovnik.hr, www.tzdubrovnik.hr.
