From the Academy

Wandering for a fort night in Dalmatia, your servant has meditated on the persistence with which human nature and civilized institutions reassert themselves. Poor Yugoslavia—after suffering a quarter of a century ago a civil war more terrible than Spain’s, the ravages of repeated invasions and “liberations,” and the triumph of an armed doctrine, Communism—why, poor Yugoslavia now makes her way back toward the politics of the possible.

If one sits at a table of the Cafe Luxor, in the ancient heart of Split, one sees pullulating about him a life indistinguishable from that of Western Europe. Sitting there, one is confronted by the cathedral, once the tomb of the Emperor Diocletian; for this square was the peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace, converted into a teeming fortified town by the Roman refugees from Salona, after the Avars and the Slavs had broken the defenses of Illyria.

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Russell Kirk

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Wandering for a fort night in Dalmatia, your servant has meditated on the persistence with which human nature and civilized institutions reassert themselves. Poor Yugoslavia—after suffering a quarter of a century ago a civil war more terrible than Spain’s, the ravages of repeated invasions and “liberations,” and the triumph of an armed doctrine, Communism—why, poor Yugoslavia now makes her way back toward the politics of the possible.

If one sits at a table of the Cafe Luxor, in the ancient heart of Split, one sees pullulating about him a life indistinguishable from that of Western Europe. Sitting there, one is confronted by the cathedral, once the tomb of the Emperor Diocletian; for this square was the peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace, converted into a teeming fortified town by the Roman refugees from Salona, after the Avars and the Slavs had broken the defenses of Illyria.