Croatia historical timeline

Croatia's history is the story of a small nation that kept its name through long periods of rule from elsewhere and made a state of its own only in living memory. What a visitor sees -- Roman, Venetian, Habsburg, socialist and post-war -- is the record of who held the coast and the plain in each century.

Chronology

1. c. 300 A.D. Diocletian builds his retirement palace and fortress on the coast at the end of the third century, about half of it for his own use and the rest housing the garrison. It is not a ruin: the palace forms roughly half of the old town of Split today, with some 3,000 inhabitants and its shops, cafes and bars inside the Roman walls.
2. 925 The medieval Kingdom of Croatia is formed from the Croatian duchy and Lower Pannonia. It lasts until 1102, and its existence is the reference point for every later claim to statehood.
3. 1102 The crown passes into personal union with Hungary, which lasts until 1527; the coast, meanwhile, falls piece by piece to Venice, which is why Split, the islands and Istria look Venetian while the interior does not.
4. 1527 The union with Hungary gives way to the Habsburgs, who hold the Croatian lands, with intervals, until 1918. Ottoman advance and the military frontier that held it shape the interior for three centuries.
5. 1918 With Austria-Hungary dissolved at the end of the First World War, the Croatian lands are incorporated into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
6. 1941 Germany invades Yugoslavia and installs the Independent State of Croatia as a puppet regime, alongside Italy until 1943. The Partisan movement that defeats it makes Croatia a republic within socialist Yugoslavia from 1945.
7. 1979 UNESCO lists the historic city of Split built around Diocletian's Palace as a World Heritage Site, in November. Dubrovnik's walled Old Town, whose monuments largely date to the Republic of Ragusa, is listed in the same period -- the two decisions that made the Dalmatian coast a heritage destination rather than simply a shore.
8. 1991 On 25 June the Croatian Parliament declares independence from Yugoslavia. War follows: Vukovar falls on 18 November after a siege that leaves it the first major European town destroyed since 1945, and Dubrovnik is besieged and shelled for seven months.
9. 1991 The siege of Dubrovnik begins on 1 October, and the bombardment of the Old Town -- a World Heritage Site -- culminates on 6 December. More than 11,000 buildings were damaged. The famously uniform roofscape a visitor photographs from the walls is largely replacement tile, and the map inside the Pile Gate showing every shell strike is the city's own account of it.
10. 1992 A ceasefire in January and international recognition of the Republic of Croatia freeze the front lines; the war ends with Operation Storm in the first week of August 1995. The country a visitor sees today was largely rebuilt in the decade after.
11. 2013 Croatia joins NATO in 2009 and the European Union in July 2013 as its 28th member; the euro and the Schengen Area follow in 2023, which is why there is no border check on the road from Slovenia and no kuna in the tills.
12. 2023 Croatia joins the eurozone and the Schengen Area, adopting the euro as its currency. For a visitor this removed both the border queue from Slovenia and the currency exchange at the same stroke -- and it is why guidance written before 2023 still talks about the kuna.

What survived, and how

The coast survived by being useful to whoever held it. Diocletian's retirement palace became a town when refugees moved into its walls, and it is a town still; Dubrovnik's republic bought its independence from every neighbour for centuries and kept its walls; Pula's arena stands because nobody found a better use for it. The Venetian centuries left the coast its campaniles and loggias.

The interior lost more. The Ottoman frontier emptied and refilled it, the twentieth century's wars ran through it twice, and Vukovar -- destroyed in 1991 and rebuilt -- is the plainest reminder that the newest layer of Croatia's history is a repair.