🇭🇷 Croatia
Rijeka
Rijeka is Croatia's largest seaport and third-largest city (116,000 people) — a city on the Kvarner Bay of the Adriatic with a turbulent 20th-century political history: it was simultaneously claimed by Italy and Yugoslavia after WWI, briefly constituted as a separate free city, then taken over by the Italian fascist D'Annunzio (Gabriele D'Annunzio, the poet-soldier who occupied the city with his private army in 1919 and invented many of the theatrical rituals that Mussolini later copied — the Fascist salute, the black shirts, the balcony speeches, the mass rallies), then Italian under the Fascists (1924-1943), German-occupied (1943-1945), and finally Yugoslav. The city was designated European Capital of Culture 2020 (the first Croatian city to receive this title) and used the occasion to transform its industrial waterfront into a cultural infrastructure. Rijeka's defining cultural contribution to the world is the most famous European carnival after Venice — the Rijeka Carnival (Riječki karneval, February, traditionally since 1296 though documented continuously from the 18th century) has the Zvončari (Bell Ringers) — groups of men in animal masks and sheepskin costumes who ring enormous cowbells to drive away winter spirits, a pre-Christian tradition specific to the Kvarner mountains — alongside the International Carnival parade with 100,000+ spectators. The Kvarner Bay around Rijeka has the islands of Krk (the largest Croatian island, connected to the mainland by a bridge), Lošinj (the island with the highest oxygen concentration in Europe, the blue-and-white Mali Lošinj) and Cres (the island with Eurasian griffon vultures breeding on the cliffs), plus Opatija (the 19th-century Habsburg Riviera resort 12 km south of Rijeka, with the finest Belle Époque hotels on the Adriatic).