although i did spend some time wandering through the streets of Rovinj yesterday, it was….unscripted, so we started the day with a tour of the town before driving to Tolmin in Slovenia.

Rovinj is a small coastal town that was originally settled by the Venetians, and was once ruled by the Republic of Venice, and it still has a heavy Italian influence. you hear equal amounts of Croatian and Italian being spoken and it’s quite the little tourist destination.

when i was talking to the hotel manager she was telling me that the town has 15k residents and last year they had 70k tourists in one month. every extra room in the town was taken and there was barely room to walk down the street. pandemic, what pandemic?

one of the sights we stopped to see was the Church of St. Euphemia, formerly known as the Church of St. George.

the story goes like this, St. Euphemia was from Constantinople during the time of Emperor Diocietian, and was martyred in her youth due to her Christian religion.

they put her in a sarcophagus and she was kept safe in Calcedonia, then was moved to Constantinople, but when the governing power became the Iconoclasts they felt she would be unsafe and put her on a ship to a new home, but the ship disappeared.

later the sarcophagus appeared on the shores of Rovinj and it has been safeguarded there ever since.

the Church of St. George was too small to manage all of the people coming to see St. Euphemia, so they had to make a larger church….St. Euphemia is the guardian of the city, and is honored on the 16th of September by people near and far.

we stopped for a brief visit to Zavrsje, a town with very few residents and a lot of dilapidated structures. residents left the area due to lack of work and money, and made lives elsewhere leaving many unoccupied homes.

next was the town of Groznjan, which has been know since 1965 as the, “City of Artists”, and since 1969 it is the residence to the International Cultural Centre of Jeunesses Musicales Croatia. the cultural program is made up of numerous artists, temporary and permanent, in Groznjan and the surrounding area.

once in Tolmin, the Hotel Dvorec was the accommodation for the night. it’s a large hotel, but had the tiniest of rooms. it was a single room, but there was barely room enough for one to spread out. that being said, it was clean and very efficient with the use of space. breakfast was included, and it was a nice spread.

the only slightly inconvenient thing was that they didn’t have an elevator (it’s being installed now) and i was on the second floor. my suitcase seems to be getting heavier as the trip goes on. must be the dirty clothes, they weigh more than clean clothes right?!

oh, going back to the hotel in Rovinj…….it was the first hotel in all of the town to have an elevator. the slowest elevator known to mankind, but they had the first!