November 8, 2022 – The city of Vukovar has published the full programme for this year’s Remembrance Day. The full schedule will stretch over ten days, from Friday, the 11^th November, to Sunday, the 20^th.

The scope of the programme is broad, with institutions such as the county hospital, the city library, its museums, veteran associations, and more all taking part. On top of the events happening in Vukovar, the official programme includes other Croatian cities where candles will be lit on the evening of the 18^th of November.

Grad Vukovar

The first of the events included in the programme will be a professional meeting of the Croatian Society of Emergency and Medical Intensive Care at the National Memorial Hospital in Vukovar at 5 pm on Friday, the 11^th and Saturday, 12^th November. On Saturday, the 12^th, the Sv. Bono Centre by the monastery will host an exhibition of artwork and models of the Vukovar Watertower and a meeting of war reporters.

On Monday, the 14^th, the Municipality Museum is organising a Multimedia Exhibition of their archive photos and videos, while the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar will host an online seminar titled Vukovar Today – Memories, Experiences and the Reality of Living.

On Tuesday, the 15^th, the Croatian Culture House (Hrvatski Dom) is hosting an exhibition titled Vukovar Execution Grounds, opening at 1 pm. The same venue will host the 18^th Stories From My City Memorial on Wednesday, the 16^th at 5 pm. The Association of Vukovar’s Women Veterans is hosting the 10^th Festival of Unpublished Patriotic Poetry Grad u Školjci (The City in a Seashell), starting at 6 pm at the Ružička House.

On the morning of Thursday, the 17^th, at 10 am, the associations of families of the city’s volunteers will lay roses and candles on the graves of Vukovar’s defenders. At 11 am, the Dragutina Tadijanovića primary school will host the 13^th Vukovar History Lesson titled Naša pjesma, naša snaga (Our Song, Our Strength). At noon, the City Library will host a Siniša Glavašević memorial panel on the Croatian Diaspora for Vukovar, titled The City – It Is You. At 1 pm, a scientific symposium on the Vukovar’s war hospital will take place in the Sveti Bono Pastoral Centre. At 2 pm, a monument to Kata Šoljić and her four sons who have died defending Vukovar will officially be revealed at Bartola Kašića bb. At 4 pm, the veteran associations will lay wreaths and candles and say their prayers at the votive chapel Put Spasa (Way of Salvation) at Kukuruzni Put – a path through the cornfield which served as the only link between Vukovar and the territory of the Croatian army in late summer and autumn of 1991. At 5 pm, the National Police Union will pay their respects at Hrvatski Dom. Ending the day, at 7 pm, the Vukovar Hospital will be the traditional venue for a candlelit prayer, with the support of Klapa Sveti Juraj.

On Friday, the 18^th, Vukovar’s pupils will traditionally light the candles along the city’s main roads in preparation for the memorial parade, whose start will be at the hospital at 10 am for the commemorative programme, and 10.30 for the parade itself. The arrival at the Vukovar Memorial Cemetery is expected at 12, with the national and city officials laying wreaths and paying their respects at 12.15, while the holy mass will take place at 12.30. At 5 pm, the Danube will become a Memorial River of Light. At 6 pm, other Croatian cities will pay their respect by lighting candles on their local Vukovar Street or the main street.

On Saturday, the 19^th, the pupils will light candles in the Borovo naselje area. The memorial programme starts at 9.30 at the Borovo Commerce, which served as a war hospital and shelter. The memorial parade will pass through the Blago Zadro and Trpinjska Cesta streets, reaching the Gospa Fatimska Church for the holy mass at 11. At 12.30 pm, respects for the veterans and civil victims of the war will be paid at the bank of the Danube in Borovo Selo. The same will be done at the Lovas Farm at 1 pm, while the Vukovarske Majke Association will honour those who went missing in the war at 1.30 pm at Sportska Ulica bb in Borovo naselje.

Finally, on Sunday, the 20^th, respects will be paid, and wreaths will be laid for the victims of concentration camps at the Velepromet venue in Vukovar, where the holy mass will start at 9.30 am. At 10.30 am, a memorial parade from the Memorial Cemetery to the Ovčara site will walk to honour the victims of this concentration camp. At 1 pm, wreaths will be laid there, followed by prayer. At 2.30 pm, a holy mass in honour of all the dead and missing Croatian veterans and civilian victims, as well as the victims of the Ovčara mass grave. It will take place at St Philip and James Church in Vukovar.

TCN will be in Vukovar to pay respects and walk the memorial parades on the 18^th and the 19^th of November. In the meantime, let us remind you that Vukovar also lives the other 364 days of the year.

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November the 8th, 2022 - The Zadar agency Telum has created a new and innovative tool which will help us rethink our personal data protection as things are set to change significantly with third party cookies.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Josipa Ban writes, privacy protection, which is most obviously reflected in the abolition or blocking of third-party cookies, has caused tectonic changes in digital advertising, and as such in ever-present digital media.

Huge changes are happening in this field because over more recent years, digital advertising has become "dependent" on third-party cookies. How could it not rely on it, when you take into account the fact that cookies are what lead advertisers to exactly where they need to be and who they need to be shown to by said individual's preferences?

In addition to targeted ads, cookies also enable advertisers to measure their own campaign results, user profiling and optimisation, all with the aim of achieving the best possible marketing results. However, third party cookies are increasingly being blocked by users and web browsers themselves due to privacy protection issues.

For example, the Safari browser has already discontinued them, and the consequences of such practices can be seen in the Zadar agency Telum, which is a marketing agency that has been involved in the creation, management and optimisation of Internet marketing campaigns for fourteen years now. The most important goal of marketing is performance, i.e. earnings and the growth of the client.

"When it comes to measuring the success of campaigns, we're already noticing that 50 percent of solutions that rely on third party cookies become invisible precisely because of their rejection," explained Mario Ivic, the founder and director of the Zadar agency Telum.

The situation will become even more difficult when one of the leading web browsers, Google's very own wildly popular Chrome, also chooses to block their use, which has already been announced for the third quarter of 2024. The consequences of such a move will be felt not only by advertisers but also by digital media.

"Everything starts with the advertiser themselves. They should adapt the measurement of campaign results to the increasingly frequent blocking of third party cookies. If they don't, they'll lose a lot of information, and this affects the quality of data optimisation. That being said, a much bigger problem is that with weaker targeting and user segmentation capabilities, campaigns become less efficient, and therefore less well paid. This inevitably spills over to publishers, that is, digital media, who have to reckon with a smaller number of advertisers and lower prices," explained Ivic.

Advertisers and digital media must therefore adapt to these new market conditions, and the solution, says Ivic, who is also the co-owner of Midas Network, a platform for native advertising, is in the preparation of technology for "first party" data, which enables user profiling on only one single domain.

"This somewhat reduces the quality of the data, but there are solutions that minimise this effect. These are CDP (Customer Data Platform) or DMP (Data Management Platform) solutions that enable user segmentation. By standardising these segments, over time, you can achieve a situation in which advertising becomes almost as good as it was with third party cookies,'' Ivic pointed out, and adding that some publishers are already using these solutions, while others haven't even started preparing for this yet.

The Zadar agency Telum, a marketing agency that stands out of the crowd for its own development of digital tools that help clients make their campaigns more successful, is also working on a solution to this problem, and that saw it placed on Deloitte's ranking of the fastest growing technology companies in Central Europe for three years in a row (from 2016 to 2018).

However, Ivic doesn't want to reveal much at all until the product is fully developed, so he just briefly pointed out that the software should be on the market in about three to four months, and its specialty will be that it will be the first solution adapted to the specifics of the Croatian market and at the same time be the only Croatian solution of that category for digital advertising using first party data.

Telum's brand new digital tool should be an additional tailwind for the company that has carried out more than three thousand campaigns to date, which achieved 18 percent growth in revenue in 2021, and which should be even higher in 2022. It should help advertisers and digital media minimise the negative effects of privacy protection policies and cookie blocking.

For more on Croatian companies, make sure to check out our dedicated business section.

November the 8th, 2022 - Croatian fuel prices have been altered following a recent government session and the new prices for all types of fuel are actual as of today. We'll provide a list below of what they are and what they would have been without intervention.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, following yesterday's session, the Croatian Government adopted the decree on establishing the highest retail prices of oil derivatives. According to the regulation, the highest prices are determined by a formula with a fourteen-day calculation period implied.

Margins in the aforementioned regulation are limited to 0.65/l kuna for petrol (gasoline) and diesel, 2.80/kg kuna for LPG for tanks, and 6.20/kg kuna for LPG for bottles.

The price of blue diesel is fixed at 8.49/l kuna.

This new set of Croatian fuel prices and this particular regime will be applied for the next fourteen days, the government also announced.

The new Croatian fuel prices (as of today) are as follows:

- 11.58 kuna/l for petrol (gasoline) fuel - (48 lipa more expensive)

- 13.19 kuna/l for diesel fuel (25 lipa cheaper)

- 10.16 kuna/kg for LPG for tanks (5 lipa more expensive)

- 8.49 kuna /l for blue diesel – the price has remained the same as before

- 14.41 kuna/kg for LPG for bottles - 5 lipa more expensive

Without the aforementioned capping and measures, Croatian fuel prices would be the following:

- 13.37 kuna /l for petrol (gasoline) fuel

- 15.13 kuna /l for diesel fuel

- 10.45 kuna /l for blue diesel

- 12.01 kuna /kg for LPG for tanks

- 16.75 kuna /kg for LPG for bottles of 7.5 kg and more.

For more on Croatian news, make sure to keep up with our dedicated section.

November the 8th, 2022 - Interliber 2022 is hoping to realise a certain level of profit, putting more emphasis on it than ever before as spiralling inflation continues to force the cost of just about everything up.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Josipa Ban writes, publishers have high expectations from Interliber 2022 in Zagreb, famous for being the largest book fair in the country. They have calculated that they will finally get closer to their pre-pandemic figures and one of the best years of the fair which took place back in 2019, when almost 150,000 people visited Interliber.

Interliber 2022 is the first "normal" year for Interliber, after it failed to be held back in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, and last year it was held with the obligation of covid certificates, with only 55 thousand people visiting it. This year is naturally of great importance to publishers as this large book fair brings them from 5 to 25 percent of their annual income.

"Last year, sales were at the level of cost coverage. We expect this year to be at least 50 percent better. On top of that, we expect the results to rise and approach those from back in 2019. This edition should be dynamic, both economically and promotionally,'' pointed out Slavko Kozina, president of the Association of Publishers and Booksellers of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK). The participation announcements this year are also significantly higher than they were last year, with as many as 66 publishers set to participate in the fair, more than last year. More precisely, 296 of them from an impressive 15 countries.

Among them is the Mate publishing house, which specialises in business literature and high school textbooks. They didn't participate last year, because due to epidemiological measures and the limitation of the number of people at the fair, they estimated that it simply wasn't worth it, according to Sanda Tomljenovic Polic, the editor and sales coordinator at Mate. They will be present at Interliber 2022, however, where they achieve a monthly turnover in just six days. However, Interliber 2022 isn't important to them solely because of traffic, but also because it allows them contact with their customers.

"We sell through the web or via distributors, so this is a great opportunity for us to socialise with people and hear their comments for ourselves," stated Tomljenovic Polic, announcing attractive discounts of 15 to 80 percent.

In addition, at Interliber 2022, Bernard Marr's book "Artificial Intelligence in Practice" will be presented, in which the author provides detailed research on 50 companies that have successfully integrated AI into their business practices.

From Fraktura, which annually publishes about a hundred new titles, they have prepared 15 of them for Interliber 2022 alone. "I believe that the fair will be crowded this year," Seid Serdarevic, editor-in-chief of Fraktura, is convinced.

"It's a great source of income for everyone, and this will be especially important this year due to the increase in the prices of raw materials", warned Serdarevic, pointing out that the price of printing is 40 to 60 percent higher this year compared to last year, while the price of paper has also shot up significantly.

"The jump in costs was caused by the global coronavirus pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and inflation, and all of this creates pressure on the final price of the product, i.e. the book,'' said Serdarevic, adding that there has been a certain increase in the price of books in general, but that publishers are trying to minimise it so that physical books will continue to be affordable and available to Croatian buyers.

Although researches show that Croats don't read all that much anymore, the fact remains that of all the creative industries, this publishing industry is the toughest. In the last five years, the Croatian publishing scene has gone through three major crises, the failure of Algoritm, then the 2017 Agrokor crisis, and recently the coronavirus crisis, and in the end they successfully overcame it all.

As far as sales are concerned, this year things were solid with a slight increase compared to last year. Slavko Kozina pointed out that the latest figures for the business year of 2021 showed an increase in income of five to seven percent compared to pandemic-dominated 2020. It is the industry that, according to him, employs about 3,200 people and annually generates a massive one billion kuna in revenue.

For more, make sure to keep up with our dedicated news section.

November the 8th, 2022 - Croatian hotels could soon become the practical classrooms for students from Austria's private IMC Krems as the need for high quality staff in tourism becomes more pressing.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Crnjak writes, Croatian hotels could soon become classrooms for the practical parts of classes for students studying tourism and the wine business at the Austrian University of Applied Sciences (IMC), a leading private university with international significance that generates top-class personnel in tourism around the world.

With the growing need for top quality staff in tourism operations and management, it is also expected that the IMC university campus in the Austrian university town of Krems could attract more and more Croatian students. Even though it is a private university, thanks to significant state subsidies, tuition fees for IMC Krems are extremely affordable.

"Our University is the most international in Europe, and since its foundation back in 1994, it has been the first private university for tourism in all of Europe. We're committed to innovation and an international approach, with a special emphasis placed on the practical part of the teaching that our students must do abroad," revealed Karl Ennsfellner, president of the University's board, at a press conference.

IMC Krems was founded back in 1994 as the International Management Centre (IMC) by Dr. Heinz Boyer, who is now chairman of the university's supervisory board and majority owner, while the Austrian city of Krems itself holds a 30 percent stake.

Eight years after its establishment, they received the status of a higher education institution, and since then the university has grown rapidly. IMC Krems currently offers seventeen bachelor's and ten master's programmes, as well as three continued education courses, and about 40 percent of the programmes are taught in English. Programmes in three core areas - business, science and technology, and health - are all offered to full-time students, as well as those who choose to study while working.

Their programmes are closely related to the university's core focuses on business, digitalisation and engineering, health and life sciences, and they generate the most income from biotechnology studies, in which they closely cooperate with leading pharmaceutical companies. IMC Krems has more than 160 partner universities and they have attracted students from 50 different countries.

The practical part of the 22-week course takes place in hotels abroad all over the world, and currently students are very interested in South America," says Bauer-Krösbacher. In addition, classes take place at partner universities in Egypt, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, China, Latvia and Vietnam, and Croatian hotels may well be the next practical classroom for students.

For more, make sure to keep up with our dedicated news section.

November 7, 2022 – Although this year’s A World for Travel forum was dominated by stories from the host France, the USA, the UK, Spain, and other European countries, a few keynote speakers showed up to represent the underdogs. Jamaica’s minister of tourism, Bartlett, had stories to tell and could have kept going for days. Just ask Rajan Datar of BBC, who moderated the panels and was tasked with signaling “wrap it up.” A few interesting stories came from Croatia’s neighbours, Bosnia and Herzegovina. As we wrote, contracts were signed between the Global Travel and Tourism Resilience Council, Intrepid Travel, The Travel Corporation, and USAID’s Developing Sustainable Tourism in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Turizam) to facilitate the development of sustainable tourism in BiH.

This made us think – is Croatia late for this train? Of course, the way and why tourism developed in Croatia is vastly different from BiH’s situation. With the Adriatic Sea there, it was almost inevitable that tourism would eventually bloom in Croatia. Whatever the supporting factors were (social media, the EU, marketing), the fact is that it happened somewhat rapidly and before the infrastructure was ready to support mass tourism. Dubrovnik is the perfect example.

What struck us the most in the panels with BiH is how much they emphasized the environment, underlining that their mission includes avoiding and mitigating mass tourism at all costs. With the help of their foreign partners, BiHis doing the opposite of what happened to Croatia – making tourism work for them, slowly, thoughtfully, and with a long-term plan. They did, of course, learn from Croatia, as there were many examples of what was done right, too. But it might not be a bad idea for Croatia to peek over the border and copy a few ideas on how to keep doing it sustainably.

An important point for BiH was the engagement and involvement of local communities in tourism. Whether that is local wineries, farms, or accommodation units. With an increase in OPGs and domaćinstva that now take part in Croatia, it was interesting to discuss the importance of developing this part of the tourist infrastructure. TCN spoke to BiH’s delegation at AWFT – Sabina Sahman Salihbegovic and Inja Hadzialic Bubalo of the Federal Ministry of the Environment and Tourism.

USAID - Turizam

How do you view Croatia and the way tourism has developed there?

“We see Croatia as a good example of tourism development; it is a well-branded destination and a famous one. Many tourists from our country go to Croatia, they love staying there and visiting the beautiful places you have.

Would you say that tourism has been developing sustainably in Croatia?

Tourism in Croatia has been developing sustainably, but there is always room to improve.

Have you seen good examples of community involvement/engagement in Croatia?

We find an example of good local community engagement at the Plitvice Lakes, a good community bond, tourist offer, and public sector.

What do Croatia and BiH have in common to benefit the sustainable future of tourism?

Croatia and BiH have much in common; we speak the same language, we have similar traditions, historical bonds, beautiful monuments, nature, an attractive offer, and friendly people...

What are the main differences between the two countries?

The differences between us are mostly connected to the state government and the levels of power, but that is not something that should put tourism in a bad position...after all, tourism does not know borders...

We are stronger if we stand together – what are Croatia and BiH doing to use their geographical and cultural proximity to facilitate positive trends?

We can do much together by attracting tourists from around the world to both countries. Tour operators and travel agencies from our countries have already created connected itineraries so that for a few days tourists stay in Croatia and a few in BiH, and we can work more on our joint marketing and promotion, especially in long-distance markets.

While we might be competitors locally, competing on the global market together would make a lot of sense. Long-distance tourists are always looking to get the most out of their visit and want to travel as much as possible to the new part of the world. Croatia and BiH, but our other neighbours as well, could complement each other and create a fantastic offer.

What can foreign media do to support community involvement/engagement?

Foreign media can report about the beauties of our countries, of their unrevealed nature, parks, and protected areas.

How can we enhance community involvement/engagement in the diaspora?

Diaspora is valuable to every aspect of the economy, so it is for BiH and tourism. We can encourage people living outside their country to speak more about their home country to invite their friends and relatives to come and visit.

How do you view digital nomads, what is their role?

Digital nomads are coming; it is like a new way of life, a new way of doing tourism... We welcome them to BiH.

Are there cross-border tourism initiatives? What do you think about turning the region into a digital nomad hub?

Some projects are developing around cross-border digital nomad projects but still need real initiative. Of course, there is a legal matter concerning their period of stay in a particular country. We welcome all ideas aimed at developing tourism, so this one about a digital nomads hub is a good one and definitely something we could discuss in the future.

For more, make sure to check out our dedicated Travel section.

November the 7th, 2022 - Have you ever heard of the Zaratin dialect (Zaratinski dijalekt)? Unless you're a linguist or you just happen to be from the part of the wider Zadar area which spoke it, it isn't likely.

For such a small country geographically speaking, there are so many dialects, subdialects and even ways of speech which border on a language of their own spoken across Croatia. There are words specific not only to certain areas, but in many cases to specific islands, and in some cases, to specific places on those same specific islands. Having looked into the main dialects which make up the standard Croatian language as we know it today, Shtokavian, Kajkavian and Chakavian, as well as old Dalmatian and Ragusan (the Dubrovnik subdialect), let's get a little bit more obscure and delve a little into the Zaratin dialect from Zadar (or should I say Zara, given that we're talking about the Venetians).

The Zaratin dialect came to be from mixing Venetian speech with both the Croatian and Jadertine languages and was used by Italians from Zadar for centuries. The horrors which played out across Europe during World War Two are often blamed for kickstarting the beginning of the end for the Zaratin dialect, more specifically the bombing of the City of Zadar.

This tragic event saw a huge number of Zadar locals leave this part of Dalmatia and seek refuge and better lives elsewhere. Most of those people were actually Italians from Zadar who spoke in the Zaratin dialect, and censuses taken during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth show that a significant number of locals living in Zadar spoke in the Zaratin dialect (then listed as Italian for all intents and purposes) - over 60 percent to be more precise.

There were of course other dialects spoken in Zadar, most of which were heavily influenced by the Venetians and as such their language. As stated, up until the outbreak of the Second World War, the Italian influence in Zadar was strong and ethnic Italians living in Zadar were numerous, and as such their various ways of speaking. Following the bombing of Zadar and the aforementioned exodus of around 20,000 or so Italian Zadar residents, the Zaratin dialect (and others) suffered a decline in the amount of people left there who spoke it. The tragedy for this dialect didn't stop there, as Italian property was either handed over to relatives or confiscated by the state in Yugoslavia, and the ethnic Croatian influence began to grow, replacing the traces of the ethnic Italians from Zadar.

By the time the war ended and the 1950s rolled around, a heavily damaged Zadar was reconstructed by Croats, and the standard Croatian language began to gain a stronghold. The demise of the Zaratin dialect was then in full force. In this day and age, with many local dialects and subdialects across the Republic of Croatia unfortunately dying with the very last generations to speak them, very few elderly people in Zadar still speak in the Zaratin dialect and have it as their mother tongue.

While not all of them spoke in just the Zaratin dialect, the Dalmatian Italians were once a fundamental part of the way life was woven in Zadar and across the rest of Dalmatia, and it seems that even today the true amount of Italian Dalmatians is unclear, with just a few hundred individuals declaring themselves ethnic Italians in official censuses. It has been more or less accepted that the census carried out in Croatia back in 2001 underestimated the sheer number of Italian Dalmatians there are, as many people simply chose not to express their actual ethnic identity for a variety of reasons, from disputes over property ownership rights to not having adequate representation or protection as a minority.

Today, there are numerous Dalmatian Italian Associations, and the one in Zadar is called the Italian Community of Zadar (Comunita Italiana di Zara), which boasts 500 members and was founded back in 1991. It is responsible for launching the first Italian courses after Italian schools were all shut down in 1953.

If you want to hear the Zaratin dialect, one song which was once very popular and is worth listening to is El muto zaratin (Zadarski mulac), written back at the end of the nineteenth century by Luigi Bauch.

For more on Croatian language and history, make sure to keep up with our dedicated lifestyle section.

November the 7th, 2022 - Inflation is continuing to pile the pressure on everyone's bank accounts, wallets and back pockets. With spiralling prices and a lack of stability continuing to dominate, Croatian fuel prices are set to change yet again as of tomorrow, with quite an increase on the cards for one type.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, as RTL Danas/Today has unofficially learned, Croatian fuel prices are set to change once again as of Tuesday, with basic Eurosuper 95 being 48 lipa per litre more expensive, while diesel will be cheaper by 25 lipa per litre.

The Croatian Government will most likely step in and freeze the price of blue diesel so that it remains at 8.49 kuna per litre. The average tank for fiel should as such increase in price by 24 kuna at the pump, while diesel vehicle owners will pay 12.5 kuna less from Tuesday on than they currently are.

According to the Government decree on determining the highest retail prices of oil derivatives, over the last two weeks, the price of basic Eurosuper has been 11.10 kuna per litre, while the price of Eurodiesel has been 13.44 kuna.

For more on Croatian fuel prices and other news, make sure to keep up with our dedicated section.