Zagreb

Synonyms

Austria-Hungary; The detective novel

Introduction

Zagreb began in the nineteenth century as a tale of two cities: two medieval towns in central Croatia (Gradec and Kaptol), situated on adjoining hills and separated by a creek, were joined in 1850 into a single urban and administrative unit. Zagreb thus flaunted its beginning to be a legal fiction and received its historical coherence like a first-person narrator in a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, as if to suggest that nineteenth-century cities and nineteenth-century novels invite to be analyzed along the same lines. Indeed, in 1776, the year of the American Revolution, the bourgeois Gradec had been reinstated as the political capital of Croatia, in contrast to Kaptol, the traditional seat of Croatian bishops: a climax of often violent conflicts between the two towns. When the two were joined into Zagreb in 1850, an urban identity was invented that mitigated a history of violence, just as the narrative self in the...