While most of Croatia's coastal towns seem tailor-made for tourism, Split is real and vibrant ... as his country was turned upside-down by World War II. Meštrović sketched his inspiration ...

Croatia's progress to the European mainstream has been long and difficult, for the country has had to turn the page on some of the darkest episodes in European history since World War II.

During the war, the German and Italian invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 installed a puppet state on the territory of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which the returned Ustashe were in charge ...