Vukovar

Our boat docked this morning at Vukovar, Croatia. On the opposite side of the river is Serbia. This was a key battleground in the Yugoslavian civil war where the Serbian army first crossed the river to attack Croatia.

War memorial in a park near the Danube River

At great cost, a small, poorly armed brigade of 1,800 fighters held off an army of 30,000 for 87 days, giving the rest of Croatia crucial time to gather arms and train soldiers for the larger war. About 90 percent of the buildings in this city were heavily damaged or totally destroyed. As refugees fled and casualties mounted, this city of roughly 45,000 before the war is now a town of about 22,000.

An unrepaired building remains in the center of the restore town.

In the morning we had a lesson on Slavic languages. Although Croats and Serbs speak close dialects of the same language -- and can readily understand one another orally -- Croatian uses the Latin alphabet whereas Serbian is written in Cyrillic, similar to Russian.

The city continues to seek a developer who will restore this hotel.

We then took a tour of the center city of Vukovar, seeing both unrepaired and fully restored buildings. A number of buildings still have visible bullet holes, and some mortar craters are preserved in the streets.

A stork nests on a restored home.

But a sign that war is in the past is that the storks have returned to nesting on the chimneys of some of the restored homes.

Many buildings have been restored to their 18th century grandeur.

Then we were bused to a small village outside of town for a home-hosted meal. Our hostess was a woman in our age range who was an excellent cook, but with limited English. So the company had hired a young university student to join us as a translator. He was quite good and we enjoyed a lively conversation along with an excellent meal.

The water tower was struck by more than 600 shells.

On the way back, we visited the Vukovar water tower. The tower became a symbol of the resistance because as long as the Croatian flag flew at the top, Croatians knew that the city had not yet fallen. But the Serbian forces fired on it continually. One young Croatian hero climbed the tower each night to raise a new flag. The tower remains, no longer holding water, but still flying the Croatian flag.

The grave of heroes are well attended.

Finally, we visited a cemetery where nearly 1,000 bodies were exhumed from a mass grave after the war. More than 900 white crosses mark that spot. Most of the bodies have been identified and reburied nearby in graves marked "HRVATSKI BRANITELJ" -- Defender of Croatia. But more graves are set aside for the 200 or so yet to be identified, as well as for survivors of the 1,800 who will have the option to be buried here at the ends of their lives.

Nearly 1,000 crosses mark the location of the mass grave.

The circumstances of the civil war and its aftermath are incredibly complex. Of the 1,800 fighters who defended Vukovar, nearly 600 were actually of Serbian descent, while thousand of ethnic Croatians continue to live in Serbia. And still today, more than 30 years later, schools in Vukovar continue to be segregated, with Serb and Croat students attending separate classes.