The Road to Plitvice

May 19, 2026

We have left Zagreb, and our destination today is Plitvice with a few stops along the way.

Dubovac Castle

There have been inhabitants of this area for some 3000 years.  Dubovac Castle was built on a large artificial mound. Construction began sometime at the end of the 12th or the beginning of the 13^th century. The castle often changed hands after the 14^th century. During the Turkish assaults of the 16th century, the castle was badly damaged, but never taken. However, it lost its strategic and military purpose in the 16th century when it became simply a military warehouse.

Under French rule from 1809 to 1813, it was modified into a romantic country residence, causing considerable damage.  Restoration began in the 1950s with a rethink on usage and further restoration in the 2020s.

The castle is now used for many children’s educational projects.  This is from a local school, where they all had to make a tile with the first letter of their name in Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is a historical script used by the Croats, with its use traceable from the 12^th to the 19^th century.

Looking out from the top of the castle

Spotted while we were driving down the road

Rastoke – Slunj

We stopped in Rastoke, a part of Slunj, for river trout, for which they are famous.

At Rastoke, similar natural phenomena are occurring as at the Plitvice Lakes, which we will visit later. Rastoke is sometimes known as “the Small Lakes of Plitvice”, and is connected to the Plitvice Lakes by the Korana River.

In medieval times, it was known as no man’s land, an uncertain border region between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Slunj was under French rule from 1809 until 1813. During this time, Croatian became the official language of the province.

Rastoke is known for its water-powered mechanical mills. The architectural style of the region combines those of the Dalmatian region. The ground parts of the houses are made of travertine, while the upper parts are made of wood. The roofs are made of shingles or tiles. Due to high concentrations of calcium that regularly form at the openings between stones, the areas near the ground have been covered with a layer of cinder so that water cannot run into the houses, even at high water levels.  Sadly, during the War in Croatia from 1991 to 1995, many century-old houses were partly destroyed.

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Petrova Gora

Petrova Gora

So, taking a long detour up a windy mountain road where the only things we saw were logging trucks and potholes, we eventually came to Petrova Gora.

Written on the top of this stone addition is written: “Within the foundation of our earned freedom is the peak of Petrova Gora, always our mother mountain.”

 Of the hundreds of ethnic-Serb peasants captured by the Ustaše, the ones who were not executed were sent to concentration camps. During the course of the war, roughly 27,000 people from the Kordun region were killed (approximately 30% of the pre-war population).

The monument to those Serbians who were killed was completed in October 1981. Within the structure, over its thousands of square meters of floor space, was originally intended to be a 250-person congress hall, a library, a reading room, a cafe, and a museum which housed hundreds of documents, relics, and artifacts related to the battle and the history of ethnic-Serbian struggles in the region. However, the vast majority of these grand ideas were never fully realized.

Over the decades, it became completely defaced, looted, and demolished, with all its historical artifacts and relics in its museum and archives taken or destroyed. With the onset of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, the monument fell into further disrepair.