If one has ever spent a Christmas over in Croatia, one would know full well how tame the whole season of ''Christmas giving'' is over there. Over there the shops are not filled with ceiling high Christmas trees, adorned with thousands of dollars worth of decorations. There are no car-parks filled to the brim, with people struggling to find a parking spot because they desperately need to buy their loved ones (and even their not-so-loved ones) a few more presents to show them how much they care. Although it must be said that times are a changing - especially in the larger cities such as Zagreb, Split and Rijeka....

The Croatian art historian and theorist of the 1930s, Ljubo Karaman, stated that - in the cultural sense - Croatia is a 'borderline and peripheral milieu' of Europe.

International migration can lead to significant social benefits for migrants and their families, and for their countries of origin and the receiving country if measures are implemented for better migrant flow management and to facilitate emigrant monetary transfers, says the annual World Bank report, which opens a challenging perspective for Croatia because our educated emigrants usually engage in two forms of monetary transfers to the homeland: investment into real estate and human resources.

When a Greek girlfriend recently came up to Sydney to visit me, my friend Maria and I found ourselves constantly needing to translate words to her. We never realised just how much of the Croatian language had seeped into our everyday banter. It got me thinking....

Born on the fifth of April in 1960, in Split, Nenad Vetma's rise from accomplished professional athlete to booming baritone singer is one of the most interesting stories in Croatian music history. With his family hailing from Klis, Vetma nevertheless lived his entire life in the coastal Split suburb of Bacvice, opposite a tennis court, where his first passion began.