The Konavle secret: Discovering Watsonville’s sister country in Croatia

I’m sitting at a table on a warm September day on the second-floor patio of the home of Donna Mekis and Kathryn Mekis Miller in the tiny community of Gruda in Croatia, on the Adriatic Sea. Our hosts — sisters, Santa Cruz County natives and authors of a book about the deep link between this part of Croatia and the Pajaro Valley — have prepared a light lunch of bread, olives and cheese, and the moment approaches the perfect. 

The patio faces the northeast and the vista is nothing short of majestic, the lush greenery of the ancient Konavle Valley rising up to the towering mountain peaks of the Dinaric Alps, just a few miles away as the crow flies. We can spy from the table the Sokol fortress, a medieval-era stone castle on the slopes of the mountain where we had visited that morning. 

From the perspective of a contemporary non-indigenous Californian, this view feels like a peek into antiquity. And indeed, the Konavle Valley was shaped by the Romans and settled by the Illyrian people who date back in the area to at least the second century B.C. What captivates me at the moment, however, is reconciling the serenity of this scene with what happened here just 30 years ago. 

In the 1990s Croatian war for independence, or what the locals called “the Homeland War,” Konavle was occupied territory, invaded by hostile Serb troops, moving in from Montenegro, the border of which is less than 4 miles to the east. And just on the other side of that mountain range lies Bosnia and Herzegovina. I’m trying to visualize mortar shelling and sniper fire emanating from that mountainside. It’s like imagining Watsonville being shelled from Mount Madonna, with a hostile army pouring in from Monterey County. 

The comparison of the Konavle Valley in Croatia to the Pajaro Valley in California is apt, given the deep connections between the two locales, more than 6,000 miles apart. That connection is beautifully documented in the Mekis sisters’ 2009 book, “Blossoms Into Gold: The Croatians in the Pajaro Valley.” The Mekis family — which includes four other siblings besides Donna and Kathy — is emblematic of that connection, with roots in Santa Cruz County going back more than 100 years and in Konavle for centuries. 

“Watsonville is famous around here,” said Donna Mekis, on a long walk just outside Gruda with her sister, as well as me and my wife, Tina, last week. Anyone who has spent any time in Watsonville is likely to recognize the family names that are referenced throughout “Blossoms Into Gold”: Lettunich, Franich, Gizdich, Scurich, Strazicich and many more. 

In 2026, “Blossoms” will, for the first time, be published in the Croatian language, introducing the story to many new readers throughout Croatia. 

Croatian families from the Konavle region began to emigrate to the Pajaro Valley in the late 19th century, when Konavle and Watsonville were both very different places than they are today. After the pandemic, the Mekis sisters made the decision to buy the house in Gruda from their share of the proceeds of their late father’s estate, which included a commercial building in downtown Santa Cruz. (The Mekis patriarch was the late Andrew Mekis, the namesake behind the iconic downtown business Andy’s Auto Supply on Pacific Avenue.) Thanks to their family roots in the area, the Mekis sisters were also able to get Croatian citizenship, and now plan to live in Croatia half-time. 

Kathy Mekis Miller said that her father would probably be amazed at the fact that she and Donna had decided to buy a house in Konavle. Andy Mekis was born in the U.S. in 1920, but his own parents lived most of their lives in this valley before moving to Santa Cruz County for a better life. 

Of her Croatian grandparents who lived in the area more than 100 years ago, Donna said: “You could say that my father’s parents’ lifestyle was practically medieval, because they were living with no electricity. They got their water from wells. Everything they had was hand-made.”

Her grandparents chose to raise their family in the States, meaning that Andy Mekis went to school in Watsonville knowing very little English. The Mekis family was part of a wave of people making the jump from Konavle to Watsonville in the years before Croatia was absorbed into the now-defunct nation of Yugoslavia. 

“At that time,” said Donna, “everybody in Konavle was connected to somebody in Watsonville, not just my dad and his family. So everyone’s writing letters; there is a lot of communication going back and forth — in good times and bad times. When it was really bad, during wartime, there were periods when the mail wasn’t getting through.”

The diaspora of Croatians who left the old country to settle in Santa Cruz County might be bedazzled by what Croatia has become today. The country’s capital, Zagreb, sits in the mountainous country near the shared borders of Slovenia and Hungary. But the country also include a blade of land along the Dalmatian coast line just across the Adriatic from Italy. Konavle exists at the far eastern end of that coastal swath, just to the south of Dubrovnik, the famed walled city that is one of Europe’s most popular tourist draws. The country contains many of the most gorgeous and dramatic beaches in all of Europe. Croatia has embraced the West, joining the European Union in 2013, and adopting the Euro as its currency as recently as 2023.

If the Konavle Valley can bear comparison to the Pajaro Valley, then Cavtat is the region’s answer to Capitola. A breathtaking coastal town a 45-minute boat ride to the south of Dubrovnik, Cavtat (pronounced Tsauv-taut) features seafront restaurants, million-dollar yachts and picture-postcard ocean swimming spots. When we visited the weather was positively summer-peak, and the village of Cavtat was as thick with tourists as the vineyards in the area are thick with grapes. 

In Cavtat, innkeeper Pero Radovic makes his living hosting visitors. He was born and raised in nearby Čilipi, and still lives there with his wife and two children. But he also lived in Santa Cruz County.

“Yes, it’s true,” he said on a ravishing day overlooking Cavtat, the walls of Dubrovnik gleaming white across the water on the far horizon. “We all knew about Watsonville. Even when I was like 6, 7 years old, we were always looking forward to the mailman. Today, he only brings the bills. But back then, he actually used to bring letters from people. I remember them all marked ‘Airmail,’ and very colorful. Inside would be a handwritten letter, but also sometime $100.”

Radovic came to Santa Cruz County as a young man after the Homeland War, in 1999, at the behest of an uncle who owned land in the Pajaro Valley. The uncle was recently widowed and struggling with his health, and young Pero moved to the States to assist his uncle.

“I was finished with high school, and this area was just too small for me,” he said. “I wanted to, you know, spread my wings a little bit.”

He stayed in Santa Cruz County for a few years, working for his uncle, attending classes at Cabrillo College, then leaving the area in 2001. Even in that short time, Radovic connected to many of the Croatians living in the Pajaro Valley. But he was also keenly aware of the fundamental changes taking place in the historic connection between Santa Cruz and Croatia.

“There was one moment in time when many many people in Watsonville were from this area,” he said. “But by the time I came [to Santa Cruz County], the old-timers were [dying off], and their children, born in the United States, weren’t so interested in farming. They went off to Berkeley, or San Diego, or Los Angeles, or different places.”

Just in Radovic’s lifetime, Croatia has gone from Soviet-influenced Yugoslavia, to a war-torn occupied land, to today’s dazzling pro-EU tourist mecca. The U.S. has changed almost as dramatically as well. What was once viewed as a golden land of opportunity is now seen with more skepticism. For generations of Croatians, it was an article of faith that life would be better in the golden sunshine of California than in the volatile land of the former Yugoslavia. Now the tide is turning on that attitude. The polarized nature of American politics have driven many with roots in Croatia to look at it anew, as a place to begin again, just as Watsonville was once thought of.

The Mekis sisters are more deeply committed to life in Konavle than other American-born people with family lines from Croatia. During our visit, the sisters were proud to showcase a place where they were so rooted in timelines of which Americans are not accustomed. They showed us the Mekis family home, an imposing stone house that’s been in the family since before the United States existed. 

“It’s definitely the [American] politics,” said Donna Mekis of why Croatia is emerging as a new possibility for those with family roots there. “But it’s also a deep love of this place. It’s definitely true that there are always some family members who are more interested [in learning more about Croatia] than others.”

But, she said, intermarriage with people of other backgrounds has made Croatian ethnicity less of a deciding factor. (The Mekises’ mother was originally from Missouri, so they trace their Croatian heritage strictly from their father’s side.) And it raises thorny questions on who exactly qualifies as Croatian. What means most is a deep-seated desire to reengage with a country and a community.

“My grandchildren are one-eighth [of Croatian heritage],” she said, “so it’s certainly getting diluted. But they’ll get their Croatian citizenship. If you raise your family such that everyone knows they are tied to a country, and you go back there as a family and learn about it, it has a huge impact on the continuance of that culture, even if you are only one-quarter or one-eighth.”

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