So, United Airlines just dropped a press release that reads like a travel influencer’s fever dream. They’re launching nonstop flights to Split, Croatia. You know the pitch: "explore historic sites," sip cocktails on a "palm-lined Riva promenade," and take day trips to sun-drenched Dalmatian islands. It’s a perfect, airbrushed fantasy for anyone with a couple thousand dollars and a desperate need for a new Instagram profile picture.
Just three days before this glossy announcement, a different kind of boat trip was happening in Croatia. No palm trees, no cocktails. Just the cold, dark waters of the Danube River, and a news report with a blunt headline: Chinese Migrant Dies as Boat Sinks in Danube on Serbia-Croatia Crossing. A small boat, overloaded with at least ten people, had capsized. Police from two countries were pulling shivering survivors from the river and searching for more bodies.
This is the Croatia they don't put in the brochure.
One country, two realities existing side-by-side, completely sealed off from one another. It's like a twisted funhouse mirror. On one side, you have the smiling tourist in a Boeing 767, sipping complimentary orange juice and dreaming of ancient Roman palaces. On the other, you have a desperate migrant on a smuggler's dinghy, praying they don't become another statistic in a river that’s become a graveyard. The price of admission to this European paradise is either a credit card number or, sometimes, your life.
Let’s be real. The language United uses is pure corporate poetry. They’re selling an experience. Patrick Quayle, a Senior VP, boasts about connecting customers to "unique, trendsetting destinations." Trendsetting? Is that what we’re calling a country that’s also a hard-line EU border? A place where the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service isn’t just finding lost hikers, but also pulling drowned migrants from a river?
I read the police report and the United press release back-to-back, and the cognitive dissonance is enough to give you whiplash.
United Airlines: "Split offers travelers the ability to explore historic sites like the ancient Roman Diocletian's Palace... while the harbor gives travelers the chance to explore, sail and even adventure to many Dalmatian Islands."
Serbian Interior Ministry: "Rescue teams from Croatia and Serbia saved nine people. Later one body was retrieved from the water near Backo Novo Selo."
It’s the same country, I checked. One group is "adventuring" to islands; the other is just trying to reach solid ground without dying. Does the American tourist stepping off that brand-new flight to Split have any idea this is happening just a few hundred miles to the east? Hell, do they even care? Or does knowing that the walls of Fortress Europe are holding strong just make the vacation feel more… exclusive?
That’s the unspoken part of the sales pitch, isn't it? The pristine beaches and historic towns are so lovely precisely because they’re kept separate from the messy, desperate world just outside the gates. The glamour is propped up by the grim reality.
As if the universe needed to provide more irony, archaeologists in Croatia just announced a major discovery near Split, summed up by the headline: 1500-year-old olive oil production complex discovered in Croatia. It's a huge find, a window into the "economic life of the once-thriving Roman city." It’s exactly the kind of stuff United’s new customers will pay to see. More history, more culture, more content for the feed.
But here’s the kicker. Buried inside this ancient complex, where they weren't supposed to be, archaeologists found two graves. An adult male and a young girl from the 4th century. They believe the burials happened during a "period of crisis such as war or siege," when the normal rules didn't apply.
You can't make this stuff up. We are literally digging up the evidence of people dying in a crisis 1,500 years ago and treating it as a fascinating historical artifact. We’ll put their story on educational panels and preserve the site for tourists. Meanwhile, a modern crisis is creating new bodies at the border, and we treat it as a law enforcement problem. It’s a bad look. No, 'bad' doesn’t cover it—it’s a five-alarm moral dumpster fire.
We fetishize the past because it’s sterile. The bones of a 4th-century girl can’t ask us for anything. She doesn't need asylum or a blanket or a hot meal. She just needs to be an interesting footnote in the story of a "trendsetting destination." It reminds me of the tech bros trying to solve death while the rest of the world is just trying to figure out how to live. Focus on the clean, theoretical problem, not the messy human one staring you in the face. And offcourse, we're all complicit.
To top it all off, just a few days after the drowning, Pope Leo XIV stood in St. Peter’s Square and addressed 10,000 Croatian pilgrims. He praised their faith, their history, and their traditions. He urged them to be a "leaven of peace, goodness, and hope in a world torn by violence and wars."
Beautiful words. Genuinely. But where was the peace and goodness for the people on that boat?
I’m not blaming the Pope, but the disconnect is staggering. We have these incredible, lofty ideals about our shared humanity, our faith, our culture. We tell ourselves we’re people of peace and hope. But when faced with the actual, desperate reality of that humanity—a person from China paying a Serbian smuggler to get them into Croatia—the system’s response isn’t peace. It’s police boats and prosecutors qualifying the incident as "people-smuggling."
The Pope talks about a "precious treasure" of tradition that needs to be preserved, and honestly... I just keep thinking about that body in the Danube. What treasure was that person seeking? Probably just a chance at a life that didn't involve risking everything on a leaky boat in the middle of the night.
Maybe I'm the cynical one here. Maybe these things—tourism, archaeology, faith, and border crises—are all totally separate issues. But it sure doesn't feel that way. It feels like they are all tangled up in a story about who we decide is worthy of paradise, and who we leave to drown at the gates.
Look, here’s the ugly truth. The shiny brochure and the grim police report aren't telling two different stories. They’re two sides of the same, dirty coin. One doesn't exist without the other.
A destination can only be an exclusive, pristine paradise if you have a very firm policy about who gets in and who stays out. The entire business model of high-end tourism relies on a world of inequality. United Airlines isn't selling tickets to Croatia; they’re selling access to a carefully curated theme park version of it, scrubbed clean of the inconvenient human suffering required to maintain its borders.
So when you see those ads for a sun-soaked getaway on the Dalmatian coast, just remember the cover charge. For some, it’s paid with a Platinum card. For others, it’s paid with everything they have. And sometimes, it’s a price no one should ever have to pay.
