The Kolovare Hotel is now a nice four-star. It faces the Adriatic Sea on the back. However, it was a refugee camp during the Croatian Wr of Independence. There were a lot of families there, who had to leave their homes because of the wr but didn’t have to move very far.

They were some of the last refugees to leave and lived at the Kolovare for seven long years.

The Kolovare also had a nice, flat parking lot. That’s where young Luka Modric started to work on his football skills nonstop. He would beg the teacher from his elementary school across the street to go inside and do his chores. Luka would always be nice and say “just a little longer.”

He was smart, and he could do any sport that his school gave him. He liked basketball and played two-on-two with some friends, one of whom was Danijel Subasic, who would become a goalie for the national team. In handball, Modric was a great goalie himself.

But Albert Radovnikovic, his PE teacher, was shocked the first time he saw him with a football in his hands. He would put him in goal or play against bigger boys to push him, and sometimes he would do both. But Modric would bat all of those problems and win.

It wasn’t always possible for the kids to use the school gym for those lessons, and they weren’t even sure that class would happen every day. Artillery shells were still falling heavily on Zadar all the time, making it feel like a ar zone. When Luka and his friends heard the air raid sirens, they had to hide under their tables. Sometimes they were hidden for so long that they could only laugh.

It was the same story at the nearby football field, where Luka was quickly becoming a major player. There would be times during practice when the alarms would go off, and the teams would have to hide. They’d come back out when it was over.

Even though the school kids didn’t have to deal with the worst of the ar, it still had an effect on them. When Luka was in the third grade, he was asked to write a story about something that made him feel bad. He decided to write about his grandfather’s deth.