Karlovac County

Four rivers converge at Karlovac: the Kupa from Slovenia, the Dobra, the Mrežnica from the south, and the Korana. This hydrological accident made the site militarily and commercially inevitable. The Habsburgs recognized it in 1579, building a star-shaped Renaissance fortress named Carlstadt after Archduke Charles II. The hexagonal citadel withstood seven Ottoman sieges—the last in 1672—and became headquarters of the Military Frontier's Karlovac Generalate, the command center for the defensive line running from the Adriatic to Serbia.

The fortress logic yielded to trade logic in the 18th century. When Maria Theresa restored Karlovac to Croatian civilian rule in 1776, merchants replaced soldiers. The Kupa became Croatia's grain highway: ships from the Pannonian plains unloaded at Karlovac, where cargo transferred to ox-carts for the mountain roads to Rijeka and the sea. For a century, the city thrived as the transshipment point between continental Europe and the Adriatic. Then in 1861, the railway came—but routed through Sisak instead, bypassing Karlovac entirely. The city's commercial purpose evaporated almost overnight.

The 1991-95 war completed what the railway began. Karlovac sat directly on the front line, its rural Kordun hinterland controlled by rebel Serbs. The city endured sporadic shelling—16 civilians killed in September 1993 alone—while the surrounding villages saw ethnic cleansing in both directions. Operation Storm in August 1995 ended the occupation but left the county depopulated: Serbs fled, Croat refugees from Bosnia arrived, and many residents simply left. Population dropped from 128,899 in 2011 to 112,195 by 2021.

What remains is parks planted in the old fortress trenches, the Karlovačko Brewery (founded 1854, now Heineken's Croatian flagship), and rivers recently designated as protected areas. By 2026, Karlovac seeks to rebrand from transit point and warzone to eco-tourism destination—though reversing demographic decline will require more than scenic waterways.