Hi, I'm Jelena — and I've spent a lifetime collecting perspectives on this part of the world.

I'm Jelena Tanjić, a licensed tour guide based in Split, Croatia, and the founder of KUKUVIA. Currently, I lead one tour — a small-group walk through Diocletian's Palace and Split's Old Town — and I put everything I have into it! It's a story worth telling. A city that has been continuously inhabited for 1,700 years and still hasn't decided whether it belongs to the past or the present. I find that question endlessly interesting. Most of my guests do too.

I was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, grew up moving between places, and spent two years as a child going to elementary school in the United States. That American chapter left me with something I didn't fully appreciate until later: an instinct for how to explain things across cultural distances. I understood early on that the same fact can land completely differently depending on where you're standing when you hear it. After the US, I lived in Zadar before eventually making Split my home. My parents lived in Belgrade and Sarajevo, and I visited often enough that both cities feel genuinely familiar to me — not tourist-familiar, but family-dinner-familiar, neighbourhood-familiar. I have relatives across Zagreb and I'm there regularly. I've read widely about the entire Balkan region: its history, its politics, its economics, its shifting borders and identities, the ways outside powers have shaped it and the ways it has resisted being shaped. I say all of this not to compile a résumé, but because it matters for how I guide. Most people come to Split expecting a walking tour of old stones. What they often get — if they want it — is a conversation about how this city sits inside a much bigger, much stranger story. The Roman Empire. The Venetians. Napoleon. The Austro-Hungarians. The Yugoslav project and what came after. The EU accession. The tourism boom that's currently rewriting coastal Croatia in real time. I can talk about all of it, at whatever level of depth you're interested in.

Before I became a tour guide, I worked in web design and digital marketing — which is also why this website exists and why it's built the way it is. But the work I've always cared about most is understanding places: reading about them, visiting them, talking to people who know them differently than I do, and then trying to articulate what makes them specific. What makes this place *this place* and not somewhere else. Split answers that question better than almost anywhere I've been. It's dense with history in a way that feels lived-in rather than preserved. People hang laundry from windows that open onto 3rd-century Roman walls. The Cathedral of Saint Domnius sits inside a mausoleum that was built for the Emperor who ordered the last great persecution of Christians. The whole city is a series of ironies and reversals, and most of them are still visible if you know where to look. I became a licensed guide because I wanted to be the person who shows people where to look.

I keep groups small — maximum 15 people — because I'm genuinely not interested in talking at a crowd. I want to hear what you're curious about. I want the conversation to go somewhere it didn't expect to go. Some of my best tours have ended up deep in discussion about the EU's role in post-war Balkan reconstruction, or about how Roman engineering principles ended up in modern Croatian apartment buildings, or about why the Dalmatian coast became one of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in Europe and what that's doing to the people who live here. Other tours are more about the Golden Gate and Jupiter's Temple and which café does the best coffee on the Riva. Both are great. I follow the group. The tour itself is 90 minutes and covers the major landmarks inside and around Diocletian's Palace: the Golden Gate, the Peristyle, Jupiter's Temple, the Cathedral of Saint Domnius, the underground Cellars, the Riva promenade. But the best part — and guests mention this consistently — is the fifteen minutes at the end when we I give you honest, personalised recommendations: where to eat, which beaches are actually worth the trip, which day trips are genuinely special and which ones you can skip. I've also partnered with some of the best restaurants in Split and made a deal with them to offer my guests exclusive discounts. I also curate a selection of partner tours on this site — island excursions, boat trips, hiking, wine tasting — all run by people I know and trust. I don't lead those personally, but I recommend them to my own guests and I stand behind them.

I'm fluent in English and Croatian, and I'm comfortable having detailed conversations in both. If you want to talk history, I'm at home in the ancient world, the medieval period, the Ottoman era, the Austro-Hungarian period, and the 20th-century Yugoslav story. If you want to talk current affairs — Croatian politics, regional economics, EU integration, the post-war trajectory of the Western Balkans — I'm equally comfortable there. I read broadly and I take questions seriously. I also know how certain things look from an American perspective specifically, having grown up partly in the US school system. I understand the reference points, I understand what's familiar and what's genuinely strange, and I enjoy that conversation.

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