Karlovac
Karlovac is a city in central Croatia with 59,395 inhabitants (2001), center of the Karlovac county.The Karlovac was founded in a fort built in the 16th century in an interesting location: where four rivers merge (Kupa, Korana, Mrežnica and Dobra), and in an interesting shape: as a six-side star fort. Its name is Carlstadt in German, after the archduke Charles of Habsburg who had it built starting July 13, 1579 on the Zrinski estate near the old town of Dubovac.
The first church (of the Holy Trinity) was built in the central square in 1580, but all of the city buildings burned down in the fire of 1594. The plague epidemic of 1773 was also a notable threat to the city, decimating almost half the population at the time. The forces of the Ottoman Empire laid siege to Karlovac seven times, the last time in 1672, but never managed to occupy it.
The fort was beginning to be too crowded for the city's rising population, and the Military Frontier government couldn't allow for its further growth. On December 6, 1693 the city received some limited self-government. Queen Maria Theresia, after long insistence from the Croatian Parliament, restored the towns of Karlovac and Rijeka to the Croatian crownland on August 9, 1776. King Joseph II reaffirmed it as a free town with an official charter in 1781, allowing the citizens to expand the city and utilize the potential of being at the crossroads of paths from Pannonian plains to the Adriatic coast. The town blossomed in the 18th and the 19th century with the development of roads to the seaside and waterways along the Kupa river.
The 20th century wasn't so favourably inclined, what with all the wars and migrations, but the city's steadily recovering, once again being on the crucial geostrategic point in Croatia, where the continental regions touch the Mediterranean ones.
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