Hrvatska! Hrvatska! Hrvatska!
In a basement of the typically quiet Strawberry Hill neighborhood in Kansas City, Kan., those words could be heard echoing repeatedly from over 200 strong over the course of three hours on Saturday afternoon.
Hrvatska means “Croatia” in the native tongue for a Croatian, and a strong band of Croatian soccer fans had gathered in the basement of St. John’s Catholic Club, where through an inauspicious set of doors down a spacious alleyway, a bar and bowling club played host to the hopes and dreams of generations of Croatian fans in the KC area, as their team competes in the 2018 World Cup. Hordes of Croatians made the long journey to America for the hope of a new life, like many of those before them. Kansas City was home at the time to a Swift Meat Packing factory, which brought in and gave work to many of the Croatians who arrived in the Midwest.
The small community in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood that has housed Croatians for over a century has a very European feel to it, too. Small streets with cars squeezed on either side are lined by tight, yet neatly kept houses.
Everybody also seems to know everybody else. On Saturday afternoon, there weren’t many people in the streets, because they were inside St. John’s Catholic Club. But inside the tightly cramped bar, there didn’t seem to be a face that was unknown by somebody else.
Even the beer being served in the bar was native to Croatia — a beer called Karlovačko, which translates roughly to ‘made in Karlovac.’
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