With much love and no embellishment, Ivan Kovačić's diligent pen tore the early 20th-century Split from oblivion across several thousand pages. Through a series of prose sketches, he left us an authentic testimony of a time and people who lived a reality entirely different from our own. Not because they were poorer, uneducated, or technologically less advanced than us today, but because they lived by principles. The play "Laughter and Tears of Old Split" provides an opportunity for us to pause, remember, and move forward with the awareness that the principles of those people were not mere emptiness, but a way of survival and nurturing a cultural and urban identity, witnessing its erosion.

Both old Split and its sensitive chronicler, Ivan Kovačić, have been inexplicably neglected and even erased from our memory. Therefore, "Laughter and Tears of Old Split," directed by Goran Golovko, will compel us to pause and contemplate what kind of survival we are pursuing as we flee from our own yesterdays.