evidence: In the Great Turkish War of the late 17th century, the city-state of Dubrovnik allied itself with the Ottoman Empire, but that didn't end well. The 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz gave a lot of the Ottoman lands in the Balkans to the victors: the Habsburg Empire and Venice. Dubrovnik was so afraid of a Venetian attack that it gave away a tiny tract of land on its northern tip to the Ottoman Empire, to give itself a buffer against Venice. That fateful decision made Neum a permanent part of the region's Ottoman-ruled provinces: Bosnia and Herzegovina. [...] This arrangement is hard on tourists who want to see Dubrovnik—and many do, because it's a jaw-droppingly beautiful medieval walled city, which stands in for Kings Landing on HBO's Game of Thrones. But Neum is in the way, so traveling down the Croatian coast to Dubrovnik forces you to cross two international borders. For many years, security was so lax here that sometimes tour buses would zoom right through Neum without stopping. But in 2013, Croatia joined the EU, bringing tighter border security and long traffic backups during the summer.