In June, the checkerboard was everywhere. Red and white crests hung in the windows of Boxwood on King Street, Eliana Curated a few doors down, Encore and Mint Condition on South Royal. Shoppers picking up a scarf or a stationery set walked out with a free tote bag stamped for a team most of them couldn't have named a year earlier. Old Town had become, for a month, the most Croatian city in Virginia.
By September, the flags are down. Hotel AKA has other guests. Episcopal High School's Bermuda grass field, the one good enough to train a top-ten FIFA squad, belongs to the school's own athletes again. The spectacle that put Alexandria on international broadcasts for a month is finished.
Two businesses never needed the spectacle to begin with. That distinction is the real story of what Alexandria kept.
The Part That Predates the Bid
When the Croatian Football Federation picked Alexandria as its base camp in January, after evaluating more than 60 potential North American sites, it wasn't discovering a city with no prior connection to Croatia. It was walking into one that already had two.
Lisa Katic has been curating wine at her Old Town shop for the better part of a decade, drawing on her family's Croatian heritage as she built out the list. Wine Gallery 108, at 108 N. St. Asaph Street, was doing this work long before any federation official toured Episcopal's practice fields. A few blocks over, Ivica "Ivan" Svalina and his wife Amela have run Old House Cosmopolitan Grill for nearly 25 years, since fleeing the Bosnian War and rebuilding a life in Northern Virginia. Their menu has always carried Zagrebački Odrezak, the breaded chicken cutlet stuffed with ham and Gouda, alongside Ćevapčići and the Käse Spätzle their regulars already knew by name.
Neither shop rebranded for the tournament. When the Croatian Football Federation's technical director, a former national team goalkeeper named Stipe Pletikosa, later stood with Mayor Alyia Gaskins at Episcopal High School to accept a proclamation on the team's behalf, the city had already sent its own ambassadors ahead of him. Visit Alexandria's Todd O'Leary walked King Street with the Croatian ambassador to the United States, Pjer Šimunović, stopping at Wine Gallery 108 for a glass and at Old House Cosmopolitan for a plate, months before a single player set foot in the city.
That sequence matters. The World Cup didn't manufacture a connection to sell to residents. It found one that had been quietly operating on two blocks of Old Town for years and put a stadium-sized microphone in front of it.
Six Months of Borrowed Infrastructure
What the city built around that existing thread moved fast, and most of it was designed to expire.
In May, the Torpedo Factory Art Center hosted "Discover Croatia: A Journey Through Tiny Windows of History," a stamp exhibit that had never traveled outside Croatia before. It ran one week. In June, "Flavors & Sounds of Croatia" filled Waterfront Park for a single Saturday evening, with a Dalmatian a cappella group called Muška klapa Podvorje performing alongside a tamburitza band, and Old House Cosmopolitan supplying the food. Old Town Boutiques ran its "Shop the Checkers" week from June 14 through June 28, timed precisely to Croatia's three group-stage matches against England, Panama, and Ghana. Wine Gallery 108 poured a different selection of Croatian wines before each of those three matches, then the promotion ended when the schedule did.
The single open-to-the-public moment with the team itself came on June 10, when 700 to 800 children from Alexandria's recreation, school, and soccer programs watched Croatia train and collected autographs and mini soccer balls. Every other training session stayed closed, by FIFA requirement.
None of that was built to last past July 19, the day the tournament final was played at MetLife Stadium. It wasn't supposed to. A ribbon-cutting, a tasting menu tied to a match date, and a weeklong stamp exhibit are marketing calendar items, not neighborhood institutions. They did their job, which was visibility, and then they came off the books the way sponsored content always does.
The One Thread With a Chance of Actually Lasting
Alexandria already has four sister cities: Dundee in Scotland, Helsingborg in Sweden, Caen in France, and Gyumri in Armenia. The city has a committee and a code chapter for adding a fifth, and it has used that process four times before.
The case being made for a fifth, Rijeka, rests on a detail most visitors to the Torpedo Factory never think about. The torpedo that gave the building its name was invented in Rijeka, Croatia's principal seaport and a European Capital of Culture in 2020. Ambassador Šimunović pointed this out standing inside the building in May, and it's become the anchor for an argument that Alexandria's Croatia connection could outlive the World Cup entirely, provided the city treats it as infrastructure rather than as a summer promotion.
The comparison other sister-city relationships offer is instructive. Newport, Rhode Island's 25-year relationship with Kinsale, Ireland has produced ongoing chef exchanges, student exchanges across three schools, and a seasonal pipeline of Irish workers who staff Newport's restaurants and yacht clubs each summer. That's not a plaque on a wall. It's a functioning arrangement that a local chamber of commerce treats as a genuine economic contributor. Alexandria's existing ties to Helsingborg have already sent the Helsingborg Symphony to local stages and Swedish students into Alexandria classrooms, and this August an Alexandria rugby team flew to Dundee to compete for a Mayor's Cup being revived after a long hiatus.
Whether Rijeka becomes sister city number five is still an open question. What's not open is that Alexandria has the process, the precedent, and now a specific, physically anchored reason to make the case.
What Happens Between Now and the Answer
Visit Alexandria's fiscal year began July 1 without either of the two events that had carried its calendar for the past year, the World Cup and the city's America 250 celebrations. Todd O'Leary has said plainly that the bureau doesn't yet have a public answer for how to keep the momentum going in their absence. He's promised specifics at Visit Alexandria's annual meeting this month, which also marks the organization's 30th anniversary as a standalone destination group.
That's a real deadline, not a vague one. It means the answer to whether Alexandria's Croatia summer becomes a lasting relationship or a fond memory from 2026 is scheduled to arrive within weeks, not years.
O'Leary has called the visibility the city got "that money, or exposure, that money can't buy," and he's said he expects "reverberations of positivity" to continue well after the tournament itself ended. Mayor Gaskins framed it even more plainly back in May, standing next to the ambassador at the stamp exhibit opening: "This is bigger than football." Whether that turns out to be true in a durable, structural sense, rather than a nice thing someone said in front of a podium, depends on decisions the city hasn't made public yet.
What Doesn't Depend on Any of That
Here's what a resident walking past Wine Gallery 108 this month doesn't need to wait for. The Croatian wines Lisa Katic pours are still on the list, whether or not there's a match to time the pour to. Ivan and Amela Svalina are still serving Zagrebački Odrezak at Old House Cosmopolitan on a Tuesday in September the same way they served it in June, and the same way they served it for twenty-some years before anyone in FIFA knew Alexandria's name.
That's the difference between a marketing calendar and a neighborhood. One needs an audience to justify itself. The other was already there, doing the work, before the audience showed up, and it'll keep doing the work after everyone else has moved on to the next tentpole event.
If you're watching Old Town's evolving identity from the outside and wondering what a neighborhood like this actually holds onto once the spotlight moves elsewhere, The Onyx Element spends its time exactly there, in the texture that outlasts the headline. Contact us.
