• Home
• About book
• Order/contact
• Croatian
• Blog

CONTENTS

Ranko Marinković

A Salute to the Island of My Birth

After putting out to sea from Taranto I woke one fuzzy January morning in the war year of 1944 on one of the “Liberty ships” on their way to the “Egyptian exodus” (El Shatt) and caught sight of Malta a few miles in the distance. In that grey winter haze it seemed to me that I was looking at (because I probably wanted it to be so) the island of my birth. At a distance Malta rose through the fog on the endless open sea lonely, abandoned like an orphan, deserted by mother Earth.

Slobodan Novak

Introspective Mirror

Even today you could fling a stone from the window of my parents’ house, my birthplace, into the sea. However, since city planners have paved, asphalted, covered with concrete and decked out the old beach and our former courtyard with transplanted palm trees, the old Matejuška harbour in Split has merely become a part of the waterfront. Today’s waterfront is more a tourist promenade and a terrace of filth than a waterfront.

Mirko Kovač

Like Holy Ground

I worked on at least a dozen film and TV projects with Lordan Z., film director and one-time close friend, six of which were actually realised. Almost all of them were connected with Dalmatia.
Sometimes I felt that the projects which we were unable to bring to life were much better, such as, for example, the screenplay for the novel The House on the Slope (Dom v strani) by the Slovak classic author Martin Kukučin, one of the finest novels dealing with life in Dalmatia at the turn of the 20th century. Kukučin came to the island of Brač in 1894 as a schoolmaster and physician. His real name was Dr. Martin Bencur. He fell in love with the beautiful Perica Didolić from the village of Selce and tied his literary destiny, his love life and his later fate as an emigrant to the Croatian people; with them he ended up in South America, in Patagonia where he wrote Mother Calls (Mati
zove) a novel dealing with the lives of Croatian emigrants. The other was a film we planned based on Simo Matavulj’s famous short story Oškopac and Bila ( Oškopac i Bila) but since this was a more demanding project financially we postponed it for better times, times which were never to arrive.

Predrag Matvejević

Adriatic Portolan Navigation Chart

Six centuries before the birth of Christ, Hecataeus of Miletus lived on the eastern and western side of the Adriatic. In passing, the “father of geography” mentioned Hadria which the Adriatic was named after. Sometimes the Greeks and Romans called it a sea, other times a bay: Adriatike thalassa or Adriatikos kolpos, Hadriaticum Mare or Sinus
Hadriaticus. That duality will determine the fate of our sea and its inhabitants for a long time.

Luko Paljetak

Dubrovnik – a City of Stone, of God and of Man

Everybody who comes to Dubrovnik should, even nowadays, bring along a stone, not huge, perhaps even invisible – maybe those are the best – bring it as your contribution, as your hand-wrought piece, to allow you to go over the bridge and so enter this City worthy of the great effort needed to reach it. And build on it, symbolically, with
that great feeling which overpowers not only humans but birds, fish and all crawling beings, in the place where gods and humans meet as one.

Jakša Fiamengo

Five Stone Fragments

This can also be said in the following manner: As long as the sky exists, there will be stone to buttress it.
Furthermore, maybe stone is nothing more than sky solidified. The material extension of the invisible. Coagulated air. Spirit imprisoned in a visible shape. If Plato and the Platonists teach that ideas of the visible world exist in the sky, so we should believe that they are inscribed in stone.

Slavenka Drakulić

Waiting

Before we arrived our great grandmother would usually sit on the small wall and glance towards the sea until she caught sight of the rather small ship approaching the harbour at the foot of the rocks. The island town in which she had lived her whole life stood hunched up on the rocks. Then she would wait until we put ashore and climbed up to her just as in a time past she had waited for her husband to return from America…

Daša Drndić

The Return

I haven’t been on the island of Lošinj for twenty-seven years. What I have written I scrambled together after going through notes, books, tourist guides which I took with me when I left, thumbing through images from memory, images that have begun to blur.

Arsen Dedić

island
you‘re an island alone and distant
and surrounded by the sea
you were neither for the shallows made
nor for the mainland

Vesna Parun

Three islands

Three islands are in the middle of this sea, one is more craggy than the next, one is more passionate with the song of cicadas, with the rustle of pines than the next.

Stipe Nobilo

Nobilo’s paintings are not talk off the top of one’s head or the registration of facts in a dry manner, rather they are the expression of an authentic admiration for and, what is even more important, an understanding of the Mediterranean home place.

Joško Božanić

Terra marique

Island One has to get to know an Island: its scents, its sounds, its rules – the law of the island. To the Mainland it appears that it understands the Island because the Island, the Mainland thinks, is small and a piece of earth prised off from the Mainland. On the other hand, the Island is self-sufficient and does not attempt to understand the
Mainland. The Island does not feel a part of prised off Mainland. It is the entire earth. The Mainland never understood this and it extended, without adapting, whenever it could, its mainland laws onto the Island, although they were never heeded there.

Giacomo Scotti

Islands without borders

From earliest childhood, since the time I spent my summers living with shepherds under the hill of Pag, I did not recognise borders on the sea. Enchanted by the sea that spread out “beneath our feet”, while I played on rocky ground or during mysterious nights marveled at the infinity of the heavens, I listened to the words of the old
woman who explained to me how the lights on the distant shore which could be seen from our side come from a faraway land, Italy, from where we also get the rennet shepherds use to curdle the milk out of which the famous Pag cheese is made. All the boats that I saw on the open sea, I thought then, were bringing rennet to us...

Miroslav Radman

The Mediterranean:Life in and on the Sea

Why did life begin in the sea almost four billion years ago and why did it hide there for a long time before it came to the shore? The most probable reason is that at that time there was only 1% of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and therefore no ozone. Without the ozone filter in the sky, somewhere between the Earth and the Sun, the ultraviolet Sun’s radiation would have destroyed all the fragile single-cell life-forms.

Anica Kisić

Elaphites Islands

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder named a group of seven smaller islands located to the northwest of Dubrovnik the Elaphites islands (Greek Elaphites, Elaphitides – “deer islands”) although there had never been deer on this group of islands. Apparently their configuration reminded him of a deer leaping. The main islands are: Olipa, Jakljan,
Šipan, Ruda, Lopud, Koločep and Daksa, although nowadays some smaller islets are also included in the Elaphites.

Senko Karuza

Sardines

Lunch was another story and if you have not eaten brodetto made of sardines cooked over an open fire, on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Adriatic, you will have a hard time understanding its full flavour. But bring to mind that young sailor cutting the onions and braising them in olive oil taking care not to burn the hairs on his forearm. Then after fifteen minutes he adds the cut tomatoes and waits for another fifteen minutes for the liquid to
evaporate, spreading out the fresh and cleaned sardines into half of the sauce. He is doing this as if he is again salting the fish, only now he is covering the sardines with the half of the sauce instead of salt and adding water and vinegar.

Damir Miloš

A Story from Drvenik Veli

The story reaches back to the time when the islands such as Drvenik Veli were already well populated. The first houses were built a little away from the sea, reflecting not only the islanders’ fear of marauders who came from the sea but also their faith in the niggardly earth which nevertheless gave them enough food to live. What is more, there
was enough food for the duties the islanders had towards the nobles, the owners who had won the islands at auctions. These obligations were only agricultural products and not fish.

Islands of the Seasons of the Year
Stories of the Adriatic archipelagos, those which survived from of old but also the new ones, however varied, are nevertheless strongly linked. Our thoughts turn to the sea. But the sea also experiences change depending on what holds the islands together – the seasons of the year. There are not that many archipelagos in the world that are located in a region that has all the four seasons of the year.

Javor Novak

Gitta adriatica (Adriatic Journey)

„She was living somewhere like a vegetable. She was neither in Zagreb nor in Istria. She has been living in some private sanatorium since she was 27. A year after she received her Masters degree and got a job in an institute she fell from a moped. She had been driving without a helmet. She has been vegetating someplace for 20 years if
not more”, Dorian was telling me slowly, as the train glided along. It was descending very slowly, allegedly to the sea. “Miran didn’t tell me the whereabouts of his daughter. He only explained that it was she who, a month before the tragedy, had named their boat the Dolphin.”

Radovan Marčić

Endemic Islands

There is something that makes each Croatian island endemic. Perhaps not in the strict sense of the word but it is certain that anybody who knows them well can find distinct features on each island that belong only to this one island. Some are unique because of the sum of their features. We have chosen those islands or island groups where these distinct features, not necessarily natural, stand out.

Radovan Marčić

Archipelago by himself

Istria - western coast
Navigating alongside the Istrian peninsula, especially along its western coast, is very different to sailing the other waters of the Croatian Adriatic. Unlike those waters, there are only a few islands along the western Istrian shoreline. It is only on the southern tip of our largest peninsula that one finds a somewhat larger group of islands, the Brijuni islands.

Kvarner and the northern Adriatic
The eastern shore of Istria presents a different picture, with far fewer settlements, less tourist facilities and, accordingly, with less nautical infrastructure so that you can sail there in harmony with nature. More numerous marinas, harbours and little ports as well as towns are to be found again on the Opatija Riviera in front of the largest Adriatic harbour of Rijeka.

The Zadar maritime zone
As well as Zadar and Biograd, two cities laden with history and at the same time important for navigating and controlling the eastern shore of the Adriatic, which because of this have been devastated and built anew many times over the centuries, there are so many beautiful islands in these waters that it is difficult to decide where to set sail.

The Šibenik maritime zone
Sailing the Adriatic from north to south this is the last maritime zone where a multitude of islands lines up along the coast. Island next to island, large ones and really small ones in rows parallel to the coast with narrow canals between them – this seascape comes to an end with the island of Zlarin beyond which lies the southern boundary of this maritime zone.

The Split maritime zone
This is a maritime zone of great diversity. While there are obvious similarities between islands in other parts of the Adriatic Sea, here they compete with their individuality. Even their layout is different in relation to the other islands. While from the north of the Adriatic all the way to Brač the islands are aligned with the “crookedness” of the mainland, in this maritime zone and further along towards the south they suddenly take up position in the east-west direction.

The Dubrovnik maritime zone
We have emphasised the variety of shorelines as the characteristic of islands in the Split maritime zone. The same contrast is to be found on the majority of islands in the Dubrovnik maritime zone – on  Korčula, Mljet and to a degree on Lastovo.