Tag Archives: History

Day 14 – Trogir; the unexpected bonus

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28th September. The bura wind, although it only actually blew strongly on one day, had a considerable impact on the overall itinerary for the week, right from the start:

  • The threat it posed meant we had to leave Dubrovnik as soon as everyone was on board, which is why we had our visit to the Old Town before we boarded. This gained us a day, since the Dubrovnik tour was supposed to take place the following morning, by which time we were already under way.
  • Its threat still loomed over us after a day on Brač, making it too dangerous to move out, thus meaning a second day’s entertainment on Brač. This lost us the day we’d gained, but enabled me to fly my drone for some photos and video.
  • The fact that we were still on Brač meant we were unable to get to the furthest island, Vis, simply because of the distance involved. So the planned visit there was abandoned, which gave us the day back.
  • This enabled Filip to suggest the town of Trogir, near to Split, as a candidate for a visit.

So, Trogir it was. The above goes to show how uncertain things can be when cruising the Adriatic, and I commend Filip and the crew of Perla for thinking ahead, planning accordingly, and being flexible enough still to make the programme for the week interesting, entertaining and varied.

The journey to Trogir was short, so we tied up once again to a handy piece of rock that was in the environs so that those who wished could go for a swim.

Then, because we couldn’t tie up near to Trogir’s old town island, we made our way to Trogir marina, which is (at least to my inexperienced eyes) absolutely vast and really emphasises the importance of yachting, sailing and cruising as an activity in the Adriatic – more on this later.

From the marina, we took a water taxi towards the old town. I was hoping to get a great photo of it from the water, but it’s not easy; the most striking feature is a fortress at the edge of the town

and you’ll be able to see the view from the top if you just control your impatience and read on. You do get a sense of the character of the old town from the water

and, if you look to the left, a small idea of the sheer number of visiting (small) cruisers – again, more on this later.

Our guide for the day was Igor (supplemented, as ever, by the energy, enthusiasm and knowledge of Filip) and he conducted us into the old town, taking us past charming alleyways

to the central square. Like most space in the old town, it was full of cafes and umbrellas, so difficult to capture as a photo. It features a loggia which was being used to showcase another group of Klapa singers (I got a very short snippet of a similar group in Split). So, here’s a longer video of this lovely a capella style of singing.

As well as the general charm of the place, there are some interesting things to occupy the historically-interested tourist. There’s a museum which has a lovely courtyard

and which enabled Filip to wax lyrical about some of the archaeological and historical aspects of the town. Frankly, it was a level of detail that was too much for my limited attention span, so I took the opportunity to have a short kip when I found a nearby chair. From a photographic point of view, the only item that I found really interesting was the ceiling in the library they have there, the Garagnin – Fanfogna library.

It’s a lovely example of trompe l’oeuil painting.

After the museum, Igor and Filip took us to the Benedictine convent of St. Nicholas, which has in it something whose historical and archaeological pith and moment had Filip at his most rapturous. It is a bas-relief which dates right back to the beginning of the 3rd century BC. It depicts Kairos, son of Zeus, and God of the Fleeting Moment.

This bas-relief was almost certainly modelled on a bronze statue of Kairos made by the (apparently) famous Greek sculptor Lysippos from Sikyon.

Kairos is permanently running or flying, and hence the favourable opportunity (his tuft of hair) must be grasped swiftly, otherwise he has passed you by, and all you can see is the bald back of his head.

After all of this culture, the only thing for it was to take coffee in the cathedral square, after which we visited the cathedral itself. It’s not particularly large or impressive in and of itself, but it has a couple of items of note. The carving of the choir stalls is very detailed and intricate.

And a chapel off to the side has a really intriguing ceiling

which shows God actually poking his head through the sky to keep an eye on proceedings. The cathedral also has other intricate carving, for example in the baptistry ceiling

and in the door itself, which depicts many scenes from the bible around it.

Since the cathedral has a bell tower, it seemed only reasonable to climb up it. Getting to the top gives you a fine view over the town

and also makes you glad not to be up there on the hour as there are two enormous bells there

which are active, as you can see from the electric striking mechanism.

We had a little free time, and Filip recommended another good viewpoint, the tower of the Kamerlengo fort which is such a striking sight as you arrive to Trogir. So we paid our 25 Kuna each to climb the tower and were indeed rewarded with a fine panorama.

The old town is to the left of this picture, with its waterfront in the centre. It is notable that the boats on the waterfront are triple-parked, so visitors on these sort of cruise boats might have to walk through two other boats to get to land. You can also see the number of smaller yachts that are moored here – further evidence of how important yachting is in the Adriatic.

As we walked to catch our taxi back to Perla, I took a couple of shots of the handsome waterfront buildings

to try to capture a bit more of the vibe of this very pleasant town. It was our last destination as tourists, and an agreeable place to spend time, all the more so because it was unexpected – I believe that we were the only tour group organised by Peter Sommer actually to visit Trogir, which makes up for missing out on seeing Vis.

Back on the boat it was time for packing and the Last Supper on board. Boško, our chef, had prepared us a lavish meal and we took the opportunity to try to drink the boat dry. We failed, of course, but it was fun trying and made for an agreeable Last Night feeling to the whole proceedings.

This is the last blog entry to describe the fortnight’s relentless tourism. Assuming we get home safely, I might be moved to some philosophical musings about the holiday in general, in which case there might be another blog entry. You’ll just have to keep an eye out to see, won’t you?

Day 10 – High points and high winds!

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September 24th. As we breakfasted in the warm sunshine aboard Perla, it was difficult to believe that we were effectively pinned into the Milna marina by a coming storm – things were calm and all my weather apps were forecasting 25°, light showers and a moderate breeze. But Filip warned us, as we set out for our day visiting the highlights of Brač, that we might need rain jackets and warm clothing. As we left Perla the wind had risen a notch and there were clouds in the sky, but the sun still shone and it was hot.

Our first port of call was Vidova Gora, a place we had hiked up to in the previous week. It was windy at the top and the visibility was even poorer than it had been the first time we were up there. This made it slightly difficult for Filip, who was trying to point out various islands and other things that we could have seen had it been clearer. He did explain the derivation of the name Vidova Gora, which has the same root as that of Saint Vitus (best known in the UK for his dance). St. Vitus is patron of many things, including dance and the arts for the northern Slavs, and of seeing, or vision, for southern Slavs – hence the name for this, the highest peak (or “penk” as the sign has it) in the Adriatic islands.

Our next stop was in a small town called “Pučišca”. In Croatian, the č is pronounced “ch” as is “cheese”; the š as “sh” and the c as “ts”. So good luck with getting the pronunciation of this town right. Apparently many of the locals can’t.

Like so many Croatian places, Pučišca is a handsome place

and its claim to fame is that it has a stonemasonry school (“Klesarska škola” in Croatian). Since Brač is famous for its white limestone (to be found in Diocletian’s Palace in Split, bits of St. Mark’s square in Venice and other notable places, although not, probably, the White House), it’s good to see that investment is being made to maintain and develop the skills of working it.

Our time there was sadly short, as it is an interesting place to visit. We had an explanatory description and a bit of a technique demonstration from a professor at the school, Siniša Martinić, against a background of the students hammering and chiseling away. Here is a link to some video clips of the place.

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Here’s the template for the item that Siniša was using as a demo:

and here’s how it’s coming on:

If reproducing a complex shape, a kind of 3D manual pantograph arrangement is used.

The shape to be reproduced is in the foreground, and the odd-looking frame in the background is used to measure specific dimensions to ensure correct reproduction.

Siniša also showed us different sorts of stone. Some, from near the surface, has fossils clearly visible in it

and some is from deeper and has fewer fossils visible.

(The lump of stone from which this piece is carved would set you back €3,000, and the work to complete it would cost you an extra €6,000. Just so you know.)

Everything done at the school is done by hand – no machinery or power tools. If polishing is needed, the process is done by hand, using eight successively finer diamond pads, like the ones shown here.

It would have been great to have spent more time there, but the scale and scope of the storm started to become apparent and so we left the stonemason school in a hurry… the harbour in Pučišca was being whipped by a strong wind (the other image in the set is the BBC Weather App’s forecast of moderate breeze!)

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And, as we ran for a cafe, we realised that the gusts were really very strong – outside tables and chairs were going flying and awnings were in danger of being ripped apart. The cafe we got to had a really tough time with ladders and rope to secure their awning. I would have videoed it, but that seemed a bit ghoulish, so I just drank their coffee instead.

After our coffee break, the script called for us to visit a place called Škrip, where there was a historical and archeological museum and also an olive oil museum, which sounds a bit niche. On the way, we could clearly see from our minibus how the wind was whipping up the waves, and how sensible had been the decision of our gulet captain to stay put for the day, rather than strike out for a different destination.

The wind is my introduction to the word “katabatic”. The locals call it “bura” or “bora” and it is caused by the clash of continental and adriatic weather systems. A major characteristic is strong gusts rather than simple raw wind speed, and what we experienced was actually quite light – 200 kph gusts have been registered in the past, apparently.

In our first museum in Škrip, a delightful lady called Andrea took us through a rapid overview of the history and culture of the island over the centuries, since there have been people living here since at least 900BC. At various stages in the island’s history there have been three alphabets in use: latin, cyrillic and glagolitic. This is terrifically important as one characteristic which defines the change from prehistory to history is the development of written language. So one display in the museum formed my introduction to glagolitic script

while a second was a reproduction of one of the earliest recorded instances of the cyrillic script used on the island.

Andrea was a real story-teller and covered many of the aspects of society as it developed on the island, with too much detail to record here. And then it was time to go and meet another charming hostess, called Dora, who looked after us as we went to the olive oil museum round the corner.

An olive oil museum sounds rather niche, and it is in fact quite a small place – but they gave us a nice lunch (I have a photograph of the spread of tapenades, prosciutto, bread, local cheese, tomatoes from their garden, marinaded olives, locally baked bread and fig jam, but my religious principles forbid me from sharing it, of course). After lunch, Dora explained how the process of making olive oil used to work, with a huge old wooden mill to create a paste from the olives and an impressively large press to extract the oil from the paste (which was put in rope baskets to filter out much of the remaining bits). Cold water was used at first, but still there was oil in the paste, so a second pressing used to be done with hot water, resulting in oil which was edible but not very nice. To get the last knockings out of the paste, boiling water was used, and the result was inedible, but could be used in, for example, oil lamps. So “cold-pressed” was the good oil, and you’ll see that on many an olive oil label these days. But all the olive oil one buys today is electrically extracted and with cold water, so it’s all cold-pressed. If it says it on the label, it’s because the marketing department put it there, and is nothing to do with the basic quality of the oil – the key phrase is “virgin” which (according to Dora at least) refers to oil produced no more than 24 hours after picking.

One of the recurring themes of our travels in Croatia is the presence of locally-produced liqueur wherever we have gone. The olive oil museum was no exception, and produced a sour cherry liqueur for us to taste which was very nice but not significantly better than others we had tried. But they also produced an olive liqueur, which was strikingly different… in a good way… so we now have two bottles of Croatian liqueur to take home – cornelian cherry and olive. Our New Year celebrations will be considerably enriched, I think.

Despite unpropitious weather, we had an absorbing day, indeed quite an exciting one at times! And when we got back to Perla, we found that the crew had set things up so that we could still have dinner on the deck, protected from the wind by screens and warmed by blankets as needed. And once again, we had a great dinner with much conversation, great food and good local wine. Here we all are – our tour group, and Filip and the boat crew:

We will stay on Brač tomorrow, so stay tuned to see what we get up to. For now, good night!

Day 5 (I) – Split….

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19th September. Now that I am a gentleman of leisure, one of the annoying aspects of being on holiday is having to get up early. An alarm set for 0630 seems to be par for the course for this holiday, bringing back dark memories of life as an employee, whereas having to set an alarm at all in normal life is a bit of a bore and if one has to do it, it should be no earlier than 0730. So the news from Željko that we would have to depart our hotel at 0600 in order to be on an 0630 catamarn bound for the town of Split was met with something of a groan. It turned out, as did so many of his plans, to be a good idea, but coherent thought, smooth co-ordination and swift action at 0500 are not my forte.

Anyhoo…at 0600 we bundled our cases onto a bus and stumbled down to the harbour in Bol, just as the sun was going about his (or her) business for the day.

and the catamaran duly arrived

to take us to Split, a journey of just over an hour to a very handsome town. At one stage, it used to be just this place on the Dalmatian coast, until this Roman chap, Diocles, came along, liked the weather and the local availability of fine (Brač) stone, and decided it would be just the spot to retire to once he stopped bothering about being Emperor, so he had a big Palace built there, which now forms about half of the old town of Split.

Željko had arranged for us to have a guided tour, and we met Malenka, who took us round the main sights of the Palace. As we went round, the reason for our very early departure became clear – the Palace fills with tourists very quickly, and by getting there promptly we were actually able to see it when it wasn’t mobbed. It’s an impressive site, with some of the original construction supplemented by modern reconstruction.

Some of the locals actually live within the confines of the palace; people had set up house there before its historical (and touristic) value was truly recognised, and so there are homes and apartments dotted around the site. It’s now a UNESCO world heritage site, which is in part funding the reconstruction, and Malenka explained that UNESCO rules were that any reconstruction work had to be clearly recognisable as such. So, in the photo below, it is quite clear to see which is original tilework and which is modern

as it is with this mosaic.

I shan’t bore you with too many photos of the Palace – go and see it for yourself, and get a guided tour to give you some extra insight as you go round, is my recommendation. But there are some nice courtyards off the main streets

as a stark contrast to the crowded Hell that is “souvenir alley”, the corridor leading from the South Gate.

The sheer number of tourists has (unsurprisingly) had its impact. For example, there’s one square which used to have tables and chairs set out outside a restaurant, but now they are limited to setting up places on the steps.

Outside the confines of the Palace proper, there are some scenic corners

and you can see where building started by leaning extra houses against the Palace walls.

There is a large, sprawling and busy market with many opportunities to buy local produce (Jane bought some of the local tangerines which were, indeed, very tangy)

and the area around the Palace is, generally, very crowded.

That being the case, we decided to take up on a suggestion from Malenka and head over to a quieter aera of Split, towards the Marjan Forest Park (Šuma Marjan), which is on a hill to the north-east of the harbour.

(in the middle of the hill in the photo above, you can see the terrace of the bar ViDiLiCi where we stopped for a coffee and a beer). It’s a pleasant walk up a stepped road

and the terrace I mention above has a good view over the town

as has the walk back down towards the town.

All too soon we had to reconvene to catch the (somewhat knee-crunchingly cramped) tour bus to take us to the next stage of the day, in the Krka National Park, which held the promise of some spectacular scenery. So, to see this, read on, dear reader, read on….