Brač Revisited

The year 2020 will always be remembered for the COVID-19 pandemic, but in Croatia it will also be remembered for two earthquakes, one in March, the other in December. After the final tremors ended in March, snow suddenly began to fall in Zagreb. It was an eerie sight in Croatia’s normally temperate spring. To people under lockdown, who were facing a pandemic for the first time, the earthquake, then the snow, seemed to presage the end of the world.

For me, because COVID-19 locked me down in western Newfoundland where I lived, preventing me from leaving the island as I did every year. I found myself journeying more and more with my other selves to far away places, the antipodes of my regular pandemic life. These included my return trip to the island of Brač, the island I first visited in 1977, the first island I ever saw. My return there became both a memory and a series of wish images of what could be again.

When I thought of my first visit to Brač and remembered the boy of long ago, I had a strange feeling of him joining me now. The kid who ran around Srebrnjak in his lederhosen, who dreamed of being one of the Fellowship of the Ring and of having adventures, who liked to read and draw, sensitive to things, who had no special ambition and hadn’t done anything yet and had no idea or worry about where his life was going to go—that kid was with me again. He couldn’t see me, but I could see him. I remembered the stifling drive south on the Magistrala back in 1977, my grandmother complaining about the open windows; I recalled the intense light of the sun and blue of the sea, the contrast between green Srebrnjak and the arid coast. I thought too of famous Zlatni Rat beach, which had underwhelmed me back then. I wondered what impression it would leave on me this time.

Going to Brač was another reprieve from everything back there, from the chaos of Split’s ferry docks, from the whole world I was leaving behind again. At sea, the city looked different immediately. Cleaner, less chaotic. I saw the panorama of the old town—the cathedral of Sveti Duje (Saint Domnius), the line of palm trees and the southern façade of the palace of Roman emperor Diocletian that once was washed by the Adriatic, its white limestone harvested from a quarry on Brač—and then the modern city itself, its grey Lego-block high-rises toothily sticking out of the karst rock. Split’s suburbs and other settlements stretched south along the mainland shore like beads on a string. Somewhere was Bačvice beach, where hip trendsetting Spličani spend leisure time and where the game of picigin originated. Behind the city is the Mosor mountain range, part of the tail end of the Dinaric Alps. At the base is a green carpet of vegetation, then above that the rock itself. Right now, with the sun shining brightly the stone was whitish grey, but at other times the stone changed hue. In the late afternoon, Mosor was coppery orange, and the shadows of clouds passed across its face.

After a fifty-minute crossing, the ferry arrived in Supetar. I drove to my accommodation in Postira, a small pretty town on Brač’s northern coast. The narrow road wound parallel with the sea through a forest of tall Aleppo pines that leaned to the water from years of the prevailing wind blowing off the island’s upper slopes. Now in the early evening, the setting sun sent its last rays along the road, pushing my car’s shadow ahead of me. Through gaps between the trees I could see the turquoise water near the shore.

When I arrived and stepped out of the car, I smelled the pines, the rosemary and sea water. It was a peaceful evening. People were coming home from a nearby beach as music from town drifted along the coast.

There was still time for a swim. I changed and went down to the sea and onto the brown rocks, from where I swam out into the channel as the sun set. Underwater, I could see thousands of tiny sardines moving casually in torpedo-shaped schools. From Split and the settlements along the coast, a few lights were starting to flicker orange. In the dusk, breaking the surface of the dark glassy water, I swam for a while as swallows skimmed the surface of the sea and flew on to Postira.

Afterwards, I went out for supper. The street below my apartment took me directly to Postira’s old section. Hundreds of swallows swerved above the street and into gaps in the stone, or up on the rafters where they had their nests. The sky was filled with the swallows and their high-pitched cries.

The closer I came to the centre of town, the stronger the aroma of burning wood from an open fire at a restaurant. Its owner was standing over a stone slab where embers were burning. I watched him stick some sardines on a spit, then do the same with seven or eight other fish and lay the spit on two stones at the edge of the fire. On the grill were other skewers of meat and vegetables and some larger cutlets. You could walk from the street right into the restaurant or stand by the stove as he cooked, to decide whether you wanted to eat there. I asked him if those were pork ražnjići. “No,” he said, “these kebabs are swordfish.” The TV in the street said they had roast lamb. “We have no more today,” he said. “You must come earlier. Come tomorrow at seven and there will be some. Any later I cannot promise.” He stepped onto the street and pointed over a roof at the hills. “My pastures are up there, not five kilometres from here. Fresh lamb, organic, everything organic.”

I ate at a restaurant down the street, sitting on a terrace with a view of the channel. The water was turning black and the mountains on the far side were already black. Bats fluttered around the streetlights where earlier there had been swallows.

The woman who served me was a Postira native and student of Croatian literature and culture at the University of Zagreb. She had lived all her life in Postira, but now she was gone most of the year. “I do not miss the island anymore,” she told me in English, “I do not miss the winter here.”

“But it’s colder in Zagreb than on Brač. And there’s snow.”

“Yes, but it is change for me. And there is more life in Zagreb.”

“I met someone in Stari Grad who told me she thought her town was depressing in the winter,” I said.

“I do not know if that is right word. I think the islands are so sad in winter. Yes, sad is word I would choose.”

“What do people do on Brač in the winter?”

“Life goes on. In Postira we have Sardina, sardine factory. I think it might be only one in Dalmatia. The factory employs many people on Brač. Some men fish for their families. But there are fewer fish. Some families have pastures and sheep, so I guess there is some work to do. But in winter tourists do not come; the towns are empty. You ask me what people do in winter. Well there is lot of boring time. Young people ask, ‘Do I go now or stay another year?’”

She went back to work, and I sat a few minutes longer. A more sobering picture of island life had revealed itself again, hard to imagine on a fragrant warm evening like this one with tourists aplenty, music playing, people dancing and a view of the mainland across the channel where orange lights shone like fireflies.

Fifteen kilometres from Postira, on the island’s north coast, lies the town of Pučišća. Many of the buildings in town, around the island, and throughout the world are built of stone from quarries in Pučišća and the surrounding area. In addition to Canada’s Vimy Ridge Memorial and Diocletian’s Palace, Dalmatia’s Šibenik Cathedral is made of Brač limestone, which was also incorporated into both the Austrian Parliament building, in Vienna, and the Hungarian Parliament building, in Budapest, along with the Palazzo del Governo, or Governor’s Palace, in Trieste, and many other stately buildings. So, wrote one commentator, “The people of Brač say that in the past fifty years more stone has been excavated than in the period from Diocletian times until the twentieth century. If all the shiploads of Brač stone exported around the world were put one after another, they would by far exceed the length of the Great Wall of China.”¹

In a Pučišća quarry, men operating jackhammers drilled at the white stone and white dust rose in the air and settled on their clothes and hair. Inside the stone mason school, young škarpelini in overalls and jumpsuits worked on blocks of stone with hammers and chisels, practising the deft art of carving. I saw rosettes, crosses, elaborate windows, bowls with variegated edges—all of white stone, reminding me of the lacework from the island of Pag. A former master at the school, Zdravko Matijašić, said, “A future stone carver must truly feel the soul of stone. He must have a feeling for its hardness, for the sound of it, he has to be able to hear when the stone calls to him, when it says ‘yes’ to him, and when it refuses him and says ‘no.’ And finally, the stone master must know how to read light in the depth of the rock and pull it out into the open.”²

The road to Škrip took me uphill into the island’s interior, past more old olive groves, rock walls and rock mounds than I’d seen on any island so far. From a distance, the country was wooded and dark green, the green of deep summer, striped with grey stone. Up close, I saw dense pockets of pines, mixed with the occasional oak, carob, almond and fig tree, and underbrush of myrtle, various junipers, and shrubs like Spanish broom, rosemary, and pomegranate. A bright sun outlined, scalpel-sharp, the grey Mosor mountains on the mainland. The road was good, wide, and paved with new blacktop as it approached the old village. In 1977, when I first came to Brač, inland roads had been gravel, which made the interior feel more desolate than it did now.

Škrip is the oldest settlement on the island. One of fifteen known prehistoric forts on Brač, its megalithic walls were probably built by the Illyrians with the intention of repulsing Greek incursions. The village sits on a hill, and the country falls away on all sides, rising again to the south.

When I stepped out of the car, I was swarmed by elderly ladies waiting for visitors like mosquitoes that rise from the grass. The first woman who approached me was tall, had short black hair combed to the side like a boy’s, and wore black from top to bottom. A golden chain with a crucifix hung around her neck. “Good day, sir,” she said, “I have wine, and travarica, olive oil and honey. You must try, sir, please come this way, over here, it is not very far, see just over here,” and before I knew it, I was herded down some stairs to the back of her house and into her basement, a spacious room with ten-foot-high ceilings. The room was filled with the stuff of her working life and castoff things from another time. On the top of a table she had set up some bottles with their prices printed on slips of paper.

She ploughed straight through my reluctance, pouring red wine into a cup for me to taste and herb brandy in a bottle cap. “The wine is 30 kuna a litre, the travarica 70.” That was around $5.50 and $13.00 Canadian respectively. “Here, you must try. Come here, don’t be shy. You won’t be disappointed. These are real homemade products from the island of Brač.” Vanja Radojković was a widow of seventy-five who earned extra money from tourists during the summer to supplement her pension. She owned land behind her house where olives grew and where once sheep had grazed. “That stopped when my husband died,” she told me. “We owned fifty sheep at one point. We had many hectares of land. I made cheese we sold to tourists here and in Supetar. Now it is too much work, so I do not make cheese any longer.”

“This wine is yours?”

“Yes, I have a vineyard,” waving her hand out the open door. “It was cut back when my husband died.”

“Do you do the work yourself?” I wondered.

“Yes, and my son helps me. For the berba there are neighbours too. He comes to see me every day. He lives on the coast, but he is here every day. That is fine with me. That way I can make sure he is not getting into trouble,” she laughed.

I looked around her basement. A framed picture of Mary holding Jesus hung on one wall. There were some steel barrels along another, a pitchfork and shovel, a few shelves with glass demi-john bottles, and some dried squash gourds hanging from a nail. She noticed me eyeing them, picked them up and put them under her arm. “We used this to help us swim when we were children. Ten kuna a piece!”

I bought a bottle of wine, but not a gourd, and said goodbye. When I was on the street again, a second woman stepped in front of me. She was short, wore a blue ball cap, her white wispy hair in a bun, and carried a basket of lavender. Or, more exactly, sachets of lavender with the name “Brač” written in fine script and tied at the top with purple string. “Hello, young man,” she began. “Here is something that smells sweet, something to remind you of our island. If you have a nice young wife, I am sure she will enjoy lavender from Brač.” She held out one of the sachets. “Ten kuna each.” If I could afford a bottle of wine, I had to buy a sachet of lavender.

I got out my wallet and gave her the money, took the sachet, and smelled it. “Thank you,” I said.

I was going to walk on when she touched my arm and said, “They are small; one is not really enough. Maybe you have a mother who would like lavender. You cannot forget about your mother. Here, take another. Take two.”

I didn’t really want two. One was enough for me. And I already had one. But when I looked down at her, a little talkative woman with white hair girlishly unkempt and holes in her smile where there should have been teeth, a woman who smiled at me good-naturedly, a little slyly, as though it were all a conspiracy in which we were on the same side, even though I was playing the role of the gullible tourist and she the wily local peddler, I caved in and bought another sachet.

“That’s it,” I said, “thank you. I have enough now, thank you. Goodbye.” The first sachet I stashed in my camera bag, the second in my pocket. I kept the one in my pocket for several days until I noticed that the string had come undone and the lavender had spilled out. I kept it there for weeks to remind me of the old lady in Škrip.

Clearly, my encounters with these women showed what they were forced to do to keep themselves afloat, and perhaps was evidence of the reputation of Brač residents as tight-fisted. One scholar, however, has written in their defence, arguing that every “island is a world of restricted quantities. This knowledge instructs the islander to ration the goods that nature benevolently proffers to him or that he obtains from nature through his hard work. The Mainland, all too lightly, names this island rationing as stinginess.”³ Here is a joke I heard about the reputed stinginess of Brač’s residents: an islander had published an obituary for his recently deceased wife in Slobodna Dalmacija, a paper printed over in Split. They called him up to inform him that for the same cost he could add three or four more words to the notice. They suggested he insert “She died peacefully” or something similar. After a moment of silence, the shrewd widower answered, “No, put ‘Olive Oil for Sale.’”⁴

On the return to Postira, I drove on a twisting country road past stony sheep pastures and low walls of dry-stacked rock. It was a quiet evening, no cars were on the road, and most of the island’s visitors were on the coast. I parked by a wire gate between stone walls and entered a pasture and closed the gate behind me. The wild grass beneath my feet was cropped; there were sheep droppings all around, and in front of me, throwing a wide shade, stood a tall holm oak from which hung a disc of salt. A broken-down moped with a plastic bag filled with shavings for a seat, leaned against the tree. And there they were, a flock of twenty sheep drinking from plastic water containers. They were surprised to see me, since I’d made no noise. They bleated once or twice, then when I stepped closer, they clattered up a pile of stones and skittered down the other side, bells clanging, echoing loudly against the surrounding stones.

I looked around the glade. Myrtle grew by the rock walls along with bay leaf and wild roses, and in the back part of the pasture were olive trees. I came across a bunja, a hut of stone with a conical vaulted roof. This type of ancient structure can be found throughout the Mediterranean, serving as a single-roomed home or as a way place for shepherds. This one was relatively new, more shelter than hut, with a triangular stone step sticking out of the wall to make it easier for the shepherd to access his door. The entry was low, and in the crawlspace was room enough for one person. Inside were seat cushions and a pair of old leather shoes. The shepherd might be the restaurant owner in Postira, or some local living in an interior village like Škrip, and he used this hut when he wanted to get out of the way of the bura or a rainstorm passing through.

I walked around the glade taking pictures. The sun was starting to set. The wind had left for somewhere else, so a peacefulness had come into the evening, like a friendly mood. A few last swallows swerved through the copper-gold air and the cicadas were quieting down. I made sure to close the gate behind me and went back to my car.

The next day I drove to Nerežišća. Built into the foothills of the island’s highest mountain, Nerežišća was formerly the island’s administrative centre but now has an atmosphere more like a village than a town. The grey-white Sveti Petar chapel in the main square, with its Romanesque and Gothic elements, resembles similar stone chapels on the island and throughout the Adriatic, and might have been forgettable were it not for a bonsai pine tree that grew miraculously through its semi-circular apse. Over a century old, the tree was small and scrawny, but tough. There, in an unlikely and inhospitable spot, it had somehow survived. To me it seemed a symbol of the islanders themselves.

After photographing the tree, I explored the narrow alleys of the old town. A nun I met stopped to talk to me outside the Baroque parish church. She had a round sunny face and a sunny demeanour. Sister Emilja Šimić was born in Livno, Bosnia-Herzegovina, but had put down roots on the island with the other nuns in the convent house. She said, “We are none of us spring chickens, but we have our duties and we are happy. Today is a beautiful day! Would you like to see the church? I will show you the church. Come, follow me this way.”

Inside the cool, spacious church, near the front altar, another nun was polishing copper thuribles with a dish cloth. Sister Alberta Maslač was a tall woman with a handsome face, smooth skin, and gold-rimmed glasses. A different energy came from her. She spoke in elegant, long, and somewhat sententious sentences. She informed me about the history of her church, said it was constructed and designed by Ignacije Macanović and told me other details I’ve forgotten. She was knowledgeable and eloquent. I asked her whether she had studied at university.

“No, of course I have not; it was never in the plans for me.”

“Who knows, if you had, what you could have gone on to be,” I said.

“Well, it is interesting to think so,” she answered.

I asked her what she enjoyed about her life here. She said, “You know, I think it is the work with the children that gives me most pleasure. Yes, I think that gives me the most joy.” She was looking at me through her gold-rimmed glasses, observing, thinking about something. There was a silence in which she put the final polishing touches on the thurible.

“You know,” she said, “there is something in you that I see. It is a light you have inside which God has given you, and anyone who looks more closely will see. He who seeks shall find. You are good in your spirit, you are not arrogant, and you are looking for the truth.”

“Well,” I said, “thank you.”

“It is not me you have to thank.”

I didn’t know what else to say. She put the thurible on the pew, and we shook hands and said goodbye. A kind of warmth, a feeling I hadn’t had for a while, went through me as I got in the car and began the drive to the top of the island. I was feeling Sister Alberta’s words as I drove up into the deep woods of big black pines with the sun peering down into the gaps, the cathedral-high spaces, and onto the brown pine-needle floor. A rinsed cloudless blue sky was visible above the jagged treetops, then it opened wide at the summit. I got out of the car, stepped across white limestone crags, and saw the view.

This is the highest peak on the Croatian islands. Vidova Gora. To the east the wide wooded land sloped down majestically to the sea. To my right, the west, the island of Šolta lay in a white-blue haze, and to the south, across a narrow channel, was the northern, sparsely habited coastline of Hvar. I stood on a rock that projected outwards into the abyss. On the right was the famous Zlatni Rat beach, the beach I hadn’t seen in all these years, and which had left me disappointed the first time. It pointed thinly out into the turquoise shallows of the sea where, farther out, yachts in the circumambient dark blue floated, not moving, like white flecks on a canvas. White plumes of motorboats tore up the dark channel behind. What looked like parachutists pulled by boats hung motionless in the air. A warm wind blew across the summit and down to the sea, and the white-hot sun was poised above Hvar, radiating upon the southern coast of Brač and on the beach. I stood there for a while taking in the view. The smell of pines came on the wind and cicadas clacked furiously from the trees. I hadn’t seen any pictures of Zlatni Rat from Vidova Gora before this moment, even though there are hundreds online, as I now know, but the view was a thrilling one for me, not only because it was a beautiful one but because it was verification of the aesthetic value of Zlatni Rat itself, that its fame was deserved, and that I was participating in its fame just by looking down at it from on high, from where it could really be appreciated, its physical properties experienced without contamination by the human element. Zlatni Rat looked better than I had expected, more than what I remembered. I wasn’t experiencing the loss of the creature, as Walker Percy described it, I was rediscovering it. And so I felt that even though I was high above Zlatni Rat, I was really on it, or inside it, inside the trueness of it.

I got into my car and headed to the beach. The road eventually led me to Gornji Humac, which was asleep when I arrived—not a soul on its narrow streets, no voices from any of the windows. Even the restaurant, which was open for business, was empty, though there were still glowing embers on the stone slab of the oven. I ate at a gostionica down the highway, sitting on a terrace under a roof of dried palms and by a pool where thatches of lavender grew, and where bees and wasps droned. A mule stood sleepily in the shade of a field behind. On leaving, I tossed him an apple, which he grabbed with his big yellow teeth.

I drove on. I passed an enormous vineyard that went from the road to the summit of the hill, and then I descended sharp switchbacks until I reached Bol.

Bol is a small quaint fishing town on a little harbour facing west where boats are packed at the head and where ice cream stands, cafés and restaurants are packed with customers. In the evenings people sit there and watch the last rays of the sun sloping across the Hvar Channel.

I walked to the head of the harbour and then back again through the pine woods that surround Zlatni Rat. The Yugoslav-era hotel where we stayed in 1977 was still there, minus the picture of Tito. Sunlight slanted through the forest onto the brown pine-needled floor and the smell of the trees surrounded me. The laughter of kids playing on a bright yellow plastic network of slides and rafts rose from the water. Music, a hum of voices, more muted, came from farther off.

Zlatni Rat was below me. After all these years.

It curled to the right—a cream-coloured peninsula of stone shingles a few hundred metres long with a bright turquoise sea right around its sides and blue Hvar in the distance. A hot, tanned nude woman lay on the right, and another woman rose statuesquely out of the water like Ursula Andress without her white bathing suit and shells. On the beach now, I walked to its head. Tourists had gathered along both edges of the beach where it sloped to the water, but there was still room to lie down. Stone shingles crackled under my sandals. There were no cigarette butts or pieces of garbage on the clean white stones. At the tip of Zlatni Rat I lay down, twisting my back into the pebbles to create a hollow. The point of Zlatni Rat curved slightly to the right, but the form it took today might be different tomorrow because it was always changing, the sea constantly reshaping it. For a time, I don’t know how long, I lay there in a fjaka, drowsily hearing voices of Czechs and Hungarians and listening to the hiss of small waves on the pebbles and feeling the sun on my body. Later, I got up and walked down the slope to the water, the stones shifting and sinking under my feet, hard under my soles, and I slipped into the green water that was cool and fresh on my hot skin. Then I swam out towards the blue. Below were schools of small silver fish with black bands around the base of their tails like bowties, and then there was only deepening water. I swam farther out where the sea turned dark. A hundred metres out, the channel pushed strongly towards Bol. There at the edge of the blue current I looked at the island, at the rocky crest of Vidova Gora where I had stood earlier, the wide slopes of dry dark green vegetation through which the road cut like an incision, the town of Bol on my right, with its orange-tiled roofs and harbour of white boats—all of which reminded me of some other town I had already seen, a town that was familiar because of its design, like a morphological pattern in a tale I had grown used to, but a town that became new all over again since I had come to it from a different angle, through a new experience, and saw it fresh all over again. I hung there for a time hardly moving, floating, treading slowly on the channel. I was inside myself and I was looking at the scene. Then I left myself and became part of the scene around me, the blue water and bright light and the pleasant warm wind. It was a moment when I felt happy to be alive.