Malo Grablje Village

Malo Grablje is a genuinely abandoned village in the hills of Hvar, tucked into a wooded ravine roughly two kilometres above the coastal hamlet of Milna and around six kilometres from Hvar Town. It is reachable on foot from Milna or over the ridge from Velo Grablje, and there is no reason to go except to look at it, which is exactly why it is worth the walk.

Oil, Wine and Lavender

Families worked these slopes from the 14th century onwards, making a living from olive oil, wine and, later, lavender oil. The village itself first appears in writing in 1539, and for most of its existence it was an unremarkable Dalmatian hill settlement: stone houses stacked along a narrow valley, small bridges linking one lane to the next, a school, a public well and an olive mill that has survived in better condition than most of the buildings around it. A record from 1853 counts ten houses and thirteen families, and the population peaked at 178 in 1910.

The parish church, dedicated to St Theodore - St Tudor in the local form - dates from 1882. After the Second World War the ground around the village was increasingly given over to lavender, the crop that made this corner of Hvar briefly famous; neighbouring Velo Grablje, settled in the fifteenth century by families from the centre of the island, became the hub of that trade.

How a Village Empties

The usual account is straightforward: in the early twentieth century disease wiped out the olive trees and the vines, and with no crops left to sell the villagers went downhill to the sea. The reality was slower and more deliberate than that. Land in Milna had already been bought in 1905, during one of Malo Grablje's prosperous phases, and distributed among the village's residents, so when the crops failed there was somewhere to go, and the coast offered fishing and, before long, tourism.

The move took decades. Families drifted down to Milna through the middle of the century, taking what they could with them, including, according to local accounts, the remains of their dead, reinterred in the cemetery near Milna. Malo Grablje was completely abandoned by about 1967. The 2011 census recorded zero permanent residents; the 2021 census recorded three.

The Tudor Legend

One odd detail survives all of this: every family in Malo Grablje carried the same surname, Tudor. Local legend links it to an illegitimate son of Henry VIII who supposedly washed up on Hvar and founded the village. There is no evidence for the claim, and it is disputed at least as often as it is repeated - the surname sits far more comfortably with the village's own patron, St Tudor - but the story persists, and the descendants of Malo Grablje's families, most of them still living in Milna, gather each February at the old church.

Walking In Today

What is left is unusually complete for a ruin. The stone lanes, the bridges between houses and the arched doorways are all still legible; the roofs have gone and the floors have fallen in, but the plan of the village reads clearly as you walk through it, and old wine presses sit in the cellars where they were left. The buildings are unprotected and unstable, so caution and decent shoes both matter.

There is one working business in the village: Konoba Stori Komin, opened in 2005 by Berti Tudor, Malo Grablje's first returnee, who restored his family house and cooks largely from what he grows and presses himself, down to the wine and the olive oil. Its speciality is peka, the Dalmatian method of slow-cooking meat or octopus under an iron bell buried in embers, which needs a reservation and a day's notice. It is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Croatia and want a short walk with a genuinely strange story attached to it, rather than just another beach stop.