Hum Hill

Hum is a village in central Istria, roughly 14 kilometres southeast of Buzet, that bills itself as the "smallest town in the world". It is a marketing line, but not much of an exaggeration. The whole settlement fits inside medieval walls measuring about 100 by 30 metres, laid out as two short streets and three rows of houses, and you can walk from one end to the other in under a minute. What is packed inside those walls, however, is completely out of proportion to the size of the place.

How Small Is Hum, Really?

Census figures shift depending on what gets counted: 17 residents in 2001, thirty in 2011 and fifty-two in 2021 for the wider statistical settlement, which takes in scattered houses well outside the walls. The walled core itself is home to only a couple of dozen people. Hum nonetheless carries town status rather than village status, with its walls, a gate, a cemetery, two churches, a restaurant and its own civic institutions, which by the criteria that matter locally is more than enough to qualify.

The place first appears in writing in 1102, in a charter of Margrave Ulrich II, under a name recorded as Hulm and later Italianised to Colmo. It stands at 349 metres above sea level on a ridge above the Mirna valley. The parish church of the Assumption, at the highest point where the castle once stood, was rebuilt in 1802 with a Classicist facade on the site of a 13th-century predecessor. Beside it rises a bell tower of 1552, twenty-two metres high, and the surviving town gate dates to 1562. Local legend explains the town rather differently: the giants who built Istria's hill towns along the Mirna ran out of stone at the end, and made Hum from what was left over.

Glagolitic Script: Hum's Real Treasure

Hum's most valuable heritage is written rather than built. In the small Romanesque cemetery church of St Jerome are frescoes from the second half of the 12th century, an unusual survival of Byzantine-influenced painting in this part of Europe: an Annunciation on the triumphal arch, scenes from Christ's life including the Visitation on the south wall, and a Passion cycle on the north wall running from the Last Supper and the kiss of Judas through the Crucifixion and Deposition to the Entombment. Scratched across the plaster are Glagolitic graffiti of roughly the same age.

Those Hum Glagolitic wall inscriptions are among the oldest surviving traces of Croatian Glagolitic literary culture, from the formative period of a script that Croatian scribes used for centuries before Latin letters took over. More Glagolitic inscriptions elsewhere in the town carry the dates 1529 and 1562, and one on the bell tower names its master builder, Gržinić.

The theme continues outside the walls. The seven-kilometre road between Hum and the neighbouring village of Roč is lined with the Glagolitic Alley, a sequence of eleven monuments erected between 1977 and 1985, ten of them in stone and the last, Hum's own town gate, in copper. The idea came from the writer Zvane Črnja and was realised by the sculptor Želimir Janeš together with the literary historian Josip Bratulić. Between them the monuments trace Croatian Glagolitic literacy from the 11th century onward. It is a strange thing to drive past: sculpture after sculpture standing in open Istrian countryside, raised for an alphabet almost nobody can still read.

The alley finishes at the town gates themselves, inaugurated in 1981. They are heavy two-winged copper doors, with twelve medallions set in a semicircle, six on each wing, showing the farming work of each month of the year. The handles are shaped like the horns of the Istrian ox, and an inscription in Old Church Slavonic, written in Glagolitic script, reads: "And the door will not be closed day or night, but there is no night here."

Electing a Mayor with a Notched Stick

Hum still elects a mayor once a year, and it does it the old way. On Hum Day, the second Saturday in June, the men of the parish gather at the town loggia and cast their votes by cutting notches into a wooden tally stick called a raboš; whoever collects the most marks serves as župan for a year and a day. The custom descends from a medieval practice, recorded from the early 13th century, of electing a župan and a council of elders, and it was revived in 1977. It is one of the reasons locals insist Hum is a town rather than a hamlet: it has institutions, and it still uses them.

The other thing Hum is known for is drink. Biska, a brandy flavoured with mistletoe, is made here to a recipe local tradition dates back centuries, and a rakija festival is held in the village at the end of October. Between the frescoes, the gates and the biska, an hour spent in Hum goes considerably further than an hour in most places ten times its size.

Fitting Hum into a Sailing Trip

Hum is inland, so it will never appear as an anchorage. It works instead as a half-day detour from the Istrian coast, usually driven out from Rovinj, Poreč or Pula, and it pairs naturally with Roč, the Glagolitic Alley and the truffle country around Motovun and the Mirna valley. If the Istrian coastline is already one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Croatia, the drive inland is short, the roads are good, and the contrast between a working harbour and a walled town of twenty-odd residents is the whole point of going.