Prvic Island

Prvić lies in the Šibenik archipelago, about half a nautical mile off the coast at Vodice in Šibenik-Knin County. It covers just 2.37 square kilometres, with a shoreline of some 10.6 kilometres, which makes it one of the smaller inhabited islands in Croatia — and yet, with a little over four hundred residents at the last full census, it also ranks third among Croatian islands for population density. Two stone villages share it: Prvić Luka, in a bay on the south-east coast, and Šepurine on the western shore, looking straight across at Vodice.

Where the Name Comes From

There are two competing explanations for the island's name and neither has been settled. One traces it to the ancient Greek Proteras, and links it in turn to Prvin, a pre-Christian Croatian figure associated with spring. The other is far more prosaic: Prvić means roughly "the first one", and this is simply the first island you meet coming out from the mainland into the Šibenik archipelago. The second reading is the one you are most likely to be given locally.

The settlements are documented from the 11th century. Their populations swelled during the Ottoman advance, when people from Srima and Vodice crossed to the island for safety, and by the sixteenth century Prvić had become something rather different — a fashionable retreat where the nobility of Šibenik built villas and summer residences. Parts of those buildings still stand among the ordinary stone houses of the two villages, which is why the place has a slightly grander architectural grain than its size would suggest.

Faust Vrančić, the Island's Famous Son

The island's best-known figure is Faust Vrančić, born in Šibenik in 1551 and dead in Venice in 1617: bishop, lexicographer, historian and inventor, and the man usually credited with the first published design for a parachute. His family kept a summer residence in Šepurine, and he asked to be buried on Prvić rather than in Venice; his tomb is in the parish church at Prvić Luka.

His career explains a good deal about the range of his work. Educated under the eye of his uncle Antun Vrančić, Archbishop of Esztergom, he ran the bishop's estates at Veszprém from 1579, and in 1581 took up the post of secretary to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague — a court where natural science, mathematics and engineering were taken seriously, and where he clearly spent as much time on them as on his official duties. He gave the post up in 1594 for Venice and Dalmatia, was named titular Bishop of Csanád in 1598 while acting as royal counsellor for Hungary and Transylvania, and left the court for good in 1605 to join a religious congregation.

Two books carry his reputation. In 1595 he published a five-language dictionary in Venice — Latin, Italian, German, Croatian and Hungarian — the first printed dictionary of both Croatian and Hungarian, which alone secured his place in the linguistic history of the two nations. His book of machines, Machinae Novae, printed around 1616, sets out 56 devices across forty-nine engraved plates, with explanatory texts in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French and German. The most famous plate shows a man suspended beneath a square canvas sail, captioned homo volans — the flying man — and it is the reason Vrančić's name is attached to the parachute at all.

A memorial centre devoted to him opened in Prvić Luka in September 2012, built with EU co-financing, and it is unusually well done for a village of this size: around fifty hand-built models of his inventions indoors, full-size versions out on a terrace planted as a Mediterranean garden, and a café looking over the bay. It stands only a few metres from the church where he is buried, which makes for a compact and coherent visit rather than a scattered one.

Churches, Villages and No Cars

The convent and parish church of Our Lady of Mercy in Prvić Luka date from the late fifteenth century and hold five baroque altars along with fragments of much earlier early-Christian stonework. In Šepurine, the church of St Rok was built in 1620, its bell tower plainly Venetian in influence and its wooden altar heavily worked in baroque ornament; an early Croatian cemetery of the ninth and tenth centuries has been identified beside it. Šepurine's parish church of Our Lady is far newer, completed in 1978. From the Second World War there are several monuments to islanders who joined the Partisan resistance.

The detail visitors remember, though, is that Prvić has effectively no cars. A single fire engine is the exception; everything else moves on foot, by bicycle or by tractor, and the absence of engine noise changes the character of the place completely. The two villages are only about 1.5 kilometres apart along a coastal path, a walk of roughly fifteen minutes past a run of small bays, with Trstevica — the island's best beach, pebble and shallow — on the Šepurine side. The local economy still rests on the old trio of agriculture, fishing and tourism; grapes, olives and figs are the crops, worked on dry-stone terraces that climb the slopes behind both villages and that represent centuries of accumulated labour.

Accommodation is correspondingly modest. There is a single hotel, the Maestral, on the seafront square at Prvić Luka — a stone building put up at the end of the nineteenth century as the village schoolhouse and converted in 2004 — plus private rooms and apartments in both settlements. That is the whole of it, which is the point: an island this size cannot absorb mass tourism and has not tried to.

Getting There

A regular Jadrolinija line links Šibenik with Zlarin, Prvić Luka, Šepurine and Vodice, running several times a day, so the island is easy to reach on public transport and easy to combine with Zlarin. That neighbour is worth the detour in its own right: the third largest island in the archipelago, likewise car-free, with fewer than three hundred residents and a red-coral trade documented since the fifteenth century. By water it works better still: Prvić sits directly on the route out of Šibenik towards the Kornati, which is why the island is best reached during a Sibenik gulet cruise, anchoring off Prvić Luka rather than queueing for a ferry berth.

It also makes sense as a counterpoint to the mainland side of this coast, which is busy and well trodden — Šibenik with its UNESCO-listed Cathedral of St James, Vodice with its bars and beach clubs, the Krka waterfalls inland. An island of four hundred people with no traffic, two churches worth the walk between them and a fifteenth-century tomb belonging to the man who drew the first parachute is about as unhurried as the Adriatic gets.