Ravni Zakan Island

Ravni Žakan is a small, uninhabited island of about 0.3 square kilometres sitting at the southern entrance to Kornati National Park, roughly 16 kilometres by boat from Murter. Despite its size it is one of the most visited stops inside the park, and the reason is simple: it has a sheltered natural harbour, a proper pier and somewhere to eat — three things in short supply across an archipelago that has no permanent settlements at all.

The Pier, the Buoys and the Anchorage

The island's jetty is usually described as the largest L-shaped pier in the Kornati archipelago, offering berths in water up to four metres deep. Boats that would rather stay off the quay can pick up a mooring buoy or anchor in the bay in front of it, where the water is clear enough that snorkellers can generally see fish without swimming far from the boat. The bay is open to southerly winds, which makes it a fine-weather stop rather than a bolt-hole in a strong sirocco.

The national park maintains environmentally friendly moorings at sixteen locations across the archipelago, with 164 buoys in total. Ravni Žakan – Zmorašnja accounts for five of them, while the neighbouring islet of Kameni Žakan, just across the channel, carries fifteen buoys for boats up to 16 metres plus three for vessels up to 26 metres, making it one of the largest fields in the park. The buoys themselves cost nothing to use, but only if you already hold a valid park entrance ticket, which every visitor needs for every day spent inside the park boundaries. Tickets are priced by vessel length and season and work out considerably cheaper bought in advance than on the spot; sport fishing requires a separate licence on top.

The restaurant in the bay is the other draw. It is one of the larger konobas in the archipelago and works mainly with fresh fish, and in peak season a place at the pier is worth arranging ahead rather than assuming.

Inside Kornati National Park

The Kornati group counts roughly 140 islands, islets and reefs and is the most densely packed archipelago in the Adriatic. The southernmost 89 of them, together with the sea around them, were declared a national park in 1980, protecting an area in the order of 220 square kilometres. Almost all of it is bare karst limestone. There is no fresh water, and there are no permanent settlements: the land is privately owned, mostly by families from Murter and Dugi Otok, who come out to tend olive groves and sheep and then go home again. Olives account for roughly 80 per cent of the little land that is cultivated, and the hillsides are ruled off by dry stone walls built to keep flocks in place.

Kornat itself, the island that gives the group its name, is by far the largest at 32.44 square kilometres, stretching 25.2 kilometres from end to end but never much more than 2.5 kilometres wide.

Crowns, Forts and Older Traces

The feature that makes Kornati famous among sailors is the line of cliffs on the seaward side of the outer islands, known locally as the "crowns". They are the exposed edge of a tectonic fault running from Istria down into central Dalmatia, sharpened afterwards by wind and current. The tallest stands on Klobučar at 82 metres; the longest runs for 1,350 metres along the coast of Mana; and off Piškera the same wall continues underwater to more than 90 metres. Climbing them is strictly forbidden, which is no great loss, since they look better from the water in any case.

The archipelago has been used far longer than its emptiness suggests. A Neolithic stone axe was found near the field of Trtuša on Kornat and is now held in the Archaeological Museum in Zadar. The Illyrians left burial mounds and fortified settlements on Kornat and Žut. The Romans built farming estates, harbour works at Piškera and Šipnate, and saltworks. The most conspicuous survivor is the fort of Tureta on Kornat, probably 6th century and part of the Byzantine chain of coastal strongpoints that guarded shipping under Justinian. Below it stood an early Christian three-nave basilica measuring roughly 30 by 13 metres, which is why medieval documents referred to Kornat as the Insulae Sanctae Mariae, the Islands of Saint Mary. The small church of Our Lady of Tarac was later built on the same site, and mass is still said there once a year on the first Sunday in July.

Reaching Ravni Žakan

There are no scheduled ferries; the island is reached only by boat. Murter, joined to the mainland by the bridge at Tisno, is the usual gateway and the town where the national park has its headquarters, and day excursions also run from Šibenik, Vodice and Zadar. For anyone already cruising the coast the calculation is different, because the park sits an easy sail from the mainland and many charter guests anchor here for the afternoon before pushing deeper into the archipelago or turning back towards Šibenik.