Bobovisca

On the western shore of Brac, a short way north of Milna, a deep inlet cuts into the coast and then splits in two. One arm is Bobovisca na Moru, a row of stone houses along a quay; the other is Vicja Luka, wider, emptier and one of the most significant prehistoric sites on the island. Together they form an anchorage that has been in organised use for something like three thousand years and that today counts fewer permanent residents than a single Split apartment block.

Two Harbours and Fifteen Residents

Bobovisca proper is the older inland village, sitting roughly two kilometres up from the sea; Bobovisca na Moru grew below it as the port serving both Bobovisca and neighbouring Lozisca. The settlement covers about 1.7 square kilometres and the 2021 census found just 15 permanent residents, a density of under nine people per square kilometre, which makes it one of the emptiest inhabited places on an island otherwise busy with summer traffic. The inland village has the church of St George; the harbour settlement below it, unusually, has none at all, and is often described as the only village on Brac without a church.

The bay itself is deep and well protected, running inland so that the worst of the open-sea swell never reaches its head. Larger boats lie in the outer part, where soundings reach about 20 metres, while smaller craft can go alongside the northern waterfront of the village. An organised anchorage in the bay maintains 32 mooring buoys for vessels up to 25 metres, held by Manta Ray-type ground anchors driven around two metres into the seabed, which is a considerably more secure arrangement than dropping the hook on a crowded Dalmatian summer evening.

Vicja Luka: Corinthian Helmets and a Roman Fish Farm

The name Vicja Luka is usually glossed as the Witch's Port, and local legend has the bay linked by underground channels to the Vicja jama, a pit high on Vidova gora, the highest summit on any Adriatic island, complete with a story about oxen falling into the pit and their yoke surfacing down in the bay. The archaeology is more remarkable than the folklore. Graves excavated on the slope above the bay at the beginning of the twentieth century produced material dated between the 9th and 5th centuries BC: bronze helmets and greaves made in Corinthian workshops, coins, imported Greek pottery from the colonies of southern Italy, simpler Illyrian ware, and a mass of jewellery in bronze and glass paste, including fibulae, hairpins, pendants and necklaces. Among the finds was a small engraved glass gem showing a goat, later adopted as an emblem by the island's scholarly journal.

The collection is now held by the Archaeological Museum in Split, and the site is counted among the most important Illyrian and Greek find-spots in Croatia, evidence that this bay functioned as a redistribution point between Mediterranean trade routes and the communities inland. At the head of Vicja Luka the outlines of an ancient Roman fish farm are still visible at low water, and structures interpreted as storage installations have been recorded on the seabed, proof that the port stayed in continuous, organised use for well over two thousand years.

Vladimir Nazor's Village

Bobovisca is bound up with one of the major figures of twentieth-century Croatian letters. Vladimir Nazor, born on Brac at Postira in 1876 and dead in Zagreb in 1949, kept the family house at Bobovisca na Moru and wrote here, including work towards Pastir Loda, the sprawling 1938 novel narrated by a faun and set on his native island. The house now holds a memorial collection of manuscripts, photographs and personal effects. Above the port he built a small symbolic fort in memory of his three sisters, the Tri Sestrice monument, which still looks out over the water.

Nazor's later life took him a long way from the bay: he escaped occupied Zagreb in 1942 with the poet Ivan Goran Kovacic to join the Partisans, presided over ZAVNOH from 1943, and served as the first President of the Presidency of the Croatian Parliament until his death. The waterfront he knew is largely intact, a line of plain stone houses along a stone promenade, dominated by the fortified Gligo residence, a late-Renaissance and Baroque summer house once used to store grain, oil and wine and still showing its mooring rings and gun ports.

Anchoring at Bobovisca

Bobovisca lies roughly twelve nautical miles from the marinas of Kastela bay and only a short hop from Milna, which puts it within easy reach on the first or last day of a week afloat. Shelter is good, the water in the inner arms is calm and shallow enough for swimming with small children, and there is very little ashore beyond stone houses and pine, which is rather the point. It is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet from Split and want an evening without the noise of Hvar, followed by a morning spent picking out Roman stonework under a foot of clear water.