Drvenik

There are several places called Drvenik on the Croatian coast, and this one, the Drvenik of the Makarska Riviera, is a mainland village rather than an island. It belongs to the municipality of Gradac in Split-Dalmatia County, sits between Makarska and Ploče on the coastal highway, and occupies two small bays, Gornja Vala and Donja Vala, tucked in under the wall of the Biokovo range. It should not be confused with Veli Drvenik and Mali Drvenik, the two islands of the same name further northwest near Trogir. The 2021 census recorded 420 residents across a territory of 22.2 square kilometres.

Two Bays Below Biokovo

The village's name comes from drvo, the Croatian word for tree. Its two bays face south across the channel towards Hvar and are backed almost immediately by rock, with the Biokovo massif and the Rilić ridge rising steeply behind, which is why the built-up area forms a narrow ribbon along the water rather than spreading inland. A seafront promenade several kilometres long connects the two bays, and the beaches along it are the wide, pale pebble typical of this stretch of coast. Marked mountain trails climb from the village into the foothills behind.

Drvenik is one of the settlements strung along the Makarska Riviera, the 66-kilometre coastal strip running from Brela in the northwest through Makarska itself down to Gradac in the southeast. Tourism is now the village's main business; fishing continues, as do olive growing and goat herding, though on nothing like the scale of a century ago.

The Old Village, a Fortress and a Famous Ballad

Drvenik is first mentioned in written sources in the 13th century, but the settlement of that period did not stand on the shore. It lay inland at the foot of Biokovo, in the place now called Staro selo, the old village, where the remains are still visible. Its parish church, dedicated to Saint George, stands up there above Donja Vala; the building was reworked in 1772, and the Gothic vaulting over the nave has been preserved. At the foot of the hill nearby lie the archaeological remains of a church of Saints Cosmas and Damian.

Above the coast, east of the hamlet of Kostanić, a hill called Gradina carries a fortified complex: a low, battered defensive wall pierced with gun embrasures that follows the contours of the hilltop. Pottery finds show continuity of occupation from prehistory onwards, and the fortress appears in documents from the fifteenth century, in the era of the Hum princes Vlatković. The Ottomans took it in 1685. The Franciscan poet Andrija Kačić Miošić recorded a siege of 15 April 1687 in verse, describing a place held not by fighting men but by women, girls, widows, small children and three old men, weak and blind. A fifteenth-century monument to a doomed love, known locally as Kostanića greb, stands nearby.

The old path over the mountain above Drvenik carries a literary claim of its own. Local tradition holds that it was here that the Italian abbot and naturalist Alberto Fortis heard and wrote down Hasanaginica, the Dalmatian ballad of Hasan Aga's wife. Fortis travelled through Dalmatia in 1770 and published the poem, together with his own Italian translation, in Viaggio in Dalmazia in 1774. From there it spread across Europe: Goethe rendered it into German, Walter Scott into English and Pushkin into Russian.

The Earthquake That Moved the Village

Modern Drvenik exists in its present location because of a natural disaster. On 7 January 1962 an earthquake of magnitude 6.2 struck near Makarska and Podgora, and a second shock of comparable size followed on 11 January, with tremors continuing for a further fortnight. Six people were killed. Across the affected area 3,256 buildings collapsed outright, 108 of them schools, and around 500 more were badly damaged; the army put up 200 tents for some 3,500 people left without shelter. Drvenik's inland settlement was among the casualties, and its residents came down off the mountain to rebuild in the two coastal bays where the village stands today. Staro selo has been largely abandoned ever since.

Getting There and Getting Away

Drvenik sits on the D8, the Adriatic coastal highway that runs some 643 kilometres from the Slovenian border down to Montenegro, roughly 90 kilometres southeast of Split and about 120 kilometres northwest of Dubrovnik. That position makes it a natural halfway halt on the drive between the two cities.

Its more important connection, though, is by sea. The ferry port handles the crossing to Sućuraj, on the eastern tip of Hvar, a distance of about six kilometres and a run of around half an hour, with roughly eleven sailings a day in high season and six out of season. It is the shortest ferry crossing to Hvar, and the reason a village of a few hundred people supports a working port at all. Between that link, the shelter of its two bays and its position midway along the coast, Drvenik is a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Split and the wider Makarska Riviera.