Bozava

Bozava sits in a sheltered bay on the north-western coast of Dugi Otok, the long, thin island that shields the Zadar archipelago from the open Adriatic. Pine forest comes right down to the water on both sides of the harbour, the village behind it is small enough to cross in ten minutes, and yet this is the most developed tourist settlement on an island of more than a hundred square kilometres. For boats working north from Telascica or west out of Zadar, it is one of the few places on this coast that offers both a proper berth and somewhere shaded to walk afterwards.

From Illyrian Hillforts to a Charter Written in 1327

The bay has been in use for a very long time. Remains of fortified Illyrian settlements survive on the peninsula around the village, and archaeological evidence points to Slav settlement at the nearby Sipnata site by the 9th century. Bozava itself first appears in the written record in 1327, under the older form Bosane. Like most of Dugi Otok, though, the village only filled out later: the islands off Zadar absorbed waves of refugees during the Ottoman advance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and much of the settlement pattern visible today dates from that resettlement.

Piracy left its mark too. Several of Bozava's older houses stand behind high stone-walled courtyards fitted with gun ports, built in the eighteenth century when raiding was a real risk for a village on the seaward side of the island. The population peaked in the first half of the twentieth century and has fallen steadily since; the 2021 census recorded 118 residents in a settlement area of 3.2 square kilometres. Bozava lies toward the north-western end of Dugi Otok on the sheltered side facing the mainland, as do almost all of the island's eleven villages, because the seaward flank is an almost unbroken wall of cliff dropping into open water.

Four Churches in a Village of a Hundred People

For its size Bozava is unusually rich in sacred architecture. The parish church of St Nicholas is thought to go back to the ninth century, although it was substantially redesigned in 1882, and it holds three Gothic processional crosses from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The cemetery chapel of the Holy Cross is older still in its fabric, dated to the ninth or tenth century, and preserves fragments of a ninth-century stone altar screen along with a fifteenth-century wooden crucifix. The church of St Sunday has been mentioned in documents since the seventeenth century, and a fourth church, dedicated to the Birth of the Virgin, stands on the Dumbovica hill above the village. For a place that has never held more than a few hundred people, that is a remarkable concentration of medieval and early modern building.

The Port, the Hotels and the Tourist Train

Bozava has been a farming and fishing community for most of its recorded history and still is in part, but tourism has been the main business here for decades. The village is built around a hotel complex of four hotels, Lavanda, Mirta, Agava and Maxim, set back among the pines rather than crowding the waterfront, which is why the harbour itself has stayed uncluttered. The port offers berths with water and electricity for visiting boats, and the shape of the bay together with the high ground around it gives reasonable shelter.

Connections are better than the village's size suggests. Bozava is linked by road to the other settlements on Dugi Otok and has a year-round boat service to Zadar, with seasonal sailings across the Adriatic to Ancona in summer. In the high season a small tourist train runs from the village to Sakarun, saving the walk and giving visitors without a car access to the island's most famous beach.

The climate is textbook Mediterranean, and unusually well documented for a village this small. The local weather station has been recording since 1997, and its extremes are a high of 39.0 degrees Celsius on 10 August 2017 and a low of minus 5.0 degrees, logged in 2012 and again in 2017. In practice that means hot, dry, reliably settled summers, mild and wetter winters, and a sea warm enough for comfortable swimming from June into September.

Sakarun, Veli Rat and the Rest of Dugi Otok

Dugi Otok is 44.5 kilometres long and rarely more than about five wide, covering roughly 114 square kilometres with a high point of 337 metres and only eleven settlements, of which Sali in the south is the largest. Sakarun, a short ride from Bozava, is the exception on an island of pebble and rock: a long, shallow, pale sandy bay backed by pine, which is why it is regularly listed among the best beaches on the Croatian coast and why the anchorage off it fills up in August.

Round the northern tip stands the lighthouse at Veli Rat, built in 1849, a stone tower some 36 metres tall with a focal plane 41 metres above the sea, showing two white flashes every twelve seconds and visible for 22 nautical miles. Local tradition insists the yellow render on the keeper's house was mixed with thousands of egg yolks to protect it against the salt air; the light is still tended, and since 2000 rooms in the keeper's house have been let to visitors. South of the village the island runs down to Telascica Nature Park and, beyond it, the Kornati National Park, which is one reason many gulet cruises in Croatia call in here on the passage between Zadar and the archipelago.