Mana Island

Mana is a small, uninhabited island at the southwestern edge of Kornati National Park, in Šibenik-Knin County, lying within a couple of nautical miles of Kornat, Levrnaka and Borovnik. It belongs to the outer chain of the archipelago, the Donji Kornati, which face the open Adriatic rather than the mainland, and it is one of the most visited stops in a park made up of 89 islands, islets and reefs spread across 217 square kilometres. Two things bring boats here: a ruined village on the hillside that was never a village at all, and a wall of rock running for well over a kilometre along the island's seaward side.

The Village That Was Built for a Film

The stone buildings above Mana's shore look like the remains of an abandoned settlement, and are routinely photographed as such, but they are a film set. Between May and August 1959 the German production Raubfischer in Hellas, adapted from Werner Helwig's novel and directed by Horst Hächler, was shot on the Adriatic and on Mana, and the crew built a fake Greek fishing village on the island for the purpose. The cast was unusually strong for a location this remote: Maria Schell, who was married to the director at the time, alongside the American actors Cliff Robertson and Cameron Mitchell.

The film premiered in Vienna on 5 November 1959 and in Frankfurt five days later, and reached the United States in 1961 under the title As the Sea Rages, which is how the ruins are usually labelled on Croatian maps and signboards today. Roughly a dozen structures survive in varying states, among them houses, storehouses and a small church, spread over a slope that ends abruptly at the cliff edge. Nothing about them is ancient and nothing about them is stable, so the standing advice to keep well back from the drop is worth taking literally.

The Crowns of Kornati

The cliffs on the seaward flanks of the outer Kornati islands are known locally as the crowns, and Mana carries the longest of them. Of the island's roughly 4.5 kilometres of coastline, about 1,350 metres is a single unbroken wall, the longest continuous crown anywhere in the archipelago. It is not the tallest: at around 65 metres Mana comes second behind Klobučar, which reaches 80 to 82 metres, while the deepest crown belongs to Piškera, where the rock face carries on more than 90 metres below the surface.

The geology behind them is regional rather than local. A major tectonic fault runs from Istria down to central Dalmatia, a consequence of the African plate pushing north into Europe, and the crowns are the exposed, sheared edge of that structure, worked on afterwards by wind and current. In the Kornat section of the archipelago the crowns add up to about seven kilometres of cliff, running from Pulara southeast through seventeen named islands to Lopata point on Dugi otok. Climbing them is strictly forbidden, both for conservation reasons and because the limestone is friable.

Diving and Swimming at Mana

Mana is one of only nine zones inside the national park where scuba diving is allowed, along with Samograd, Oključ, Mala Panitula, Vela Panitula, Rašip, Kasela, Borovnik and the Opat to Tanka Prisliga stretch of Kornat. The rules are strict and worth knowing before booking: diving is permitted only in organised, approved groups through a licensed operator, the maximum depth is 40 metres, night diving between 19:00 and 07:00 is banned, and nothing may be touched or taken out of the sea apart from rubbish. Surface snorkelling with a mask and snorkel needs no permit at all.

What divers come for is the wall itself, where the cliff carries on underwater as a near-vertical drop. Octopus and lobster shelter in the fissures, large yellow sponges grow on the rock, and red sea fans appear as the light falls away. Sea temperatures across the archipelago run from about 14 to 15 °C in winter up to roughly 22.8 °C at the height of summer, so the swimming season is a long one, stretching well either side of the July and August peak.

Anchoring, and the Park Around It

Mana has two usable bays. In Lopatica, boats moor bows-on to laid lines in shallow water close in, or anchor in the northwestern corner of the bay in five to seven metres over sand and weed, which holds well. Tomasovac, in the Suha Punta area, is open for mooring and overnight stays where permission is given, and the park has laid buoys there to keep anchors off a fragile seabed. Neither is a bolt-hole in a hard bora, and Mana is best treated as a fair-weather stop rather than a place to sit out weather.

The wider park was proclaimed in 1980, with its present boundaries set in 1997, and its 238-kilometre coastline is spread through a territory that is roughly three-quarters sea. Nobody lives here permanently, but the islands are not public land: residents of Murter and neighbouring Betina began buying up the Kornati in the mid-19th century and were their sole owners by 1896, and the roughly 300 cottages dotted around the archipelago still belong to their descendants. Their olive groves cover a little over five per cent of the park, some 18,000 trees in all, divided by the dry stone walls that give these bare hillsides their odd geometry, built just high enough to stop sheep and just wide enough to survive the winter wind.

There is older history too, most of it on Kornat: the Tureta fortress, probably 6th-century and Byzantine, built to watch over navigation in the Kornat channel and the only fort of its period in the archipelago never pulled down for building stone, and below it the church of Our Lady of Tarac, raised on the foundations of an earlier three-nave basilica. Between the forts, the film set, the empty hills and the cliffs there is far more to look at here than the bare rock suggests, which is why Mana remains a classic stop on a Croatia blue cruise itinerary through the Kornati islands.