by The first thing that struck me about Luke was the silence.
My wife, Caroline, and I drove our rental car from Split north along the Croatian coast to Zadar and took an hour and a half ferry ride to the island of Dugi Otok. Then we drove the length of the island south, through pine forest and scrub, to reach this small fishing village, where we would spend the following week. We were both a bit wired from driving on foreign roads. But Luke’s strange spell put an end to that.
Nothing moved, not even cats. Before us was a sheltered bay that seemed almost smooth and flat, undisturbed by the weakest glass. Flaky plaster from the walls of the fishing houses crumble, their gardens bright with flowers cactuses and bougainvillaea. A row of empty beer bottles outside the closed general store gave the abandoned pier a Mary Celeste quality. Sometimes traveling in space is like traveling in time, and it felt as if we had stepped back to the 1950s.
Dugi Otok (“Long Island”) is the westernmost of the Zadarian Islands off the Dalmatian coast, and one of the least visited major islands in Croatia. Twenty-seven miles (44.5km) long and only three miles (4.8km) wide, the island’s small size makes it easy to explore, with one road running north to south. Its inhabitants – less than 1,500, many of whom leave in the winter months to escape the infamous Bora winds – are huddled to the east, mostly in the “capital” of Sali; the west drops away to steep cliffs and sandy beaches. Cypress, pine, fig, olive and holm oak cover much of it, while the rest is covered in maquis, the scrubby evergreen underbrush of the Mediterranean. The plants that comprise this dense web are always spiked, hooked or barbed, as I learned the painful way when I went off track from a walking path; the next few days were spent nursing sore legs. The maquis make the island wild in a way I hadn’t encountered before, as uncultivated tracts of land are impenetrable to humans.
We rented an old fishing cottage in Lúcás (£62 per night) that had been in the owners’ family for years: tall and narrow, with strong stone walls and a tiny balcony. Black and white photographs gave an insight into the life of her grandparents, as they fished in the Adriatic through storms and bitter winters. The harbor was just steps away, and we befriended some cats at the restaurant on the quay, Konoba Zlata Vala, who served carafes of local wine and one of the best risottos we’ve ever had.
A short drive south of Luka is the Telašćica nature park, surrounding one of the largest natural harbors in the Adriatic. On the western edge of a narrow bay that cuts six miles inland, raised above the sea by cliffs 150 meters high, is the salt marsh Loch Mir (“Peace”), famous for its blue-green water. This is the island’s main tourist attraction, as evidenced by the yachts moored in the harbor below – a fleet of boozy Italians and Germans moving across the waves to us. But we spent most of the week looking for quieter corners. On Dugi Otok in September such a mission is not difficult. The “one busy month” is August, according to our guesthouse hosts, and we often find ourselves on almost empty beaches.
Veli Žal was our best, half a mile of pebbles and sand bordered by thick vegetation, on which castaways had previously built driftwood shelters. A mysterious craftsman had made stick windmills, which spun in the wind, a strange generosity that I found strange. In the evening when we didn’t want to venture far from home, the stony beach near Lúcás had its own charm. I was excited to meet a bright green praying mantis there, and Caroline admired the glorious, unobstructed old ladies that frolicked on the rocks. It reflected what we found to be an uninhibited – and extremely relaxed – attitude among the islanders and visitors we met. That said, anti-nudity signs – a Ghostbusters-style bar across a pair of cartoon breasts – were displayed at Veli Rat, the lighthouse at the northern tip of the island. The islands are a parish. Things are different up north.
When the Austrians who were in charge came to record the names of the islands, the locals dutifully told them that the name was Babina Guzica – Grandmother’s Donkey.
Islands are also superstitious, refugia of myth. At the Dragon’s Eye sea basin we found fossils in the rocks and in the Strašna Peć cave – said to have been created by fairies in an attempt to split the island at the narrowest point – deep time was recorded in flowing stalactites. Like many Adriatic islands, for centuries on the front line of invasion from the Ottomans, Dugi Otok also has its share of pirate stories. These coasts were once haunted by the Usks, Croatian sea pirates used by the Hapsburg Empire as proxy forces, wreaking havoc on the Venetian and Turkish fleets.
The best way to get to know islands is from the sea, of course. On our penultimate day, a skipper steered us by boat south out of Sali and through Telašćica harbor into an archipelago that felt like another world (private half-day boat trips with Adamo Travel cost £128). Kornati national park consists of 89 islands and islets spread across eight miles southeast of Dugi Otok. They are very different from the wooded place we just left, banded with karst rock formations like huge ammonites, yellow and lonely, looking – as our skipper said – “like Arabia or Iran”. A hundred years ago, peasant farmers bought the Kornati Islands from Zadar aristocrats for grazing sheep, which ate everything in sight. Most of them are unoccupied, except for the hardest souls; the summers here are winding down and the winter winds are brutal. The remoteness and wildness show an anti-authoritarian streak that goes back centuries: when the ruling Austrians came to record the names of the islands, the locals gleefully told them that Babina Guzica (“Arse na Grandmother”) and another Kurba Vela (“The Great Whore”). Happily, these two islands bear these names today.
As we returned to Dugi Otok, when the view of the trees returned, Caroline pointed out sheep bleeding on a headland. Our skipper said this matted beast was a celebrity, an escapee from a nearby island that swam the strait and managed to avoid recapture for 10 years. Its cultivators have long given up; the sheep have won freedom. In November 2023, a stranded ewe was “rescued” in Scotland and taken to a petting zoo, and was later used to spearhead a rural loneliness campaign. In Dugi Otok, this proud loner is left to her own generous life, basking in the sun next to some of the cleanest waters in the Mediterranean. Older women would be allowed to be naked. It perfectly embodies the spirit of the island.
