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On the summer day that Elena Rusnjak introduced her parents to the family of her betrothed, on the island of Rab, they set off early from their hilltop town in Istria, in the northwest part of Croatia near the Slovenian border. A place, she told me, as green as Ireland. It was her 21st birthday. She was nervous about the meeting. At the ferry port she watched her father look apprehensively across the strait at the lunar landscape of Rab, where the land was stripped naked by the ferocious wind known as the bora. On the island they drove over karst on which no vegetation could endure and stopped in eastern Barbat, whose name means “densely green” but is a place as bald as a stone on a beach. Finally, her father could contain himself no longer. He began to sob. Elena begged him to tell her what was wrong. “My child,” he said, “what is this place you have chosen? A single goat could eat all that is here in a day.”
What she knew and her father didn't was that just over the ridge were the island's beaches, inlets, farmland, vineyards, one of the last oak forests in the Mediterranean, and the millennia-old city of Rab, where her future husband was waiting for her. Soon everyone was happy. Elena went on to raise two daughters on the island before moving to the mainland's seaside city of Zadar. She grew to love life on the North Dalmatian coast, with its archipelagoes, special light, and complicated history that has seen nearly every European imperial force, from the Greeks and Romans on, pass through and leave its mark. Its austere beauty cured her homesickness for the soft greenness of Istria.
I met Elena when I walked into the lobby of the Almayer Art & Heritage Hotel in the old part of Zadar; she was behind the desk. The teasing started before I even reached her. Something about my parking skills and inability to find the main entrance to the hotel. I was reminded of being in Glasgow or Brooklyn, where roasting is a recreational pastime. In her case it had an appealing combination I've encountered elsewhere in parts of Europe, an alternating current of the acerbic and the passionately enthusiastic. As a teenager she was, she says, an introverted punk. In order to overcome her shyness, her mother suggested she study hotel management. This gave her the chance not only to spend time in the places she loved but also to convey their virtues to others. She blogs about the region and, still the punk, conducts her own alternative tour of Zadar in a dress and Doc Martens, uncovering secret gardens and ruins and monuments officialdom might not promote. We sat in the hotel's courtyard and she talked about this part of the country, so that when I walked the streets of Zadar and nearby Šibenik, I saw them in part through her eyes.
This is northern Dalmatia, which feels quite different from the Dalmatia around Dubrovnik, with its Venetian harbor. The north stretches from the Kvarner Riviera down to the ancient city of Split, and for the most part is harsher, less populated, and less visited. The bora defines the vegetation and at times the angle at which people walk. It is more Croat, less Italian, particularly in Šibenik. Those who pass the region by miss not only these small cities with their layered histories, but also the nearby lake lands of Prokljansko and Vrana and the glorious Krka National Park, emerald green and blue, with cascades of waterfalls that catch the light.
I'd come to northern Dalmatia to see these things, but above all to sail around the islands of the Kornati archipelago. I was to set off the following morning and asked Elena what I might expect. “Tomorrow you will get relief from the ordinary world because the Kornati is so starkly empty,” she said. “Everyone who goes there speaks of this. Out there, you can hardly even get a phone signal.” A substantial fee to enter the national park deters many outsiders, and with the party-boat scene kept further south around Hvar and Brac, the Kornatis are eternally calm; even in the height of August, it's possible to sail around for a week and encounter only a handful of other yachts. This strange, bleached world of scattered islets and reef is considered one of Europe's last wildernesses. If viewed from above, the Kornati appear like little hillocks in the sea, stretching out as far as the eye can take in. I set out to sail around them on the Satori, a 136-foot schooner that can be chartered for a few days or longer.
There are certain journeys that feel more like allegories than routes to a destination. Sailing the seas is one. This has to do with the vastness and pitilessness of what you're moving through. You feel infinitely small but also liberated. The senses work in a primal way. Sometimes they are pushed beyond the range normally asked of them. Robert M. Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote, “Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape.”
Sailing among islands is entirely different than sailing the open sea. Croatia has hundreds of them, all set in unusually clear water not far from the mainland. Among them the Kornatis are distinct. These 147 islands form the densest archipelago in the Mediterranean. They are pale beige or gray desiccated limestone karst covered sparingly with low-lying shrubs, wild herbs, and pines. You glimpse orange clay tiles on the roofs of summer houses, an isolated chapel, a donkey, a few olive trees, the occasional tavern where you can get seafood or lamb baked in a pot during the warm months. The palette, all the different colors of the sea, is restrained. The islands' names are less so—Large Breaking of Wind, Prostitution, Grandma's Hind Quarters, to offer genteel translations of a few of them. It seems the locals entertained themselves with naive 19th-century Austrian cartographers and the names got onto maps and stuck.
You slalom among them through calm lagoons, narrow channels, and open sea. Notable are Levrnaka, with its sandy beach and excellent fish and seafood restaurant; Žut, for its complex coastline; and Mana, for its dramatic cliff topped by “ruins” created for a 1959 film. We stopped at an island at random and walked the paths, through the pines, out to a cliff. The sea shimmered, the islands were dark discs in the glare. We dived into the still waters of a cove. You can almost persuade yourself that no one has ever set foot here before. You enter something different than elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It is spare, timeless, silent. Of these islands George Bernard Shaw, in an uncharacteristic outbreak of lyricism, wrote, “The gods wanted to crown their work and on the last day they created the Kornati Islands out of tears, stars, and breath.”
The archipelago's complex history makes it both enticing and inhospitable. There are signs of habitation that go back to Neolithic times, but now, Elena explained, no one lives here full-time. On the one hand, the water is beautiful, there's ample fish, some good pastureland, and sheltered bays. On the other hand, the wind has always blown fierce, and good soil has always been scarce. And, of course, pirate attacks and the kidnapping of shepherds to turn them into galley slaves were real issues. Remains of stone walls, little harbors, olive orchards, forts, churches, and sea-salt refineries are vestiges of man's on-again, off-again relationship with the Kornati.
My journey through the them ended in the small fortified city of Šibenik, with its magnificent UNESCO-listed Cathedral of St. James. I walked its labyrinthine alleyways but was soon hit by a downpour and took a taxi back to Zadar. In the morning I met Elena for her walking tour, which was funny and touching, particularly when we arrived at the ninth-century Church of St. Donatus. The church was built in imitation of Charlemagne's court chapel, on a foundation of pillars left over from the city's Roman forum. After all the devastation visited on this city, the simple church is still intact and hosts concerts. We ended the tour in its bell tower.
Looking down on the city built on interconnecting islands and out to the sea beyond, Elena recalled her first glimpse of Zadar. “It was December. The light alone mesmerized me,” she said. This high bourgeois city was totally flattened by Allied bombers late in World War II. Before that, everyone else seems to have been through it and taken a piece while leaving behind a little of their glory—the Huns, Venetians, Hungarians, French, Austrians, Germans, Italians. In the early '90s, Serbs attacked from air, sea, and land. The fact that the people are hardworking and resourceful, not to mention stubborn, said Elena, is what spurred them to rebuild the home that they love so much. “And now I love it too,” Elena adds. “The shades of orange tiles on the roofs, the a cappella singers who keep on singing, and the people's capacity to survive.”
Sailing the Kornati Archipelago
The writer sailed the Croatian islands aboard the Satori, a 136-foot schooner that belongs to Claus Thottrup, owner of the Borgo Santo Pietro hotel in Tuscany. Onboard, there are lounges, indoor and outdoor dining areas, five en suite double cabins, a foldaway cinema, and a sunbathing deck. Rates from $126,260 a week for up to 10 guests (excluding fuel, food, and drink); satoriyacht.com
This article appeared in the April 2021 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
