The phylloxera swept across the terraced hills of Otok Brać – Island of Brać – in the early 1900s, invading the soil.  Native to North America, the tiny yellow aphids traveled across the sea to Europe in the late 1800s, feeding on vino roots and spreading their wine death like an infestation of involuntary Prohibition.  The people on the island of Brać did not see it coming, and the families stood in awe and despair at the expanse of useless vineyards left in its wake.

And the families began to splinter.  Some sought refuge on the mainland of the Dalmatian coast; some found their way to the university in Zagreb, while many began to feed the Croatian diasporas in South America, the United States and Australia. Those that stayed planted more olive trees, knowing that it would be 50 years before they would bear fruit, and that the hard work might mean a better future for those generations to come. The old olive trees watched, some for hundreds of years or more,  and continued to put forth.  The terra rossa soil held them close, and it was the color of blood.

My wife and I arrived on Brać via a car ferry from the ancient city of Split.  The third largest island in Croatia, Brać is within sight of the mainland, but hundreds of years ago, that distance was enough to insulate the people from the outside world.  The island is small, only 396 square kilometers, and the pirates who roamed the seas drove the people away from the stone beaches into the hills of the island, where they built beautiful churches and campaniles.  As our ferry came upon Supetar, or Sveti Petar (St. Peter), I felt like an invader must have felt as he came upon the small island.

The first things you notice about Brać are the stones…piles of stones everywhere.  Fences made from stone; terraces made from stone.  For hundreds of years the people pulled them from the karst to expose the soil necessary for grapes and olive trees.  The men dug and the women stacked.  And sometimes the stones were formed into bunjas, round huts built in the fields to provide shelter from the fast moving rainstorms and the oppressive sun. 

Even if you know nothing of Brać, you probably have still seen its stone.  If you have looked at a photograph of the White House in Washington, D.C., you have seen the marble that is cut from the island’s bowels.  The stone is prized, yet the bits that protruded from the earth must have been the bane of the olden farmers of Brać.  It is hard to imagine that the millions of stones and millions of hours spent removing and stacking them…

Ložišća means ‘a place where the vine is cultivated,’ and the town hangs on the side of a hill, joined over the Veli dolac (The Big Valley) by a bridge.  Neighboring hills have skeletons of rock that used to mark the boundaries of vineyards, but now stand scarred by a fire that came desperately close to Ložišća around the turn of this century.  The town climbs a hill and each street is higher than the last.  The homes are mostly two stories, made of stone, with the main entrance on the second story.  We enter the home of our hosts through the back door, walk past boxes of drying figs and climb a steep stone staircase. Immediately lunch is offered, lamb and chicken with new potatoes, with bread and white malvazija wine from Istria. 

From my chair at the table I can see out the north-facing window that is next to my head.  Another stone house sits at a higher elevation, and a young woman, maybe 21 years old, is playing with a small child.  She sits on the back steps in shorts and a t-shirt that seems out of style, but her hair is long and dark with short-cut bangs, and she looks pretty smoking a cigarette.  It’s amazing how a woman knows how to look good holding a cigarette, no matter where she’s from.  No one else has the angle to see the girl and I watch her alone, pausing only to take a sip of wine or decline more food. 

My hosts tell me that the people of Brać are proud, but there is much sadness among the families.  If you walk the town streets at night, you may be startled by the sound of a middle-aged man sitting alone in the dark, drinking beer in a garden.  He is long past the age where he can marry; his sisters have left for the mainland and its cities and he stayed behind to work his father’s land.  People do not move to Brać, they only move away.

I look again out my window again and the young woman has been joined by an older lady, maybe her mother, in a calf-length dress with an apron and I wonder which one is the little kid’s mother.  This girl must be a prize on this island and I can imagine her smoking a cigarette in front of the older men who can’t have her.  They both look up at me and I do not break their gaze.

The next morning we rise early and eat leftover cherry pie and drink fresh coffee for breakfast and soon we are in the backseat of a small Peugeot, watching an ever-changing view on winding curves.  It is a 45 minute drive to the southern coastal town of Bol, and its famous beach Zlatni rat.  We arc through high elevation as we skirt the mountain with Brac’s tallest point, the summit of the Vidova Gora, some 2500 ft above sea level.  From the top you can see Zlatni rat, the Golden Cape, sticking out into the ocean like a horn.  On the approach to Bol you must drive many switchbacks and it feels like the Pacific Coast Highway in California and the breakfast pie feels shaky in my stomach.

One learns to start the day early on Brać and in Dalmatia generally, as the region gets more than 2700 hours of sunshine each year.  Farmers wake early before sunrise and work hard, finishing before lunch, when they escape the unforgiving rays piercing cloudless skies.  They smile at the tourists who turn red and burn.  I can’t remember the last time I went to the beach at nine in the morning.  We park the car and walk through the pine trees and stake a spot twenty feet from the water.  After some light reading in the sun, the air was warm enough to slip into the clear sea.  Around noon the beach was quite crowded and we decided to take shade amongst the pine trees.  Massages were available but I chose a large glass of Ožujsko beer instead.

It is hard to know if they are correct, but our hosts tell us that Zlatni rat is the only beach in the world of its kind:  made of smooth pebbles that jut into the Adriatic Sea like a finger, surrounded by water on three sides, you can see the beach change shape with the tides.

For my wife and me, Brać became the vacation from the vacation.  We had arrived in Croatia a week earlier and spent our time in Istria, hours north of Dalmatia.  It was my wife’s first time in the country and her first international trip, and I had many relatives to introduce to her.  She was immersed in a whirlwind of foreign chatter, hugs, kisses, meals, more meals, pointing fingers and short trips in the back of tiny cars to see yet more full plates.  On Brać things moved slower and we were glad for the respite, to be able to lie on the beach all day and with a wine buzz from lunch.

On our last day we were not anxious to leave.  As I lay on the boat dock absorbing the day’s heat off the concrete, I felt that closing my eyes from the sun would make it all last.  My cousin’s uncle puttered up on his small fishing boat and offered us a ride.  He showed us the bay at Bobovisca na moru, the stands of olive trees that hug the beach, the new modern homes that stand atop bluffs, the subdivision being built by an Austrian businessman.  I thought of the dark-haired girl smoking.  Would she leave this place like the others?  The humming of the motor and the rhythmic chopping of the waves was dreamlike when mixed with white wine and mineral water.  Is it true that no one comes to Brać, they only leave?  I squeezed my wife’s hand and her eyes smiled and I knew that we would be back.

For More Information:

http://www.islandbrac.com/

http://www.bracinfo.com/

http://www.croatiatraveller.com/central%20dalmatia/Brac.htm