We first came here during a Croatian island-hop in 2005, but little seems to have changed since that accidental discovery. Vis Town’s old facades — all white stone quarried on the distant island of Brac — still grace the waterfront. Elderly olive-skinned locals ornament the benches that line the promenade. In the cool of evening, families come out to swim from the wood-slat pontoons that protrude into the bay.
The apartment we return to after our hours by the sea is typical of this contented stasis. We stay in Kut, on the east edge of town in a room that verges right onto the sea, the wall beneath its shuttered windows lapped by the tide. Accommodation on Vis consists almost exclusively of sobes — self-contained apartments like this one, locally owned and rarely more than $100 a night. The one large hotel, Hotel Issa, a whitewashed carbuncle on the harbor’s western peninsula, is incongruous and unloved. With the island’s 1,000 rooms widely dispersed over an area similar in size to that of Manhattan, and with camping prohibited, there’s no overcrowding even in peak season.
“No one on Vis went out looking for tourism; the tourists found us,” explains Drazen Gazija, the owner of our sobe and a former president of the Vis tourist office. “Vis is the place to come if you want pomalo.” ‘“Pomalo” — the Dalmatian philosophy of doing things slowly, little by little — is a spirit that has seeped into the island’s very soil.
A couple of days after our arrival, having recalibrated all systems to Vis speed, we drag ourselves out to do something resembling exploration. From the square by the ferry dock, a regular bus trundles along the seven-mile road that bisects the island from east to west, winding between verdant hillsides and citrus orchards, crisscrossed by a timeworn geometry of stone walls.
Sitting at the neck of a pretty anchorage bobbing with fishing boats is Komiza, the island’s second-largest town. Though it’s smaller than Vis Town, Komiza is where most tourists stay. Outdoor cafes line the quayside, while small, unassuming tour agencies offer day trips to the Blue Cave, an aquamarine grotto punched into the outlying islet of Bisevo, visible from here as a whale-backed rock on the horizon.
Walk away from the town, however, and you start to appreciate why Vis is often named one of the 10 best-preserved islands in the Mediterranean. Turning our backs on the gentle hubbub of the harbor, we circumvent the nearly 2,000-foot hulk of Mount Hum — from whose caves Tito deployed his threadbare bands to make mischief along the German lines — then head south to wander the coast.
Beyond the charming beach of Kamenice, dusty trails weave along cliffs that tumble with lavender and swordlike cactuses. Farther still, arc after arc of pebble bays nibble into a coastal landscape that, but for the unavoidable sight of a few faraway nudists, has probably changed little in 20 million years, since seismic tremors sent the Dalmatian islands bubbling out of the surrounding sea.
The more you explore the island, the more this timeless atmosphere makes the past feel palpable and immediate. For an isolated outpost, Vis has a surprising roll call of past visitors. Starting with the foundation of Issa, the island’s first significant settlement, by Dionysius of Syracuse in 397 B.C., all the Med’s major players — Illyrians, Romans, Byzantines — have passed through this crossroads of empire. The elegant church spires that stand sentinel over Vis bay conjure the era when Venice ruled the Mediterranean, while the island’s Archeological Collection, a jumble of clay amphoras dredged up from shipwrecks and red-figure pottery unearthed from ancient necropolises, now sits in a fortress bequeathed by the Austro-Hungarians.
An especially unexpected vestige of the island’s strategic role in the Napoleonic Wars perseveres in the form of the Sir William Hoste Cricket Club, founded in memory of the matches that British mariners played here in 1811. “A wretched place,” was how the naval captain who initiated those early matches described Vis in a letter home. Nowadays, outsiders tend to be far more effusive.
“I suppose you could say we’ve found our personal paradise on Vis,” says today’s club secretary, Craig Wear, a Yorkshireman who, after many years of itinerant living, finally settled here with his wife, Xania, in 2006. The pair now run active holidays from a four-room guesthouse in Rukavac, on the island’s southeast corner. “The cricket teams that visit us usually tour a new location each year, but they always come back to Vis. It’s impossible to leave this island without wanting to return,” Craig says.
Text: washingtonpost.com
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