The remote, tranquil Croatian island of Vis is often described as the gastronomic capital of the Adriatic, writes HENRY WISMAYER
IT WAS THE RESPONSE to Goran that brought it home. I was sitting at an outdoor café, two days into my first trip to the Croatian island of Vis, when one-time Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic came ambling along the promenade. All around me, not one of my fellow coffee-drinkers seemed to flicker at this sight of their country’s most famous living son – no autograph requests or double-takes accompanied his passing, not even a sneaky sideways glance. “His mother has a house on the other side of the island,” confided a waitress, seeing my surprise. “He comes here to be invisible.”
Cast adrift 30 miles from the Croatian mainland, Vis is a place which doesn’t do hysteria. The most remote of the populated Dalmatias, the archipelago of 1,185 islands that pepper the eastern Adriatic like seeds scattered by the Sirocco wind, it is archetypally Mediterranean: pebble-beaches, grape-and-olive agriculture and seafood by the net-ful. But history has conspired to give this particular island a special flavour. In subsequent visits, I’d come to realize that the serene response to Ivanisevic was typical of Vis, an island where tourism still feels incidental, leaving each new visitor with the sense that they have stumbled upon somewhere unspoiled.
“Now being discovered by intrepid travellers,” is how one guidebook puts it, though “intrepid” seems a rather generous epithet, when you consider that all girlfriend Lucy and I have done to return for this, our fourth visit, is hop aboard the Hektorovic, the two-hour car-ferry that connects mainland Split with Vis town, the island’s main harbor.
It’s gratifying to discover on arrival that little has changed since that run-in with Goran in 2005. Vis remains a town in soporific repose. The old facades – all white stone quarried on the distant island of Braè – still grace the waterfront. Old, olive-skinned locals still 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. And now, six sun-soaked hours after stepping off the ferry, we’re languishing on the beach at Grandovac – an arc of polished white pebbles overhung by pine trees thrumming with cicada-song – eating lemon ice-creams. If this is intrepid, call me Shackleton.
Things haven’t always been so tranquil here. Towards the end of the second World War, when Vis was the only island in the Dalmatias unoccupied by the Germans, it became a base for British forces, and for a cohort of 2,000 partisans, fighting the Nazis under the leadership of Marshal Tito, the man who would go on to dominate three decades of politics in communist Yugoslavia. Under Tito, the island’s strategic position saw it annexed as a naval outpost. Military tunnels and installations were dug into the hillsides. Locals lived under a veil of secrecy. Visitors — both foreign and domestic — were forbidden.
That era ended in 1989, and since then tourism has alighted on Vis’ rocky shore. The battleships have been replaced by pleasure-yachts, while around the peninsula, in St George’s Bay, the more dauntless visitors now dare to jump from the concrete lintel of what used to be a submarine depot. But the upshot of this unique history – which was to see the island skip the rapacious development of the 1980s – is that travel on Vis remains seductively low-key.
Accommodation consists almost exclusively of sobes (self-contained apartments), locally-owned and rarely more than €80 a night. The one big hotel, Hotel Issa – a whitewashed carbuncle on the harbour’s western peninsula – is incongruous and unloved. With only 1,000 rooms on the island and camping prohibited, there’s no overcrowding even in peak season. We stay on the eastern edge of town in a room that verges right on to the sea, the wall beneath its shuttered windows lapped by the tide.
“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 little-by-little – is something Vis has in spades.
A couple of days later, having recalibrated all systems to the Vis pace of life, we drag ourselves into something resembling exploration. From the square by the ferry-dock, a regular bus sets off to travel the seven-mile road that bisects the island from east to west, winding between verdant hillsides and citrus orchards, criss-crossed with a timeworn geometry of stonewall.
Sitting at the neck of a pretty anchorage bobbing with fishing boats, hemmed in by the near-600 metre slopes of Mount Hum – from whose caves Tito once deployed his fighters to make mischief among the German lines – lies Komiza, the island’s second town. Though smaller than Vis, Komiza is where the majority of the island’s tourists stay. Outdoor cafes line the harbor, while small, unassuming tour agents offer day-trips to the see the Blue Cave, an aquamarine grotto punched into the outlying islet of Bisevo, visible from here as a monochromatic rock on the horizon. South of here, arc after arc of beautiful beaches nibble into the coast.
But we’ve come here expressly to furnish our palates rather than our tans. Pleasing palates is something that Vis has long excelled in. As long ago as the second century BC, the Alexandrian scholar Athenaeus was extolling the island’s wine. “At Issa,” he wrote, invoking the name of Vis’ first major settlement, “wine is made which is superior to every other wine whatever.”
Wine derived from local grape varieties – vugava for white and plavac for red – remains a thriving cottage-industry today. But Vis also boasts the food to accompany it: this island is often described as the gastronomic capital of the Adriatic. That evening we go to one of its culinary standard-bearers.
Jastozera, meaning lobster, is a beguilingly ramshackle joint festooned in a paraphernalia of ropes and row-boats, where the diners sit on planks set over the sea. Intermittently, a waitress swings by to take up a net on a pole and hoist the restaurant’s eponymous speciality out of the lobster-cages that sit in the water directly below our table.
We opt instead to eat the way purveyed in most Vis restaurants. From traditional homespun konoba, where tables are scattered at the side of the street, to the opulence of Villa Kaliopa, where tables are secluded amidst the luxuriant foliage of a 16th century walled garden, on Vis the fish is shown to you before you choose, priced by the kilo, and served simply, grilled with a squeeze of lemon. Our meal of bass and dory is typically uncomplicated, but fresh as the air after a storm and cooked to perfection.
Given that this simple cooking grew out of the impoverishment and isolation of the past, it’s a little ironic that the island’s modern restaurant scene should be underpinned by the patronage of the yacht-set, arriving here hungry after a day on the water. Indeed, Goran isn’t the only celebrity to have treaded the Vis promenade. John Malkovitch is a regular patron, and Tom Cruise stopped off here in 2005. After all, the lack of swanky accommodation isn’t a problem, if you have your own super-yacht — when we return on the last bus, the town has adopted the air of a miniature Cannes.
Perhaps it’s these maritime comings and goings that have cultivated Vis’ characteristic poise: courtesy seasoned by wise indifference; hospitality uncorrupted by economic aspiration. The island, after all, is accustomed to people passing through.
All the Mediterranean’s major players – Illyrians, Romans and Byzantines – have left their mark on this crossroads of empire.
Remnants of later visitations provide their own diversion in the days to come. The architectural beauty of the church spires that stand sentinel over the bay hark back to the age when the Venetians dominated the Adriatic. Over in the suburb of Kut, a fortress bequeathed by the Austro-Hungarians houses the island’s fascinating archeological collection, a jumble of clay amphoras dredged up from shipwrecks and red-figure pottery unearthed from ancient necropolises.
But civilization only encroaches so far on Vis — travel away from the towns and you come to appreciate just how pristine the island is. On hired bikes, we take to the road, cycling up on to the island’s central plateau, a rolling arcadia of vineyards spread across undulating acres of yellow sand. Up and down the crinkle-cut coastline we go: Rukovac with its twin-bays; Srebrena with its huge chalk-white pebbles; Stiniva with its horseshoe cove. The latter is a favourite of the Croatia tourist board’s promotional advertisements, though when we arrive there is not another soul with whom to share it.
‘The Mediterranean as it once was,” those adverts boast. Does anywhere encapsulate the slogan as much as Vis? On our final evening, as I sit in the stone courtyard of Pajoda restaurant enjoying a glass of Lipanovic, a winery that matures its barrels in the military tunnels that defined the island’s previous self, it seems unlikely. For here that martial past has become an advantage, leaving behind an atmosphere just like this wine: pure, unsullied and uniquely Croatian.
How to get there
Easyjet ( easyjet.com) flies to Split from London Gatwick and Bristol. From Split, a daily car-ferry makes the two hour trip to Vis, departing at 9am ( jadrolinija.hr). Tickets cost 54 kuna (€7).
Where to stay
Nautic Apartments have a fantastic seafront location on the east side of Vis Town,. Double rooms start at €30 per night. nautic-apartments.com; tel: 00385-21 717 020
Villa Kamenica has three pretty apartments with private balconies, set around a lovingly-tended garden. Rooms start at €30 per night. ( villa-kamenica.hr; tel: 00385-99 8580 696)