Episode 173
Dobar Dan!
In todays lesson, Uncle Mike teaches Tony D. how to find out if your Hotel or rental has the essentials to make your vacation, a staycation. Lot's of really great useful phrases for the upcoming travel season.
Lesson
Washer - perilica rublja
Dryer - sušilica rublja
Laundromat - praonica rublja
Air conditioning - klima
Ima li?
What’s the wifi password? - Koja je lozinka za wifi?
Where are the towels? - Gdje su ručnici?
What’s the parking situation? - Kakva je situacija s parkiranjem?
Super Slatko Report
DJ MOE has a Super Slatko Report lined up for you all about Otok Vis (Vis Island). This one is near and dear to Uncle Mike and is full of super interesting information. This island has a lot going on.
Otok Vis sits out in the Adriatic, well off the central Dalmatian coast, it’s known as Croatia furthest inhabited Island. Vis sits 45 kilometers away from the Croatian mainland (28 miles). And if you’re wondering Vis is about 150 kilometers from Italy (93 miles). Vis’ closest island neighbors include; Biševo, about 5 kilometers southwest (3.1 miles), Hvar roughly 50 kilometers to the northeast in a straight-line (31 miles), and Korčula about 61.7 kilometers to the southeast (38.3 miles). Vis, as an island, covers about 90 square kilometers, (34.85 square miles) and its highest peak is Hum at 587 meters, (1,926 feet tall). And of course Its lowest point is the Adriatic itself, at 0 meters above sea level. The island’s two main towns are Vis and Komiža, and the wider island’s settlements include:
Milna,
Rukavac,
Podstražje,
Podselje,
Podhumlje,
Marinje Zemlje,
Dračevo Polje,
Plisko Polje,
Rogačić,
Borovik,
and Duboka,
The 2021 census put the island’s population at 3,313, with 1,918 in the Town of Vis and 1,394 in Komiža.
On to the fun stuff, Vis’ Ecology. Remember kids, Ecology is the study of how living organisms coexist. Vis’ ecology is something pretty special. Let’s just say geologists and botanists have a thing for Vis.
For all the geologist listening in, most of the Vis is built of limestone laid down in shallow ancient seas.
What makes the Komiža side of Vis so unique is that it’s built in layers… literally. First, you had ancient volcanoes over 200 million years ago. Then the whole area got buried under ocean sediments that turned into rock. Over time, the earth shifted and bent those layers. Now this is the strange/unusual part… massive pockets of underground salt actually pushed upward, reshaping everything from below. So today parts of Otok Vis are basically a geological layer cake that’s been baked, buried, squished, and stirred for millions of years. All that I just said is like catnip for Geologists.
For all the botanists out there, the above ground portion is your wonderland. Vis is mostly a mix of maquis and coastal scrub.
Maquis is a type of dense, fragrant, drought resistant shrubland.
And Coastal Scrub is a bio diverse plant community that is known for growing low, around 3-6 feet tall, with soft leaves and known for capturing moisture to help survive hot and dry climates.
Vis also has a ton of other plant life too; with grapevines, olive groves, and carob which especially important, including the local Komiža carob, not to mention the Vis grape, Vugava.
Along with that, did you know that Otok Vis is part of an island chain known as an archipelago? The other islands include:
Otok Biševo,
Sven Andrija,
Brusnik,
Jabuka
and Palagruža.
Not only that, this archipelago is protected as a UNESCO GLOBAL Geopark, as these islands have a unique geological heritage, that includes volcanic rocks on Jabuka and Brusnik that are unique to the Adriatic. This archipelago is Comprised of both the youngest and oldest rock formations in the Adriatic, dating back 220 million years!
What about wildlife? On Otok Vis you’ll find: bats, reptiles, green toads, important seabirds like Eleonora’s falcon, Scopoli’s shearwater, and Yelkouan shearwater; plus bottlenose dolphins offshore and large Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows below the waterline. The Natura 2000, the largest European coordinated network of protected, high-value nature sites. That documentation for the archipelago reports hundreds of plant species on Vis and protected habitats across the land combined land areas.
People living on Vis dates back to the Neolithic age, approximately 10,000BCE. In the 1st millennium BC, Liburnian and other Illyrian groups were present, but the big turning point came in the early 4th century BC, when a man named Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, sponsored the Greek colony of Issa, on the spot we know today as Vis Town. Issa became one of the earliest and most important urban centers in the eastern Adriatic, minting money, trading wine and pottery, and founding settlements on the mainland. The following is how many times Vis changed rule:
Rome absorbed the island after Issa.
then it fell under Venetian control,
Via later became Napoleonic
and then over to Austrian rule,
briefly Italian occupied after World War I
then became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,
then socialist Yugoslavia after World War II,
and finally part of independent Croatia in 1991.
One of those instances made for an interesting occurrence that happened to Vis during World War II and its aftermath that shaped the Vis we see today. After Italy fell in 1943, Vis became a Partisan stronghold and then later a major Allied and Yugoslavian base, with even their prime minister Tito staying on the island in 1944. Even after the war the Yugoslavian military kept Vis restricted all the way until 1989. That long closure had a strange side effect: it limited overdevelopment, which helps explain why visitors today always describe Vis as unusually preserved. Vis has kept its authenticity, and is pleasantly less modern than some of its neighbors. Vis was kept in a bubble and was listed as a “closed island” to outsiders for over 4 decades!
Vis had its prehistoric communities, followed by Illyrians and then Greek colonists, and over time the island’s people became exactly what island geography tends to produce: farmers, fishers, sailors, and traders. Agriculture mattered, especially vines and carob, but Komiža in particular became famous for fishing, and salting small blue fish. Also, building the falkuša, a brilliantly adapted fishing boat developed by local fishermen, became one of the great symbols of Adriatic maritime heritage. Today the people of Vis are especially associated with fishing, wine, olive oil, and a strong local identity shaped by remoteness, migration, and dialect. One especially distinctive cultural marker is the island’s Cokavian dialect, recognized by Croatia as intangible cultural heritage and notable for its Venetian influence.
Archaeologically, Vis is a treasure trove. Finds on the island range from prehistoric traces to Greek cemeteries, inscriptions, ceramics, jewelry, weapons, mosaics, Roman baths, and theater remains tied to ancient Issa. One of the island’s best-known discoveries is the bronze head identified with Artemis, an original Greek cult statue fragment dated to the late 4th or early 3rd century BC, and it is one of the marquee objects linked to Vis’s ancient Greek past. The island is also known for important inscriptions, including the funerary stele of the hero Calius, described by the Geopark as the oldest such inscription yet found in Croatia. A funerary stele, is an upright decorated stone grave marker, carved with pictures and/ or inscriptions. Beyond classical archaeology, Vis and its surrounding waters also hold military remains from the island’s fortress era and 20th-century base years, including tunnels, fortifications, and wartime infrastructure, so yes, on Vis you can move from Hellenistic civilization to Cold War concrete in a single afternoon without even changing islands.
So, to wrap it all up, Vis is the Croatian island that somehow manages to be ancient in a modern world. But also seemingly keeps effortlessly humble for an island that has been of great importance for roughly two and a half millennia. Otok Vis has Greek bones, Venetian seasoning, military scars, vineyards, dolphins, falcons, and 220 million years of geology to study.
If that’s not enough, Vis also has a neat little pop-culture following as it was featured prominently in: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again filmed there in 2017. Vis received its acting credentials for portraying the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi, which is pretty funny because Vis is so convincingly Mediterranean that Hollywood basically said, “close enough, just add ABBA.” Despite Vis going all Hollywood on us, Vis just might be the most interesting island in the Adriatic.
And that’s it for the Super Slatko Report!
