Published
'Velebit. A Mountain in Croatia' (issue 22, September 2008)
'Velebit. A Mountain in Croatia' was awarded the prize for 'best outdoor feature' in the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild Awards for Excellence, 2009 (sponsored by Crimson Publishing).
Judges' comments: '....It was heartening to see that, in these times of the dumbing-down of the print media generally, there are still outlets where good writing is appreciated and published, for which we should all be grateful.... Any one of three or four superb and very different pieces might have won, but after reading and re-reading, there was one entry which the judges felt was consistently good from first word to last. It showed a deep understanding of the destination, and its people; it was both thoughtful and entertaining, cleverly wove together the author's own thoughts with history and legend, and highlighted a part of the world that is on everyone's doorstep but remains mysterious and very special.'
First published in hidden europe, issue 22, September 2008
Velebit, we are told in the words of an old Croatian folk song, is the haunt of fairies. It is a strangely beautiful place, its wind-scoured heights characterized by areas of bizarrely sculpted and weathered rock, studded with thickets of dwarf mountain pine, and pierced by some of the deepest sinkholes in the world. In winter, it is transformed into a snowbound landscape like something out of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Wild, eerie, fractured and disjointed.
This stark upland, just a stone’s throw from the Adriatic, includes two of Croatia’s eight national parks. Sjeverni Velebit, in the north, was created in 1999 and is the country’s newest national park. Further south is Paklenica, established in 1949. The entire region is also a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, yet its southern slopes remain strewn with landmines from the 1991–1995 war.
Velebit forms part of that long, sinuous and loosely defined range of mountains known as the Dinaric Alps. Stretching from the Slovenian border in the north, these run down through Croatia parallel to the coast, on through Montenegro and into Albania, later to re-emerge as the Pindus Mountains in Greece. The familiar golden bumps of the Croatian archipelago — those dark bronze islands, on a sea at once green and hard as glass, to paraphrase Rebecca West — constitute merely the eroded tops of various outer ridges of this mountain range, now partially submerged beneath the waters of the Adriatic. Many visitors to Croatia pass beneath the ramparts of Velebit as they drive along the all too- crowded coast road. But few are the travellers who venture up onto its heights.
Ages of chemical weathering have left their mark both above and beneath the surface, and Velebit displays all those features so distinctive of a karst landscape. These are perhaps at their most impressive in the protected areas of Hajducki kukovi and Rozanski kukovi in the north, which form a quite labyrinthine succession of shattered tops and rocky dells. The area has a complex underground drainage system, and is riddled with caves and some alarmingly deep sinkholes - most notably Lukina jama, which from its entrance in Hajducki kukovi plunges well over a thousand metres into the depths of the mountain. Only discovered 1992, it is named after a local caving enthusiast who joined a mountain division (gorski zdrug) in the 1991-95 war as a volunteer, and was killed by a sniper. Another sinkhole, Patkov Gust, has a single vertical drop of over five hundred metres – the second largest in the world. Further south, the bizarre rock formations of Bacic kuk and Bojinac protrude from the landscape like so many stumpy, petrified fingers.
Premuziceva staza and Rozanski kuovi, Sjeverni (Northern) Velebit, Croatia (Nikon D200, Nikkor AF-S 12-24mm f/4 G ED-IF DX)
Velebit is also a mountain of winds. The most notorious of these is the bura, which blows over the mountains from the Lika basin, descending onto the Adriatic to wreak havoc among fishermen. Its gale-force blasts are described by the eighteenth-century Venetian traveller Alberto Abbé Fortis as picking up children and dashing them against the walls of houses. It could even knock over horses laden with salt. The bura played havoc with the Venetian ships that used to ply the channels between the islands and the Croatian coast, an inshore water route known to the Venetians as the Canale della Morlacca.
'Puse bura' say the local fishermen across the Velebit Channel, looking knowingly over the waters at the wall of mountains on the other side, slashed by the twin gorges of Velika and Mala Paklenica: ‘the bura is blowing.’ On such a day, wisdom dictates that small fishing boats should remain safe in their moorings. In defence against this wind, houses in villages such as Jovici across the Velebit Channel from Paklenica – which might otherwise boast some of the finest views in Croatia from their living rooms – are generally built with no windows or terraces facing east.
Juzni (Southern) Velebit and Paklenica, viewed across the Velebit Channel from the village of Vinjerac (Nikon D200, Nikkor AF-S 12-24mm f/4 G ED-IF DX)
Running some fifty kilometres through the very heart of Northern and Central Velebit is Premuziceva staza. This wonderfully engineered track was built during the early nineteen-thirties under the direction of Ante Premuzic, a local forestry engineer, using local labour and thus ensuring a regular income for local workers during this period of economic hardship. Backbreaking work. Winding its way among the crags of Rozanski kukovi, the path forms part of the Velebitski planinarski put, Croatia’s longest hiking trail, which stretches one hundred kilometres from the village of Oltare in the north to the gorge of Velika Paklenica in the south. It takes a good ten days to walk the whole route.
Scattered across this landscape are a number of well-preserved hamlets – small clusters of low-roofed, stone cottages, such as Marasovici and Parici in Paklenica National Park; others, such as Skorpovac, are little more than ruined shells, long abandoned. There is a small church at Veliko Rujno in southern Velebit, to which locals travel on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption (Velika Gospa). After Mass, there is a picnic on the open grasslands outside. An enormous metal cross was erected here a few years ago, brought from, and paid for by the inhabitants of a small village on the coast. Another, older, cross stands on the bleak, rounded summit of Sveto brdo (Holy Mountain), at the southern extremity of Paklenica national park. Mountain peaks, it would seem, have lost none of their associations with the Gods.
In the north of the range, near the beginning of Premuziceva staza, is Zavizan - a meteorological station run by the ever-friendly Ante Vukusic and his family, which doubles as a mountain hut. The Vukusic family hails from the small village of Gornja Klada on the coast, from where it is some four hours on foot, or considerably less by car, up to the hut. My first visit to this village was particularly memorable for the sight of a pear tree bristling with glass bottles. These bottles would later be ‘picked’, along with the fruit which had grown inside them, and filled with homemade rakija.
Toponyms, as always, are a rich source of information on an area’s history and traditions. According to local burial customs, when a body was carried from the home of the deceased to a distant cemetery, the bearers were permitted to rest and lay the body on the ground at one point only, before continuing. This point would later be marked by a stone slab, called a mirilo, and it was to this place that relatives would later come to pay their respects. The tradition died out in the nineteen fifties, but its memory survives in place names such as Martinovo Mirilo, above Mala Paklenica.
Over the years, Velebit has provided an ideal refuge for outlaws and rebels. It was after all from the port of Senj, at the northern end of Velebit, that the Uskoks launched their pirate raids against the Ottoman (and Venetian) fleets on the Adriatic; and it was from Velebit and other mountainous areas of Croatia that the Hajduks harassed and harangued the Ottomans, in between times robbing a few locals for good measure. Later, these hills were a refuge for the Partisans during the Second World War. So there is something of the Croatian soul in Velebit. Vila Velebita (‘The Fairy of Velebit’), the Croatian folksong already alluded to, was written down in the late 19th century. The lines, known by all good schoolchildren in Croatia, run as follows:
Velebite, vilovito stijene,
Ja ljubim tvoje smilje.
Ljubim tvoga u gorici vuka,
I onoga - Lickoga hajduka.
‘Velebit, the rocks of fairies,
I cherish your immortelle.
I cherish the mountain wolf,
The Hajduk of Lika.’
The immortelle referred to in the verse is a species of flower that grows profusely on Velebit.
The sixteenth-century Croatian writer Petar Zoranic imbued Velebit with additional layers of myth and legend in his Planine (‘The Mountains’, published 1569), making Paklenica the entrance to Hell itself, and in true Renaissance fashion ascribing the moaning of the bura to the sighing of a beautiful woman, named Bura, imprisoned in its depths for her excessive vanity! Zoranic describes the bura as coming from Vrazja vrata - ‘Hell’s gate’, Hell being pakao in modern Croatian, whence Paklenica.
Sveto brdo, above Paklenica, Juzni (Southern) Velebit, Croatia (Nikon D200, Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED AIS)
Velebit is home to an array of plants and animals – including the brown bear, although seeing anything more than the occasional tracks in the snow is extremely rare, unless you visit the sanctuary for orphaned bear cubs near the village of Kuterevo. This great limestone upland also protects small numbers of other elusive species such as grey wolf and lynx, and, in the depths of Lukina jama, a large population of endemic subterranean leeches. The rocky slopes of Velebit are also a common haunt of the nose-horned viper (Vipera ammodytes, known locally as poskok), Europe’s most venomous snake - a specimen of which lies coiled in a large jar in the mountain hut at Zavizan, pickled for posteruty in formaldehyde.
Yet Velebit is not as idyllic and unspoilt as it might at first seem. During the Croatian War of Independence (from 1991 to 1995), some areas of southern Velebit (along with numerous other parts of Croatia) were strewn with landmines. The zones affected included the inland (eastern) slopes of southern Velebit above Paklenica, and areas south of this such as the beautiful rock formations of Tulevo grede. To complicate matters, there is in many cases little or no record of where mines were laid. Over recent years there has been a concerted effort, orchestrated by the Croatian Mine Action Centre (CROMAC) and organisations such as Adopt-a-Minefield and Norwegian People’s Aid, to de-mine Velebit. However mine clearance is an expensive and dangerous process; and, while some areas such as Sveti Rok, near Paklenica, where the tunnels of the new motorway have been bored through the mountain, have been cleared, many others still await clearance.
Visitors to the Dalmatian coast are often wholly unaware of the landmine problem that still afflicts Croatia. It is estimated that there are still almost quarter of a million landmines waiting to be cleared in the country, scattered over an area amounting to almost 1000 square kilometres. The battles against forest fires near Dubrovnik last summer were much hindered by the fact that many of the areas affected by the blaze were infested with landmines. To find out more about efforts to clear landmines in Velebit and elsewhere in Croatia, visit www.hcr.hr, The International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Adopt-a-Minefield.
Old military bunkers are still dotted across the landscape - one above Paklenica is sometimes used as an impromptu shelter by local hikers - and old wires and communications cables, long since cut, still snake their way through the undergrowth.
Croatians feel a great affection for their mountains – witness the swarms of planinari (walkers) on Sljeme, the mountain rising just north of Zagreb, at weekends. Even during the war years of the nineteen nineties, local hikers still headed for Velebit. I have friends who, as students in Zagreb in 1992, would travel to Rijeka by train, and hitch to Gornja Klada, to escape into the wilds of northern Velebit - only a matter of months after the siege of Dubrovnik was finally lifted.
The fact that Velebit still sees so few foreign visitors is something I always find surprising - it is certainly not particularly difficult to reach. When leafing through summit registers on the rocky peaks of Northern Velebit last summer, I expected to see some increase in visitors over my previous trips there, a few years earlier; but the number of names and messages in languages other than Croatian are still remarkably few and far between. Velebit, so close to the coast, is a happy reminder that Croatia is more than just a string of sunny beaches.
Text and photographs copyright Rudolf Abraham 2008
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