Supetar Island of Brac

Description. Supetar is Brac’s centre. All the ways lead there and start off from there. Supetar is a bridge to Split. One should speak about two Supetars. About the one that was set in the picturesque peninsula of the present cemetery in the times of the Romans until Early Christian times. Then it died out, slept through some centuries, the whole of the later Middle Ages, and then started Modern Times in Glavica, Vrdolac, Varos. From these points it descended in circles towards the sea, to set around the ancient chapel of St. Peter (in portu sancti Petri), and the little bay which was, in these times of transitions, the port of Nerezisca the Brac capital for eight centuries. Supetar became its capital at the beginning of the 19th century, thanks to its very rapid development and to the best possible site it had chosen. The present administration buildings on the coast, of fanciful plastered fronts, superflousy decorated walls and unpractically huge windows and size in general, were mostly erected during the Austrian rule and appear as a foreign addition to the genuine folk architecture. Set in rows on the coast they look like a screen to the rural settlement in the backround. This settlement is built out of stone which gives the impression of durability and monumentality. The roofs are covered with heavy slabs that resist the Bura which in winter descends from Mosor and whistles across the Channel. “The body creeps with chill and the wind plays quivering, wavering tunes... What says the wind? Of how the closed hearts weep, of the resignation of the will that consents to fate, of widows that languish lonely, of lily-smiles of babes, of how the far-away world thinks, and of the final breath of those passed away on the high seas. The wind is felt like a soul and it whimpers like a cello.” (Tin Ujevic, Supetar on Brac, Jadransa posta 1929) The old, genuine, peasant Supetar is to be found in Vrdolac Glavica and in Varas. There we see the houses without anything foreign or anything excessive. All the building-material has been taken from the surroundings and so the houses seem as if grown together with the landscape, which, in its turn, gives always different, never repeated images. These stony forms are free from all the foreign additions. The small cottages in Vrdolac with the adjoining kitchens, cellars store-rooms, all set in walled yards, create much the same harmonious arrangements as the one-storey houses on Glavica with the porches that, with their vaults, provide shade over the cellar doors. Here we know why the fronts are wide, the roofs painted with milk-white lime, why the windows are small and the eaves narrow. We should especially mention here the chimneys with very imaginative endings, not because they are over-decorated elements but because they are here mere neccesity, they stop the wind and rain from damaging the fire-place. This is the first and genuine ring of old Supetar. With the passing of time, the landed gentry increased their wealth and the Turkish threat from across the Channel became more dangerous, it was neccessary to raise fortified strongholds instead of luxurious houses. The Venetians in the 16th and the 17th century do not any longer call Supetar villa (the village) but castrum. Thus from rural settlement the Mediterranean town was conceived. This development was supported by the inventive setting of the baroque buildings, from the 18th century, nearer to the landlords, which were all dominated by the monumental church set on a gentle elevation at the foot of the bay. These were the buildings formed out of the dressed stone in which baroque is felt in the profiled doors, round the windows, in the small picturesque mansarde roofs that seek for room high in the loft, Besides the porches, there are also the balconies that rest on the decorative consoles with stone walls or iron fences. Under the eaves are the stone nails that support the stone gutter-pipe which frames the walls of the house like a decorative girdle. The more comfortable mode of life slowly displaces the kitchen as the central room and creates living-rooms with period furniture, baroque lamps and many paintings on the walls. These are the elements of style of a particular period drawn into the old local atmosphere with a lot of good taste. The sunny little town was growing up, in whose tiny narrow lanes the play of light and shade was making a lating colorful impression. This was Supetar from the end of the 18th century, in the following years ready to become and remain the new capital of Brac. In the 19th century, the Austrian authority did not at all contribute to its development by building huge, unaesthetic public buildings. This sterile atmosphere with the petite-bourgeois spirit of the little communal places from the end of the 19th century was obvious here in such a style of architecture. This meant the beginning of a break with tradition and the intrusion of eclectic, uniform models into genuine harmony, into variety and uniqueness. The fourth Supetar, which today sees its future in its clear sandy beaches that are framed with the cultivated pine-woods, stretch along the sea from Babin laz on the east to Vela luka (The Big port) on the west. Stone is increasingly giving way to concrete or is serving as a false stone facing to it, while slabs are giving in to tiles. The vine-yards and olive-groves gradually disappear and turn into the typified, uniform holiday villas. The cellars, lofts, fancy chimneys and white staircases should be seen only in the old Supetar. Perhaps such was the tribute to be paid to these times, merciless in their urgent solutions.

Name. According to the archeological findings, Supetar was already settled during Roman times. It is mentioned in 1423 for the first time (Supetar). It is said that the church of St. Peter was raised only in 1604. The Early Christian sarcophagi in the cemetery would lead us to think that the little church was erected at approxiamately the same time as the one in Sutivan of which the foundations from the 6th century are still preserved. It also gave, linguistically, the same name to the settlement (Sutivan). It is hardly possible that the sarcophagi would be erected without the adjoining shrien. Supetar has its spring-water wells on Vrilo, in Babin laz which was the advantage necassary to the development of the island. the pirates’ attacks and plundering forced the people to withdraw from the coast. They started coming back there in the 15th century, settling in the sheltered Vrdolac, on Glavica and in Varos, which means a separate rural settlement outside the gentry’s centre which was in Port (Lat. portus, the harbour) and get (Lat. ghetto, the separated parts of the settlement). In these places the nobles led a life of their own, they had their church of St. Martin and spoke very often in a strange, Venetian language, which is still traceable in Supetar through its so-called cakacski pronunciation.

Monuments. The new tourist Supetaris set round the Cape of St. Nicholas to prove after many a century, the good choice Brac’s Romans had made when they settlement here in Early Christian times. There, near the cemetery church of St. Nicholas next to the exterior walls of the chapel are the two most beautiful Early Christian sarcophagi on the island decorated on the front side with relief crosses framed in rings. On their oval covers over the whole length the long crosses are carved. Apart from sarcophagi, it is reasonable to suppose the existence of other Early Christian works as well but which, however, have not survived. But the cult of the sacred, burial place has been maintained in this cemetery where these two ancient Roman graves are again used for burial. Much later, around the church of Saint Nicholas the traveller who saw off Supetar’s sailing-ships when they set off to the high sea, to the Levant and Venice, they raised a few nice tombstones which were made by Ivan Rendic (1849-1932), the father of modern Croatian sculpture. many of his stone portraits and sculptures bear the marks of the sculptor’s strong individuality with the emphasized realistic features. It happened often that, because of the lack of money and understanding from the Croatian circles in which he lived and worked he had to look for employment outside the country, in Trieste, where he had to give way to the bad provincial taste of his customers. this is often seen in his tombstone monuments, which are, like some other buildings under the influence of Secession, overloaded with symbol and decorated with too many folklore elements. “When I was a child, the shadows of those mountains across the sea seemed to me like live pictures, it seemed to me that the songs of fairies were coming from the distance, and it was only the chirping of crickets...” (I. Rendic, an autobiographical note). The man who so much loved his Supetar, where he wanted to educate young sculptors, spent his last days lonely in bitter poverty up on the Glavica, among the peasants, and was finally buried in a foreign grave in the same cemetery in which he left a few of his monuments. These are the relief Pieta on the grave of Franosovi, the relief of Christ’s head and a portrait of a man on the grave of F. Pizzoli, the head of Christ on the grave of the well known opera singer M. Vuckovic , while the tomb of the Rendic family has all the characteristic of his style. he was looking forward with pleasure to working on the Petrinovic family tomb for which he had already made the stone statue of Hercegovka (The Herzegovinian woman). The order was, however cancelled and entrusted to T. Rosandic. The big white mausoleum, sticking out like a cypress tree in this small, harmonious Mediterranean cemetery near the sea, the pines and myrtle, with some remote, Byzantine-Oriental features forgein to this region, seems like a lonely and secluded monument. Its author, T. Rosandic, in the mausoleum, however, left a few good works like The Laying in the Grave, The Crucification, The Day of Judgement, Angels the Singers, and the well next to the tomb which demonstartes the highest achievement of Rosandic’s art. “Accompanied by the breeze, filled with the scents of the island’s herbs and shrubs, I first visited the Cemetery...Here I felt the profound melancholy of Supetar and of the whole of this coastal district... the wind from the pines climbed upto these cypresses... And when I suddenly heard the sounds of a guitar, the time slipped through my fingers ike a bunch of impalpable light-rays. I was not, to tell the truth, in the mood for crying, but I felt that I was sentimental and that I have not been for a long, long time...” (Tin Ujevic, Sjeta pred Supetrom (Melancholy of Supetar, Jadranska posta, 1919). The second monumental complex is set on the site of the old chapel of St. Peter (in portu s. Petri). This church was restored in 1604, then burnt down in 1729, then in 1733 restored again in the baroque style when it got new naves, the belfry etc. it was lenghtened in 1887 from the preset side door towards the western part and on this occassion it lost a lot of its genuine baroque style. All the three front profiled entances are preserved from that time. Over the central one is God the Father and on the side ones, female figures with shields. The interior of the church is attractive with it spacious and discreet light. Striking to the eye is the big marble altar with the painting of The Annunciation, and the side sculptures among which we recognize the Village’s patron. The Supetran F. Tironi left in this church the two interesting reliquaries which hang on the side walls, with painted doors and bottom. In these paintings we feel the skillful brush but at the same time, incomplete spirit of a gifted amateur from the end of the 18th century. Interesting are his altar paintings Saint Anna with Mary and ST. Thomas Aquinus and St. Francis of Assisi, the painting with figures of the saints St. Rocchus, St. Elmo, St. John Nepomucenes and St. John the Baptist round the figure of Mary and the painting of The immaculate Conception, on the altar on the left side. Over the font is the unsuccessful painting of Dunaj, the son of Ivan Rendic. In the older part of the church are steles with Croatian inscriptions. At the entrance we find the surprising holy water stoup composed of two large Gothic capitals with the vaults in the corners and decorated with acanthus leaves. The vestibule of the church is spacious, paved and elevated, we enter it by a stone staircase. On the church building on the left is the sun-dial, very common in our town on the coast; under the sun-dial, is the sarcophagus with the emblem with the inscription and the year 1744. In the interior, in the Church assembly hall is the portrait of Supetar’s parson B. Durlindan by Tironi and a few interesting works of art belonging to the Venetian art of painting of the 16th and the 17th century. We should get to know the decorative sides of the well, executed in the baroque manner, full of religious symbols, church sings and the joys of life (the horns of abundance). And when we climb up the steep old way or the road, to Nerezisca, passing through the pine wood, we reach the chapel of St. Rocchus the protector from infectious diseases, which in the past frequently spread over the island. It was erected in 1682 for the health of Supetar’s populace. from here beautiful views open to the tame backround of central Brac and the Channel in front of it. “Sacred is this silence to me and full of its precious dearness. In the morning the lovely sun awakes me, in front of whose face the blue coasts reveal themselves like the harmless innocense of maidens... and in the evening, the calm is deep, and it is a real pleasure, just before the sleep to which I am sometimes sent by a drop of home-made wine, to see the main-land coast from Split to Makarska, lit by the electric gleams which mark the Dugi Rat and the old pirate-nest of Omis... I peep through the misty veil of the night towards the town of Marulic...” (Tin Ujevic, Supetar on Brac, Jadranska posta, 1929). It was here that I learned why so many excellent writers kept coming to this little town at my feet and what it meant for the painters to whom these landscapes are their best works, like for example the pictures in the flaming colors of our Ignjat Job.

Supetar
Island of Brac

Description. Supetar is Brac’s centre. All the ways lead there and start off from there. Supetar is a bridge to Split.
One should speak about two Supetars. About the one that was set in the picturesque peninsula of the present cemetery in the times of the Romans until Early Christian times. Then it died out, slept through some centuries, the whole of the later Middle Ages, and then started Modern Times in Glavica, Vrdolac, Varos. From these points it descended in circles towards the sea, to set around the ancient chapel of St. Peter (in portu sancti Petri), and the little bay which was, in these times of transitions, the port of Nerezisca the Brac capital for eight centuries. Supetar became its capital at the beginning of the 19th century, thanks to its very rapid development and to the best possible site it had chosen.
The present administration buildings on the coast, of fanciful plastered fronts, superflousy decorated walls and unpractically huge windows and size in general, were mostly erected during the Austrian  rule and appear as a foreign addition to the genuine folk architecture. Set in rows on the coast they look like a screen to the rural settlement in the backround. This settlement is built out of stone which gives the impression of durability and monumentality. The roofs are covered with heavy slabs that resist the Bura which in winter descends from Mosor and whistles across the Channel.
“The body creeps with chill and the wind plays quivering, wavering tunes...
What says the wind? Of how the closed hearts weep, of the resignation of the will that consents to fate, of widows that languish lonely, of lily-smiles of babes, of how the far-away world thinks, and of the final breath of those passed away on the high seas.
The wind is felt like a soul and it whimpers like a cello.”
(Tin Ujevic, Supetar on Brac, Jadransa posta 1929)
The old, genuine, peasant Supetar is to be found in Vrdolac Glavica and in Varas.
There we see the houses without anything foreign or anything excessive. All the building-material has been taken from the surroundings and so the houses seem as if grown together with the landscape, which, in its turn, gives always different, never repeated images. These stony forms are free from all the foreign additions. The small cottages in Vrdolac with the adjoining  kitchens, cellars store-rooms, all set in walled yards, create much the same harmonious arrangements as the one-storey houses on Glavica with the porches that, with their vaults, provide shade over the cellar doors. Here we know why the fronts are wide, the roofs painted with milk-white lime, why the windows are small and the eaves narrow. We should especially mention here the chimneys with very imaginative endings, not because they are over-decorated elements but because they are here mere neccesity, they stop the wind and rain from damaging the fire-place.
This is the first and genuine ring of old Supetar.
With the passing of time, the landed gentry increased their wealth and the Turkish threat from across the Channel became more dangerous, it was neccessary to raise fortified strongholds instead of luxurious houses. The Venetians in the 16th and the 17th century do not any longer call Supetar villa (the village) but castrum. Thus from rural settlement the Mediterranean town was conceived.
This development was supported by the inventive setting of the baroque buildings, from the 18th century, nearer to the landlords, which were all dominated by the monumental church set on a gentle elevation at the foot of the bay. These were the buildings formed out of the dressed stone in which baroque is felt in the profiled doors, round the windows, in the small picturesque mansarde roofs that seek for room high in the loft, Besides the porches, there are also the balconies that rest on the decorative consoles with stone walls or iron fences. Under the eaves are the stone nails that support the stone gutter-pipe which frames the walls of the house like a decorative girdle. The more comfortable mode of life slowly displaces the kitchen as the central room and creates living-rooms with period furniture, baroque lamps and many paintings on the walls. These are the elements of style of a particular period drawn into the old local atmosphere with a lot of good taste. The sunny little town was growing up, in whose tiny narrow lanes the play of light and shade was making a lating colorful impression.
This was Supetar from the end of the 18th century, in the following years ready to become and remain the new capital of Brac.
In the 19th century, the Austrian authority did not at all contribute to its development by building huge, unaesthetic public buildings. This sterile atmosphere with the petite-bourgeois spirit of the little communal places from the end of the 19th century was obvious here in such a style of architecture. This meant the beginning of a break with tradition and the intrusion of eclectic, uniform models into genuine harmony, into variety and uniqueness.
The fourth Supetar, which today sees its future in its clear sandy beaches that are framed with the cultivated pine-woods, stretch along the sea from Babin laz on the east to Vela luka (The Big port) on the west. Stone is increasingly giving way to concrete or is serving as a false stone facing to it, while slabs are giving in to tiles. The vine-yards and olive-groves gradually disappear and turn into the typified, uniform holiday villas. The cellars, lofts, fancy chimneys and white staircases should be seen only in the old Supetar.
Perhaps such was the tribute to be paid to these times, merciless in their urgent solutions.

Name. According to the archeological findings, Supetar was already settled during Roman times. It is mentioned in 1423 for the first time (Supetar). It is said that the church of St. Peter was raised only in 1604. The Early Christian sarcophagi in the cemetery would lead us to think that the little church was erected at approxiamately the same time as the one in Sutivan of which the foundations from the 6th century are still preserved. It also gave, linguistically, the same name to the settlement (Sutivan). It is hardly possible that the sarcophagi would be erected without the adjoining shrien.
Supetar has its spring-water wells on Vrilo, in Babin laz which was the advantage necassary to the development of the island. the pirates’ attacks and plundering forced the people to withdraw from the coast. They started coming back there in the 15th century, settling in the sheltered Vrdolac, on Glavica and in Varos, which means a separate rural settlement outside the gentry’s centre which was in Port (Lat. portus, the harbour) and get (Lat. ghetto, the separated parts of the settlement). In these places the nobles led a life of their own, they had their church of St. Martin and spoke very often in a strange, Venetian language, which is still traceable in Supetar through its so-called cakacski pronunciation.

Monuments. The new tourist Supetaris set round the Cape of St. Nicholas to prove after many a century, the good choice Brac’s Romans had made when they settlement here in Early Christian times. There, near the cemetery church of St. Nicholas next to the exterior walls of the chapel are the two most beautiful Early Christian sarcophagi on the island decorated on the front side with relief crosses framed in rings. On their oval covers over the whole length the long crosses are carved. Apart from sarcophagi, it is reasonable to suppose the existence of other Early Christian works as well but which, however, have not survived. But the cult of the sacred, burial place has been maintained in this cemetery where these two ancient Roman graves are again used for burial.
Much later, around the church of Saint Nicholas the traveller who saw off Supetar’s sailing-ships when they set off to the high sea, to the Levant and Venice, they raised a few nice tombstones which were made by Ivan Rendic (1849-1932), the father of modern Croatian sculpture. many of his stone portraits and sculptures bear the marks of the sculptor’s strong individuality with the emphasized realistic features. It happened often that, because of the lack of money and understanding from the Croatian circles in which he lived and worked he had to look for employment outside the country, in Trieste, where he had to give way to the bad provincial taste of his customers. this is often seen in his tombstone monuments, which are, like some other buildings under the influence of Secession, overloaded with symbol and decorated with too many folklore elements.
“When I was a child, the shadows of those mountains across the sea seemed to me like live pictures, it seemed to me that the songs of fairies were coming from the distance, and it was only the chirping of crickets...”
(I. Rendic, an autobiographical note).
The man who so much loved his Supetar, where he wanted to educate young sculptors, spent his last days lonely in bitter poverty up on the Glavica, among the peasants, and was finally buried in a foreign grave in the same cemetery in which he left a few of his monuments. These are the relief Pieta on the grave of Franosovi, the relief of Christ’s head and a portrait of a man on the grave of F. Pizzoli, the head of Christ on the grave of the well known opera singer M. Vuckovic , while the tomb of the Rendic family has all the characteristic of his style. he was looking forward with pleasure to working on the Petrinovic family tomb for which he had already made the stone statue of Hercegovka (The Herzegovinian woman). The order was, however cancelled and entrusted to T. Rosandic. The big white mausoleum, sticking out like a cypress tree in this small, harmonious Mediterranean cemetery near the sea, the pines and myrtle, with some remote, Byzantine-Oriental features forgein to this region, seems like a lonely and secluded monument.
Its author, T. Rosandic, in the mausoleum, however, left a few good works like The Laying in the Grave, The Crucification, The Day of Judgement, Angels the Singers, and the well next to the tomb which demonstartes the highest achievement of Rosandic’s art.
“Accompanied by the breeze, filled with the scents of the island’s herbs and shrubs, I first visited the Cemetery...Here I felt the profound melancholy of Supetar and of the whole of this coastal district... the wind from the pines climbed upto these cypresses... And when I suddenly heard the sounds of a guitar, the time slipped through my fingers ike a bunch of impalpable light-rays. I was not, to tell the truth, in the mood for crying, but I felt that I was sentimental and that I have not been for a long, long time...”
(Tin Ujevic, Sjeta pred Supetrom (Melancholy of Supetar, Jadranska posta, 1919).
The second monumental complex is set on the site of the old chapel of St. Peter (in portu s. Petri). This church was restored in 1604, then burnt down in 1729, then in 1733 restored again in the baroque style when it got new naves, the belfry etc. it was lenghtened in 1887 from the preset side door towards the western part and on this occassion it lost a lot of its genuine baroque style. All the three front profiled entances are preserved from that time. Over the central one is God the Father and on the side ones, female figures with shields. The interior of the church is attractive with it spacious and discreet light. Striking to the eye is the big marble altar with the painting of The Annunciation, and the side sculptures among which we recognize the Village’s patron.
The Supetran F. Tironi left in this church the two interesting reliquaries which hang on the side walls, with painted doors and bottom. In these paintings we feel the skillful brush but at the same time, incomplete spirit of a gifted amateur from the end of the 18th century.
Interesting  are his altar paintings Saint Anna with Mary and ST. Thomas Aquinus and St. Francis of Assisi, the painting with figures of the saints St. Rocchus, St. Elmo, St. John Nepomucenes and St. John the Baptist round the figure of Mary and the painting of The immaculate Conception, on the altar on the left side. Over the font is the unsuccessful painting of Dunaj, the son of Ivan Rendic. In the older part of the church are steles with Croatian inscriptions. At the entrance we find the surprising holy water stoup composed of two large Gothic capitals with the vaults in the corners and decorated with acanthus leaves.
The vestibule of the church is spacious, paved and elevated, we enter it by a stone staircase. On the church building on the left is the sun-dial, very common in our town on the coast; under the sun-dial, is the sarcophagus with the emblem with the inscription and the year 1744. In the interior, in the Church assembly hall is the portrait of Supetar’s parson B. Durlindan by Tironi and a few interesting works of art belonging to the Venetian art of painting of the 16th and the 17th century.
We should get to know the decorative sides of the well, executed in the baroque manner, full of religious symbols, church sings and the joys of life (the horns of abundance).
And when we climb up the steep old way or the road, to Nerezisca, passing through the pine wood, we reach the chapel of St. Rocchus the protector from infectious diseases, which in the past frequently spread over the island. It was erected in 1682 for the health of Supetar’s populace. from here beautiful views open to the tame backround of central Brac and the Channel in front of it.
“Sacred is this silence to me and full of its precious dearness. In the morning the lovely sun awakes me, in front of whose face the blue coasts reveal themselves like the harmless innocense of maidens... and in the evening, the calm is deep, and it is a real pleasure, just before the sleep to which I am sometimes sent by a drop of home-made wine, to see the main-land coast from Split to Makarska, lit by the electric gleams which mark the Dugi Rat and the old pirate-nest of Omis... I peep through the misty veil of the night towards the town of Marulic...”
(Tin Ujevic, Supetar on Brac, Jadranska posta, 1929).
It was here that I learned why so many excellent writers kept coming to this little town at my feet and what it meant for the painters to whom these landscapes are their best works, like for example the pictures in the flaming colors of our Ignjat Job.

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