Korcula's main town, with views of the mainland. Photo / Insight vacations
Korcula's main town, with views of the mainland. Photo / Insight vacations
On a fine Croatian island, Winston Aldworth learns of local claims to a great traveller.
There's much about the story of Marco Polo that doesn't add up. For starters, no way was he the first European to travel through Asia — the Romans had embassies in China 1000 years before Marco ever saw a chopstick, and his own father and uncle did such an extensive OE that they became great pals of Kublai Khan, who ruled the Mongol Empire from what is now Beijing.
There are some cynics who doubt that Polo the Younger even went to China. They suspect he wrote his journals by stitching together parts of his father's tales with offcuts from legends shared by passing travellers coming in off the Silk Road. Surely if he'd actually been there, he'd have mentioned, somewhere in his writings, something as grand as the Great Wall and something as odd as chopsticks, the cynics say.
And then there's the matter of Marco's birthplace.
In Venice, they'll tell you he's Venetian. For the Croats, he's from Korcula.
The birthplace of Marco Polo is to the Adriatic Sea what the pavlova debate is to the Tasman. The Venetian empire encompassed Korcula — a stunning little tree-covered island a couple of kilometres off the Croatian coastline — around the time of Polo's birth. Somewhere along the way, someone floated the idea that the old boy might actually have been born on this gorgeous little island. Modern Venetians disagree.
An affection for Marco isn't the only thing they all have in common.
In the main town of Korcula, the influence of Venice is strong, from the main square's graceful stone steps to St Mark's Cathedral where, from above the door, statues of a naked Adam and Eve greet visitors. It's easy to imagine you're winding your way through the cobbled streets of a Tuscan city, perhaps even some peaceful corner of Venice.
The house were locals claim Marco Polo was born. Photo / 123RF
Our guide, Neda, a specialist local host with Insight Vacations, takes us to the house where the locals have — from what I can gather very randomly — pegged their claims to Polo.
True or not, the Polo story is a lovely, playful piece of history, all set in as sweet an island as you could hope to find. Today, the Croatian Tourism Board are pretty much on their own in placing his birthplace here. Perhaps the locals clung to their piece of Polo for more than a millennia from a fear their tiny island had little else to offer history's pages.
It's an attitude New Zealanders, for so long marginalised by the tyranny of distance, might understand and it means, of course, that Korcula is a deliciously isolated and picturesque spot — on the tourist map, but removed from the tourist hordes.
The medieval Croatians were as clever as their Italian cousins. Walking through the main town that bears the same name as the island, Neda explains the logic of Korcula's town planners.
"The streets on the western side were built straight," Neda tells us, "in order to open the town to the summer Mistral wind, while the eastern-sided streets were curved to minimise the cold wind of winter." Smart people.
Cycling around the island. Photo / Insight Vacations
Another thing they have in common with their cousins in northern Italy: The food here is fabulous. In a small bakery, while tucking into traditional Korcula treats, cukarini and klasuni, I learned that the woman who ran the place has a daughter who ran off to New Zealand with a Kiwi bloke. It's fair to say the woman in the shop wasn't best pleased to discuss the subject with me, a Kiwi bloke. I found a warmer — and equally delicious — welcome at Filippi, where fabulous food matched the town's character and the views of the Peljesac Channel. To my untrained eye, the local produce and traditional Dalmatian cooking could have sat easily on Italian tables. Delicious fare.
Korcula's distinctive wine is Grk, a dry, aromatic white that makes up in flavour what it lacks in vowels. There's not a lot of it around — about 30,000 bottles a year are produced in Lumbarda, a village a short bike ride out from the town of Korcula. The vines that today produce Grk arrived with the Greeks 2500 years ago. Locals loved it and made it their own.
We sampled our way through a few at Bire Winery, where Frano Milina's family have been producing it for 400 years.
With a few samples under our belts, we wobble back to town. Our local cycling guide, Andrej, takes a leisurely loop through vineyards and past beaches where the azure Adriatic laps gently on sandy shores. We buzz through slow-life villages, where the Grk grape grows, following the stone walls that have marked out the geography of local lives for centuries, and whizz past pine forests banking steeply up dramatic hills.
Korcula. Photo / 123RF
It's idyllic stuff. It's probably for the best that Marco Polo wasn't from Korcula - he might not have got around to leaving.
