History of the island of Hvar

It is recorded that as early as the year 384 before our era the first Greeks crossed towards Hvar and settled here permanently. The place we know today as Stari Grad was then called Pharos and was the only settlement amid rich fishing grounds, dense pine woods and fertile soil. The Illyrians and Dalmatians living scattered over the island at first tried to drive out the intruders, but failed against the Greeks' experience in battle and their numbers. Only the Romans were able to displace Greek rule in 213 BC. They pursued an entirely different policy from the Greeks, who would gladly have made Pharos into another Adriatic metropolis. Rome pushed the original islanders east, where they had to devote themselves to agriculture. They received reinforcement at the time of the great migrations from the Slavs, who came to the island from Neretva and gave it the name "Lesna". In this period ever more farmsteads joined into small settlements on the eastern and southern coast of Hvar. In the early Middle Ages Hvar was hard fought over: from Byzantine rule in 870 to the Venetian conquest in 1420, Hvar nevertheless stood again and again, for a time, under self-rule. But since the fleet of the Serenissima needed a firm harbour in the Adriatic, it did everything to place Hvar under its protection — and finally carried this concern through. Through lively trade and contacts with abroad, Hvar experienced its heyday in the following decades: the towns were improved in their building, Venice brought more money to the island than fishing and agriculture could ever have earned, and appointed individual families to noble rank, so that political unrest too was to be largely contained. This plan, of course, failed: in 1510 six thousand citizens rose under Matija Ivanić against this class hierarchy — unsuccessfully, given Venetian superiority. The hostile parties were united in 1571 by the threat of a common enemy: the Turkish troops had, in their advance, penetrated as far as the island of Hvar and razed the towns to the ground. Despite committed but protracted rebuilding, Venice slowly withdrew. In 1774 Kotor became the region's most important harbour, and Hvar's reputation was from then on confined to its picturesque nature and its optimal climate. The island still aroused a certain interest among Austrians, Italians and Slavs, was awarded by turns now to one nation, now to another, but real renown it received again only after the end of the Second World War, when tourism began to gain a foothold here.

Since then ever more international guests have been drawn to the small coastal towns and mountain villages — but the inhabitants of Hvar have learned from the history of their home that every phase can end unexpectedly, and so people here do not concentrate exclusively on the business of tourism but preserve their independence and authenticity in that fishing and agriculture still belong to the locals' important economic pillars.