History
Premuda from antiquity to today
Roman road maps, Ottoman corsairs, a sea battle in June 1918, and 647 inhabitants in 1905 of whom a few dozen remain.
Geography
Premuda is roughly nine kilometres long and at most about 1.6 km wide, with an area of around 9 km². It sits south-west of Silba and north-west of Škarda, making it one of the outermost inhabited islands seen from the Croatian mainland. Low stone walls, olive groves and aromatic macchia cover a landscape shaped by wind and sea.
The name
The island appears on the ancient Roman road map, the Tabula Peutingeriana, as Pamodos. By the 7th century it is recorded as Primodia, from the Latin primus, the first, because it is the first island you meet sailing into the Zadar Channel from the north-west, and in the 10th century Constantine Porphyrogenitus writes it as Pyrotima. In Croatian it was Dlačnik, first documented in 1567 and still spoken into the early 20th century. The Venetian name Premuda stands in the Zadar cadastre by 1421.
Raids and hard times
Ottoman corsairs raided the island between 1559 and 1685 and carried islanders off into slavery. A lookout was organised in 1661, and two places still carry its memory: Straža and Šintinela, watch and sentinel, with Belveder south of Krijal harbour, where a fishermen’s watch is thought to have stood. A count ordered by the Zadar governor in 1608 found 27 people living here and listed the families by name. The raids returned between 1714 and 1718, when corsairs out of Ulcinj outnumbered the Venetians in these waters, and a watchtower was built, first documented in 1806 and certainly older.
A parish that wrote in Glagolitic
Premuda belonged to the parish of Silba until 1659 and has been a parish of its own ever since. Like the other island parishes it was Glagolitic, and it produced 32 Glagolitic priests from the 17th century onwards. Its registers survive: marriages from 1656 to 1718, deaths from 1662 to 1718, the confraternity book of St Kirijak from 1697 to 1812, and missals and breviaries. Islanders believe they are now kept in the parish office on Silba.
Two captains, two medals
The sea paid better than the fields. Seven islanders owned ships in the 18th century; in the 19th there was one owner but eight captains, and their graves in the church of St Kirijak carry ships cut into the stone. Pavao Smirčić saved a French vessel from sinking off Marseille around 1860 and was made a knight for it. Šanto Lovrović pulled seventeen French sailors from two wrecks off Buenos Aires in 1866, was decorated by France and by Austria, and went on to command the largest passenger ship in Argentina; a framed newspaper report of it hangs in the church.
A cooperative, a school, a post counter
For a place this small the island organised itself early. A school opened in 1867 and got its own building beside St James’s church in 1890; a reading room followed at the end of the century. The fishing cooperative founded in 1903 was the first on the Zadar islands and the fourth on the Adriatic, and the fishermen’s hall followed in 1910. Sardines from Premuda were sold as far as Bohemia. The post office opened in a private house in the early 1900s, where the old counter still stands; the family living there is called the Poštirovi to this day.
The chapel above Kalpić
Above the bay of Kalpić stand the remains of a small church the islanders call the “garška”, the Greek one, and the story goes that Greeks buried gold there. Nobody has dug. A second chapel, dedicated to St Anne, appears in the literature but has slipped out of local memory altogether.
The naval battle of 1918
On 10 June 1918 the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought SMS Szent István was struck by two torpedoes from the small Italian motor boat MAS-15, commanded by Luigi Rizzo, and capsized off Premuda. It was the only battleship sinking of the First World War to be captured on film. The wreck lies at around 68 metres and is a protected cultural monument with restricted access.
A school for a single pupil
A story that says a great deal about Premuda: for a long time the island ran its own school, for a single pupil, a boy named Armando. His mother had campaigned tirelessly to make sure that her son, too, would receive a proper education out on this remote island. And so, for years, one teacher taught one child. On Premuda, every single person counts.
Premuda today
The census counted 647 people here in 1905, the island's high point, and it has fallen almost without pause since: 320 by 1948, 78 by 1991, 64 at the last count in 2011, as families left for Zadar, Rijeka and overseas. More Premujani now live in the Americas than in Croatia. The single village has a few dozen permanent residents, many times that in summer. People still tend olives and sheep, and increasingly welcome a small number of visitors who come for the quiet, the water and the diving.
Island life
Much here still runs as it always has. A few islanders still fish, mostly for their own needs or to supply the two restaurants directly. It hardly comes fresher. Some families press their own olive oil, with no industry involved, and with a little luck you can buy fresh oil straight from the islanders. In summer, when the rain stays away, a tanker calls regularly to top up the houses' water cisterns; a refuse boat is just as reliable. And don't be surprised by all the cars without number plates: on an island with no traffic police there is simply no need for them.
The island by the numbers
Every census since 1527, and the shape of the story in one column: a village of a few hundred that doubled through the 19th century, peaked in 1905, and then emptied faster than it had filled.
| 1527 | 110 | |
|---|---|---|
| 1608 | 27 | |
| 1634 | 78 | |
| 1750 | 284 | |
| 1760 | 322 | |
| 1818 | 464 | |
| 1825 | 430 | |
| 1840 | 512 | |
| 1857 | 569 | |
| 1864 | 561 | |
| 1869 | 487 | |
| 1881 | 500 | |
| 1890 | 644 | |
| 1905 | 647 | |
| 1910 | 458 | |
| 1928 | 453 | |
| 1937 | 378 | |
| 1948 | 320 | |
| 1953 | 272 | |
| 1971 | 152 | |
| 1981 | 98 | |
| 1991 | 78 | |
| 2001 | 58 | |
| 2011 | 64 |
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