In search of ‘fjaka’—the Croatian art of doing nothing

This story begins — as many good yarns do — in a bar. Specifically, Beach Bar Dodo beside Dubrovnik’s seafront, where I’m sipping beer with a friend. David Farley had sub-let his perfectly nice flat in New York to decamp to Croatia. What’s he doing with his days, I ask. Not much, he replies: “Perfecting my fjaka.”

Fjaka, pronounced ‘fee-aka’, could only have come from a land of sunbaked islands. It is, David explains, no place to go, no place to be. Allowing days to drift and blur. Back in the capital, Zagreb, they make rude jokes about Dalmatians as donkeys, but that misses the point entirely. With fjaka, the region has elevated easy living into an artform.

With no better plans, I decide to embark on a quixotic search for something the Croatians can’t exactly define themselves — but which I’ll apparently know when I find it. Lastovo seems the place to look.

Croatia’s second-most remote island after Vis, Lastovo was once a naval base and off limits from the mid 1940s until 1988 — like a Bond villain’s lair, tunnels that once concealed submarines burrow deep into its cliffs. But if Vis is bohemian chic, Lastovo represents something Homeric, almost epic. In 2003 the World Wildlife Fund for Nature called Lastovo a last paradise of the Mediterranean. In 2006 Lastovo was designated a nature park. Croatians speak about it with a kind of reverential awe.

As I approach by ferry, it seems little altered since the Ancient Greeks dropped anchor: just one house among wild, pine-scrubbed hills. We dock in a glassy bay and I board the island’s only bus — a tatty people-carrier — to reach the sole hotel, Hotel Solitudo: a modestly tarted up Yugoslav relic in the island’s only resort, Pasadur. There’s not much to that either: two restaurants, a kiosk renting kayaks and bikes, and some concrete platforms that islanders call ‘beaches’ with a straight face.

Beaches are Lastovo’s weak spot, but what a place to attempt fjaka. For a few days, I potter. I swim in water so turquoise it would make a peacock blush. I read. At night, I sit with my feet in the sea, breathing in the smell of pines as you might a fine wine, goggling at a sky boiling with stars. With zero light pollution, Lastovo hopes to become Europe’s first Dark Sky Sanctuary.

Is this fjaka though? Not really, says Diana Magdić of the Lastovo Tourist Board. Swimming and reading are too active, apparently. “Fjaka is a state of mind,” she says. “It’s not thinking. It’s just letting time pass, the sound of cicadas, the heat.” Diana perfected her fjaka after she moved to the island as a ‘refugee’ from Zagreb. “I don’t think Lastovo people realise how pure this island is. You can hear the quiet here. You can feel it.”

I know what she means. Beyond the tourism office, Lastovo Town turns out to be a semi-ruin of pale stone and forgotten secrets, where cats doze in sunny corners, weeds sprout between marble steps and doorways reveal courtyards with plants in old tomato tins. If it wasn’t for the occasional radio blaring behind lace curtains, I might have thought it entirely abandoned.

I rent a scooter — not exactly fjaka either, but irresistible. At Lučica cove I swim beneath former fisherman’s houses, their shutters painted shades of emerald and cobalt. In Zaklopatica bay I enjoy a lazy lunch in Triton restaurant — fresh grilled fish, served on a terrace that dangles above the water. I glimpse yachts, nodding at their moorings, and am reminded of a board I spotted earlier, advertising trips with a fisherman from Pasadur.

“This is my boat,” says Ivica Lešić, gesturing vaguely. In front of us is a smart gulet, its wood shiny, its sails neatly stowed — not what I had expected at all. He steps on board, then clambers over a railing into a plastic tub moored beneath, where his wife Helena waves from beneath an awning.

During summer, the couple run trips in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund. Ivica is probably right when he says they are more play than work, but they also protect fish against overfishing — the fund compensates him for earnings lost by not fishing commercially.

It’s also a lovely trip. Ivica talks about island life as he hauls up nets in a series of dark-teal bays: a bonito like a silver bullet, scorpionfish, silvery yellow-striped barbona. Then we drop anchor in an empty bay, fire up a griddle and eat: our catch of the day soused in homemade olive oil, with homemade fennel bread, the couple’s own wine and rakija brandy. The sea chuckles against the hull. Time unspools.

In the haze afterwards, Ivica says a fjaka mood can settle like Valium post-lunch: “Fresh fish. Wine. Heat. You can do nothing, just sit.”

More holidaymakers arrive in Lastovo each year, says Ivica. There’s even talk of another hotel. The question is not simply do islanders want more development – do we? Laughably ill-equipped for a conventional holiday, Lastovo poses a singular question about what we seek from a trip away. To relax, many of us might say — but do we even know how? It strikes me that if we embrace fjaka — the delicate art of Dalmatian holidaymaking — we can help preserve Lastovo’s purity, even its dark skies.

“Lastovo island is nothing special,” Ivica says with a shrug. “It’s simplicity. It’s liberation. To love Lastovo you just need to be.” The boat rocks gently. The cicadas throb. And for long, delicious minutes we lapse into silence.