The Bay of Silence: What’s in a (Literary and Cinematic) Landscape

• In Event: Islands of Memory and the Memory of Islands

Abstract

From the tranquil bay in which the father of Croatian literature Marko Marulić composed his verses in the early sixteenth century, over the locale to which Petar Hektorović arrived from Hvar in a three-day long journey described in his piscatorial eclogue Fishing and Fishermen's Conversation nearly fifty years later, to the socialist bungalow tourist site by Union Dalmacija built in the 1980s and a subsequent overcrowded development erected from a questionable financial scheme of the new Croatian state, the bay of Nečujam on the island of Šolta serves as a prime example of what Rob Nixon names slow violence. Drawing also on Jurica Pavičić’s more recent Book About South (2018), this paper examines the mechanics of capitalist geography which violently transformed a vernacular landscape thereby erasing centuries of cultural practices and accrued spiritual meaning for local communities.

Author

• Aida Vidan, Tufts U