After a decade of service in Istria and Kvarner, in the middle of the summer of 1936, Vladimir Nazor (1876– 1949) returned to Brač - the island where he was born, spent his childhood and boyhood. He returned to a small port of Bobovišća on the west side of the island and restored his old parental home. He intensely re-experienced all the beauties of the Mediterranean landscape, its colours, smells and sounds. In his diary entries, he described and outlined this stay on Brač, which lasted intermittently from the summer of 1935 to October 1939 - what he did, what he planted and built. Here are some of the fragments.
30 AUGUST 1935 Indeed, the crazy desire to visit my port on Brač after so many years arose in me in Olympia, when I heard the buzzing of Greek cicadas on pines above the ruins, and when I filled my nostrils with the harsh scent of grasses withered under the summer sun between scattered stones. And I felt deeply, as a revelation, what was that which fed me already in my childhood and from which I have always drawn the strength to eventually do something. A summer in a narrow, wild and sun-drenched cove at the end of the island! It too is part of – ‘Hellas’. And I need it again... In August 1936, all construction and carpentry work on the renovated house was completed and, following a short stay in Split, he returned to Bobovišća accompanied by his sister Irma. The autumn and winter that would follow eventually turned out to be the poet’s longest and most intense stay on Brač, after his childhood.