Photos

After the storm in Hvar. This is downtown Hvar, the village giving name to the whole island in the Adriatic sea. The name of the island is without doubt Greek in origin, from Pharos (lighthouse). From it the Romans derived the name Pharia. The Dalmatian Romans then derived from this Fara, and the newly settled Croats in the early Middle Ages changed this to Hvar, as the old Slavonic consonant f was subsumed by the consonant group hv. The Dalmatian Romans, under the influence of Croatian pronunciation in the medieval documents spelt the name as Quara or Quarra.

At the end of the 11th century the Italians called it Lesina, or in Venetian dialect Liesena or Liesna. This was derived from an old Croatian adjective meaning "forest", which actually corresponded to the appearance of the island at the time of the Neretljani. The eastern part of the island, Plame, has the shape of a cutting edge which gets narrower towards "the top of Hvar" and corresponds well to the medieval Venetian name Liesna which means "awl". This is what it looked like to the Venetian seamen who sailed past the island on their way to the Neretva Channel, near the massif of Krajina where threatening pirates were waiting in their lairs.

A number of other island place-names describe its original wooded appearance. For example, Velo and Malo Grablje are derived from the word "grab" (hornbeam); Gin (a name identical to that of the Polish port of Gymea) also indicates a wooded place; Vrbanj and Vrboska are derived from "vrba" (willow), and Vrisnik from "vrijes" (heather). In the 3rd century BC the Hellenistic poet Apollonius of Rhodes introduced the name "Piteyeia", which is probably de rived from "pitys" Greek for spruce, or even from an old Illyrian name for the village of Pitve.
The inscription recording the victory of the inhabitants of Pharos over the Jadasini and their allies, one of the oldest known inscriptions in Croatia, 4th C BC.
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