History of the Pelješac peninsula: the Ston walls, the Napoleon road and the captains of Orebić

Before Dubrovnik: Illyrians, Narona and Roman Stagnum

In the first millennium BC Illyrians lived on Pelješac, most probably the Plerei tribe, according to the Croatian Encyclopedia. The archaeologists who excavated the cave sanctuary at Nakovana write that its rituals ended in the late 1st century BC, when Roman rule was established in the area.

Under Rome, Pelješac came under the colony of Narona. Ston appears on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a Roman road map, as Turris Stagni, and the Ston municipality notes that the 7th-century Ravenna Cosmography preserves the name Stamnes. The encyclopedia lists the remains of a Roman fort on Starigrad hill and a Roman division of the Ston field that the plots there still follow. At Orebić there are remains of Roman country villas from the 1st to 4th centuries, with inscriptions and sarcophagi. The archaeologists Vlasta Begović and Ivančica Schrunk add villa sites at Žuljana (Predium Iulianum), Ston Bare and Prapratno bay.

1333: how Pelješac became part of the Republic of Dubrovnik

From the 13th century Dubrovnik wanted the peninsula, the Croatian Encyclopedia explains, for safe sailing to the port of Drijeva at the mouth of the Neretva and for the salt pans. When the land of Hum was divided in 1326, Pelješac with Ston went to Dubrovnik and the rest to Bosnia. Recognition followed in 1333: the city bought the peninsula from the Serbian king Dušan and agreed to pay a yearly tribute to the Bosnian ban Stjepan II Kotromanić.

Dušan's charter, which cedes Ston, Rat and Posrednjica to the city, is dated 22 January 1333 and survives only in two later copies (Austrian Academy of Sciences). A 2005 paper on the fortifications by A. Žmegač names the salt pans as the main reason for the purchase.

Counts and captains: how the Republic ruled the peninsula

The Republic placed a count (knez) in Ston and a captain in Trstenica and divided all the arable land of the peninsula among its patricians and commoners (Croatian Encyclopedia). A land register of 1336 records that division. On 5 December 1334, Radio Dubrovnik recounts, the Great Council created the office of the count of Pelješac, Comes Puncte.

Contemporaries regarded Ston as the second town of the Republic. In 1465 the Republic set up a captaincy in Janjina for administration and justice. The Ston municipality notes that the State Archives in Dubrovnik keep 346 books of records from the Ston chancery.

The Great Wall of Ston and its two planned towns

Right after it acquired Pelješac, the Republic built a wall from one bay to the other across Pozvizd hill (also written Podzvizd), Žmegač writes, and founded two planned towns on its protected side: Ston to the south and Mali Ston to the north. The southern town was first laid out as three rows of five blocks of houses. According to the Society of Friends of Dubrovnik Antiquities, the government adopted Ston's town plan in 1335 and added to it in 1370. Lukša Beritić dates the decisions on the streets and houses of Mali Ston and on a fort at the top of Pozvizd to the same year, 1335.

Mali Ston was walled almost from the beginning, with the Koruna fort at its southern end. Ston got its own town walls much later, in the early 15th century: Radio Dubrovnik cites a Great Council decision of 13 June 1402 and a Small Council decision of 22 January 1407 to wall the town. The Ston tourist board dates Veliki Kaštio, the outermost fort, built to protect the salt works, to 1357. In the 15th and early 16th centuries the walls, especially around the larger town, were brought up to date with Renaissance additions.

The Croatian Encyclopedia names the builders: master Mihač, Onofrio de la Cava, Bernardin of Parma and Paskoje Miličević. The Croatian Biographical Lexicon adds that Bernardin was sent to Ston in mid-August 1462 to design a wider defensive ditch in front of the town walls. The encyclopedia gives the whole system as about 5.5 km (3.4 miles) long, with 10 round and 31 square towers. The same Society names three forts: Veliki Kaštio, Koruna and Podzvizd.

Ruin and restoration of the Ston walls

By an imperial decree of 27 February 1858 the forts passed to the state property office, which began selling off almost the whole complex, the tourist board writes. Parts were pulled down, in 1874 even as part of the preparations for a visit by Emperor Franz Joseph. The town's walls, monuments and houses were badly damaged in 1991 and 1992, and the town and its surroundings suffered heavily in the earthquake of 1996 (Croatian Encyclopedia).

Lukša Beritić co-founded that Society in 1952 and was its first president. The Society has worked on the reconstruction of the walls since 1961. Large-scale work on the Great Wall began in 2003, and the walls opened to visitors on 4 October 2009, according to the tourist board.

The French years and the Napoleon road on Pelješac

Dubrovnik surrendered to French troops without resistance on 27 May 1806. In January 1808 General Marmont dissolved the Senate and abolished the Republic's independence (Croatian Encyclopedia). In October 1813, during the war of the English and the Austrians against the French in Dalmatia, an English naval lieutenant, Harper, attacked Ston with a few men from Dubrovnik and Croatian deserters from the French army and took both towns, Beritić writes. Austrian troops took Dubrovnik on 28 January 1814, and in 1815 Pelješac became part of the Habsburg Monarchy, within the Kingdom of Dalmatia.

The Janjina municipality writes that road building across Pelješac began with the arrival of Napoleon's troops and General Marmont, and that the road is still called the King's road or Napoleon's road. The Ston tourist board explains its strategic value by the complete French weakness at sea, where their enemies, the English and the Russians, ruled the Adriatic. Local people were forced to work on it alongside the French army, which is why the quality of the sections differs. The road was built in stages, and construction continued under Austria, when all the larger places on the peninsula were connected. The tourist board gives its length as about 61 km (38 miles).

For Dalmatia as a whole, an exhibition reviewed in a Croatian cartography journal remembers Marmont as the initiator of Napoleon's road and the engineers Zavoreo and Pecota as its designers. The exhibition, initiated by the State Archives in Zadar, showed the remains of a Napoleonic road on Pelješac.

Orebić, the town of sea captains

Until the 16th century the area of today's Orebić was called Trstenica, and the Republic set up a captaincy there, later a knežija (county), according to the Croatian Encyclopedia. In 1568 the Orebić family built a castle near the shore to defend against the Ottomans and pirates. In the 17th century Pelješac shipowners traded with European, African and Asia Minor ports, and in the 18th century they reached India. Pelješac shipping peaked between 1780 and 1800. Thirty-two members of the town's Fisković family commanded ships between the 17th and 19th centuries, the Croatian Biographical Lexicon records, and the town has many villas of Pelješac sea captains.

Near the town stands the Franciscan monastery of Our Lady of the Angels. The Franciscans say 1470 is the traditional founding date, while reliable documents point to a somewhat later one. A contract of 20 August 1479 between the Republic and the builder Mihoč Radišić covers the church, which he built between 1479 and 1486. Inside are seafarers' votive gifts: paintings of sailing ships. Behind the church lies the captains' cemetery with the Mimbelli family mausoleum by the sculptor Ivan Rendić.

The Pelješac Maritime Society, 1865 to 1891

The Pelješko pomorsko društvo (in Italian, Associazione marittima di Sabbioncello) was founded at its committee's first official meeting on 1 May 1865, according to the State Archives in Dubrovnik, which hold its records. Its first ships were the barques Adamo and Eva, built in Trieste like most of its fleet. In all it acquired 33 long-voyage sailing ships. After 1870 it was at its height, with about thirty sailing ships of over 21,000 tons and more than 70 captains and officers on board.

In 1875, during a visit by Emperor Franz Joseph, the society opened the Orebić shipyard Cantiere Arciduca Rodolfo on the Blace estate. On 28 March 1882 the members decided to wind the society up after paying dividends. The last balance sheet was approved on 30 September 1891, and the society ceased to exist.

The Maritime Museum in Orebić and its collections

The museum opened on 1 May 1957. It was founded at the suggestion of the art historian Cvito Fisković, who arranged its first display. The museum keeps archaeological finds from Sreser near Janjina, seventeen ship portraits by the captain and painter Bartul Vasilije Ivanković together with his letters to the Pelješac Maritime Society, and the small metal nameplates that once hung on the noticeboard of the society's office. Its library holds Pelješac captains' books, and most of it is the collection of the Šunj family.

One of the museum's maritime stories: ships passing through the Pelješac channel used to greet the town with their sirens, and everyone in town came to the windows and out onto the balconies and terraces to wave white sheets and tablecloths.

Steamships, phylloxera and emigration

Steamships ended the growth of Pelješac shipping, and by the end of the 19th century the peninsula had lost its notable role at sea (Croatian Encyclopedia). On 6 December 1891 Austria-Hungary and Italy agreed on the wine clause, which let Italian wine into the Monarchy at a minimal duty and took the home market away from Dalmatian growers. The clause was not renewed when the ten-year treaty ran out. The encyclopedia writes that phylloxera, the vine pest that reached Dalmatia in 1894, made things worse and led to more emigration overseas.

On Pelješac the vineyards stagnated in the 1890s, though they were still free of phylloxera. Jasenka Maslek, writing on the Pelješac cooperatives, places the damage from phylloxera on the peninsula in the 1910s and names the other causes of heavy emigration: a growing population, very little work outside farming and the chance to go overseas. Vekarić adds unresolved feudal relations, bad harvests and the loss of the sailing ships. From the late 1880s a strong stream of emigrants went to New Zealand, including people from Pelješac, and between the two world wars Pelješac was among the Dalmatian places that sent people to Australia. Replanting on American rootstocks gathered pace in the 1930s, but the vineyards of the Dubrovnik region recovered very slowly.

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