Medvidina cave

 A beach on which once the Mediterranean monk seal – Monachus monachus – reposed. It was written of by Alberto Fortis in his Travels into Dalmatia 1774 recording that the “local coastal people ascribe to this amphibian an overwhelming propensity for grapes and seriously claim that in the dead of night he comes out and nibbles the grapes that hang from the vine”. A number of interesting remarks about the anthropomorphic perception of the monk seal can be gleaned from vernacular lore and Croatian Renaissance literature. It was noted that it would tease fishermen into throwing fish high up which it would then adroitly catch in its teeth. Such a case of mockery was described in the 16th century by Mavro Vetranović, in his poem Remeta (a hermit friar). It was believed that none of these animals slept soundly; in his Judita, the first Croatian vernacular epic (1501) Marko Marulić says that Holofernes (Assyrian general killed while sleeping by the national heroine Judith “mostly slept worse than a monk seal”. It was thought they could be trained and they would answer to their name and that “by certain gestures they show they understand what you tell them” (Abbot Mavro Orbini who in the early 17th century observed monk seals in the Large Lake on Mljet). A fisherman from Komiža, it was thought, killed the last monk seal in the Adriatic in 1963, but in the last few years it has come back to several places in the Adriatic. One was killed near Makarska in autumn 1908 and presented to the National Museum in Sarajevo.

A monk seal taken in the waters off Cres in 1776 at the time when Alberto Fortis was studying the “mer-man” in Makarska Littoral.