| Groznjan - Buje |
| Istria |
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Eight kilometres west of the Mirna Valley crossroads, a side-road darts up towards GROŽNJAN (Grisignana), another hill village which was given a new lease of life when many of its abandoned properties were offered to artists and musicians as studios. There's also a summer school for young musicians, the Jeunesses Musicales Croatia (Hrvatska glazbena mladeži), many of whom take part in outdoor concerts organized as part of the Grožnjan Musical Summer (Grožnjansko glazbeno ljeto), which takes place every August. Indeed high summer is the best time to come, when most of the artists are actually in residence and a smattering of galleries and gift shops open their doors. Outside this time, Groinjan can be exceedingly quiet, but it's an undeniably attractive spot, with its jumble of shuttered houses made from rough-hewn, honey-brown stone, covered in creeping plants. Standing at the centre of the town is the Church of St Vitus and St Modestus (Crkva svetog Vida i Modesta), a largely unadorned eighteenth-century affair which harbours a much older pair of choir stalls, each carved with exuberant floral squiggles, and a lively modern altar painting of martyrs Vitus and Modestus being thrown to a collection of snarling felines. Slightly downhill from here, the graceful arches of a Renaissance loggia form one side of a tiny, gently sloping square, which looks out on what used to be the main town gate. Nearby battlements command superb views of the surrounding countryside, with Motovun perched on its hilltop to the southeast, and the ridge of Mount Učka dominating the horizon beyond it. Unless you have your own transport, Grožnjan is difficult to get to: catching a Buzet-Buje bus as far as the hamlet of Bijele Zemlje, then walking uphill to Grožnjan via a signed minor road (3km), seems to be your best bet.
Buje Proceeding northwest from Grožnjan towards the Slovene border, you'll pass through the much larger town of BUJE (Buie), its old quarter piled up on a hill with patches of newer development below. Buje was known as the "spy of Istria" for its hilltop site, and still commands an invigorating panorama, the cobbled streets looking out over fertile fields to the distant sea.The town ramparts, dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, enclose a warren-like medieval centre which spreads uphill from the main road. Just down from the old town gate, the Ethnographic Museum (Etnografska zbirka; summer Mon–Sat 9am–noon & 5-8pm), displays a musty collection of kitchen utensils, wine presses and hand-operated looms. Roughly opposite, the Church of the Madonna of Mercy (Crkva majke milosrda) contains a fine collection of Baroque paintings, including a series of eight bible scenes by eighteenth-century Venetian painter Gasparo Bella Vecchia. From here, alleyways wind uphill to the parish Church of St Servolo (Crkva svetog Cervula), built in the sixteenth century on the site of a Roman temple – bits of salvaged Roman masonry can still be seen poking out of the church's unfinished facade. |
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