🇭🇷 Croatia · Southern Dalmatia and the islands
Korcula is one of those islands that wins you over at first sight: a tiny walled town of golden stone, planted on a headland that pushes into the sea, with round towers, red roofs and a bell tower cut out against the channel. They call it 'little Dubrovnik', and although the nickname sells it a bit short, it gives you the idea: a Venetian medieval old town in miniature, but without the crowds or the prices of its famous neighbour.
What makes Korcula town unique is its plan: a herringbone layout, with the main street as the spine and the lanes branching off at an angle worked out to break the northeasterly wind (the bura) and let the summer breeze through. Inside await the Gothic-Renaissance cathedral of St Mark, stone palaces, museums and the tower house that tradition associates with the traveller Marco Polo. And in summer, several nights a week, the Moreška is performed: a centuries-old sword dance that survives only here.
This guide covers Korcula with a practical eye: how to get there (by catamaran straight to the town, by car ferry to Vela Luka or by land via Pelješac and Orebić), what to see and what it costs, where to watch the Moreška, how to slip over to the sand beaches of Lumbarda and taste the island's native wines, grk and posip. We also set out, honestly, the Marco Polo myth, so you can enjoy Korcula knowing what is history and what is legend.
Korcula has a long, dense history. The Greeks called it Korkyra Melaina ('Black Korcula', for its forests) and founded a colony; at Lumbarda the Psephisma turned up, an inscription from the 3rd-2nd century BC dividing land among Greek colonists and the oldest written document found in Croatia. After the Romans and Byzantines, the island lived under the sway of various medieval powers and gave itself, as early as 1214, its own Statute, one of the oldest legal codes in Europe. In 1298, off its coast, the naval battle of Korcula was fought between Venice and Genoa, in which — according to a tradition recorded centuries later — the traveller Marco Polo was captured, and in the Genoese jail he dictated the account of his travels; hence the island's claim to him as a son. Venice ruled Korcula for much of the medieval and early modern period, leaving it walls, palaces and the skill of its stonemasons. Then came Austria, the wars of the 20th century, socialist Yugoslavia and, after Croatian independence in the nineties, today's Croatia. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Croatia's southernmost tip and its islands: the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and its diplomacy, the abolition of the slave trade in 1416, the earthquake of 1667, the islands of Hvar, Korčula and Mljet, island depopulation and the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991.
Read the history of Southern Dalmatia and the islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Seen from the sea, Korcula is a dark smudge of forest cut out against the blue of the Adriatic. That dense woodland gave it its oldest name: the Greeks called it Korkyra Melaina, 'Black Korkyra', to tell it apart from the other Korkyra, today's island of Corfu. From that name, Latinised as Corcyra Nigra and later Curzola by the Venetians, comes today's Korcula.
The Greek presence on the island is exceptionally well documented. At Lumbarda, at the eastern tip, an inscribed slab was found known as the Lumbarda Psephisma: a decree, dated to around the 3rd-2nd centuries BC, recording the founding of a colony by Greeks from Issa (today's Vis) and the division of land plots among the new colonists, with the names of the families who received them. The Psephisma is not only a moving record of how a Greek colony was organised; it is also the oldest written document found on Croatian territory, and it is kept today in the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb.
Before and alongside the Greeks, Illyrians lived on the island, and an even older tradition credited the first founding to colonists from Cnidus. With Rome's expansion, Korcula was absorbed into the province of Dalmatia, and its limestone quarries — white, hard and easy to carve — began to be worked: that stone, and the skill of Korcula's masons, would shape the building history of the whole Dalmatian coast for centuries.
After Rome fell, Korcula passed into the orbit of Byzantium and was left, like all Dalmatia, exposed to the swings of the early Middle Ages: the arrival of the Slavs, pirate raids, disputes between neighbouring powers. The island was coveted by southern Slavic principalities, by the kingdom of Hungary-Croatia, by the neighbouring Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and, above all, by thrusting Venice, which saw in Korcula a key stop on its sea route to the East.
Amid those pressures, the island's community took a step remarkable for its time: around 1214 the Statute of Korcula was drawn up, a body of law that regulated island life and guaranteed a degree of autonomy from its successive overlords. It is one of the oldest legal codes in Europe, and it contains, among other things, an early ban on the slave trade. That a small island community gave itself a written statute in the middle of the 13th century says a great deal about the organisation and civic awareness of medieval Korcula.
Over these centuries the walled town also took shape: a stone core on a headland, defended by walls and towers, with its cathedral, its religious brotherhoods and its guilds of stonemasons and shipwrights. Korcula stone travelled to Dubrovnik, to Venice and to half of Dalmatia, and the island's masters were sought after to raise palaces and churches all along the coast.
The most famous episode in Korcula's history happened at sea, in sight of its walls. On 8 or 9 September 1298, in waters off the island, the fleets of the Mediterranean's two great rival maritime republics collided: Venice and Genoa, locked in a long war over control of trade. The battle of Korcula (or Curzola) was a disaster for Venice: the Genoese, under Lamba Doria, destroyed the Venetian fleet and took thousands of prisoners.
Among those prisoners, according to a tradition first recorded in the 16th century and popularly accepted ever since, was Marco Polo. The Venetian traveller, who had not long returned from his long journey through Asia and the court of the Great Khan, is said to have fought in the battle and been taken prisoner. During his captivity in a Genoese jail, Marco Polo dictated to a cellmate, the writer Rustichello da Pisa, the account of his travels: the book we know as 'Il Milione' or 'The Travels of Marco Polo', one of the works that most shaped Europe's image of the East.
From that connection — the battle off the island — comes Korcula's proud claim to Marco Polo as one of its own. It is worth being clear: there is no documentary proof that the traveller was born on Korcula, and most historians place him in Venice. The so-called 'Marco Polo House' in the old town is, moreover, a much later building (17th century). But the tradition has become part of the island's identity, fed by the real existence of surnames linked to the Polos among Korcula families. History and legend live side by side, and the island has learned to look after both.
For much of the medieval and early modern period, Korcula was under Venetian rule, which governed it almost continuously from the 15th century until the Republic fell in 1797, with the odd interruption. The Venetian mark is everywhere: in the walls and round towers that ring the town, in the lion of St Mark carved over the gates, in the Gothic and Renaissance palaces of the old centre and in the cathedral of St Mark itself, carved by the local master masons.
Venice made Korcula a fortified stronghold and a centre of shipbuilding and stonemasonry. The town was laid out on its ingenious herringbone plan, designed to tame the wind; religious brotherhoods were founded that still keep traditions alive today, and a cultural life remarkable for a small island flourished. There were shadows too: plague struck in several waves, and the island suffered attacks, such as the assault by the Ottoman corsair Uluç Ali in 1571, on the eve of the battle of Lepanto, which the town managed to withstand (legend says with the help of its women and a well-timed storm).
From this long period comes Korcula's most singular tradition: the Moreška, the sword dance. Mediterranean in origin, related to the Iberian and Italian 'Moors and Christians' pageants, the Moreška stages the fight between two kings over a captive maiden, with a real clash of swords. It took root in Korcula from at least the 16th century and became the town's emblem; today it survives authentically almost only here, and it is still danced every summer. Along with stonemasonry and wine, it is one of the marks of identity that Venice helped crystallise on the island.
The fall of Venice in 1797 opened for Korcula, as for all Dalmatia, a period of successive rulers. After a brief spell in Austrian hands and in the Illyrian Provinces of Napoleon's empire — and even a British occupation during the Napoleonic wars — the island came, under the Congress of Vienna of 1815, under the Austrian and then Austro-Hungarian empire, to which it belonged until 1918. Those were decades of slow modernisation but also of crisis: phylloxera, which ruined the vineyards, and the decline of wooden shipbuilding pushed many Korcula islanders to emigrate, above all to the Americas and Australia, in an exodus that marked the island.
With Austria-Hungary broken up at the end of the First World War, Korcula became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, Dalmatia was occupied by fascist Italy and then by Nazi Germany; Partisan resistance operated on the island, and as on other Dalmatian islands many civilians were evacuated to escape the fighting. Once the war was over, Korcula formed part of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, with tourism taking off gradually from the sixties.
With the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatia declared independence in 1991 and fought the war of independence until 1995. Korcula, away from the main fronts, did not suffer the devastation of cities such as Vukovar or Dubrovnik, but it did live through years of tension, with the neighbouring Pelješac peninsula and southern Dalmatia under threat and tourism practically at a standstill. With peace restored, and with Croatia's entry into the European Union (2013) and the eurozone (2023), the island took up its tourist vocation again. Today Korcula combines the appeal of its medieval old town and its Moreška with an island life given over to wine, the sea and fishing: one of the most beautiful and authentic islands in Dalmatia, proud of its stone, its history and its legendary travelling son.