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Our Heritage
Centuries ago, our Heritage Villa stood as the heart of family life, where every moment revolved around the family and nature. From tending to the fields and gardens to caring for the animals, crafting wine and harvesting olives. Each day was a blend of hard work and affection, balancing with the rhythms of the earth.
Today, as the sands of time shift, our ancestral home bids farewell to the echoes of hard work and embraces a new chapter of tranquility and relaxation. No longer a stage for the effort of generations past, it now emerges as a paradise, where guests can enjoy in the gentle embrace of nature and seek inspiration in the whispers of history. Welcome to our Heritage Villa Laurel, where the legacy of labor transforms into a culture of relaxation.
Heritage Villa Laurel is one of the few houses in the village and its surroundings that has retained its originality and traditional features. The houses were mostly single-story or two-story rectangular buildings, with simply shaped facades finished with smooth plaster, topped with gable roofs covered with roof tiles, with chimneys of variously shaped crowns.
Traditionally designed openings included doors mostly made of solid, massive wood, and relatively small, narrow, double-hung windows closed with wooden shutters.
The central place, not only in the kitchen but also in the entire house, was the "ognjišće" (open hearth), which remained in use until the mid-20th century. In some occasions, a bread oven was built on the wall next to the hearth, in a protruding console (facade projection), to minimize heating of the house in the summer period. Sometimes the entire hearth was detached from the living space by a "tornica" (rectangular or semicircular projection on the facade of the house where the hearth was located).
In addition to agricultural and residential buildings, several "guvna" (threshing floors), circular agricultural elements used for threshing or beating grain, have been preserved. They were made of stone, using dry stone wall technique, with earth or stone paving in the center. It is located in open space, less commonly in agricultural buildings.
On the threshing floor, grain is threshed manually (with a flail) or by using animals (horses, cows, donkeys, etc.), which can be tethered to a pole in the center of the threshing floor (a stake).
In villages in the hinterland of the Adriatic, the threshing floor was also a place for social gatherings and was used, among other things, for dancing.
The villa is surrounded on all sides by a dry stone wall. It is a construction created by stacking stones one on top of the other, without using binding materials. In addition to sometimes using dry earth, dry stone walls play an important role in preventing landslides and floods, as well as in combating erosion, improving biodiversity, and creating adequate microclimatic conditions for agriculture.
The stability of the structures is ensured by careful selection and placement of stones, and precisely because of its specificity, the skill of dry stone wall construction received permanent protection as an intangible cultural heritage of the Republic of Croatia in December 2016.
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia made a decision declaring the skill of dry stone wall construction as an intangible cultural heritage and included it in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia. Shortly thereafter, on November 29, 2018, dry stone walling was also included on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity.