The island of Bavljenac is an island located in the Adriatic Sea of Croatia. Located in the south of Zadar and in the Pasman Channel, the island of Bavljenac is also known as ‘Baljenac’. Recently, it has become quite popular due to its remarkable appearance. Seen from above, the island looks like a giant fingerprint floating in water.
Located off the Dalmatian coast in the Sibenik archipelago, this small island covers an area of approximately 1.4 square kilometers and is completely covered by a network of dry stone walls. When viewed from the air, it looks like a giant fingerprint because of the long wall lines.
Like many countries in Western Europe, Croatia’s countryside and coastline is often surrounded by dry stone walls. The island of Bavljenac was naturally affected by this situation. The walls on the island were built without mortar to hold the stones together.
Croatia’s coastline often features karst topography. Karst topography is the formations formed by the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, gypsum, rock salt and limestone by carbon dioxide waters. These formations can be seen in the form of huge rocky or cave systems.
To use this rocky land for agriculture, farmers in Croatia painstakingly mined rocks from the soil and used some of them to build walls around geometrical plans. Although the island of Baljenac is only half a kilometer long, the walls are about 23 kilometers long.
Local people are concerned about the damage to their walls. As the unique appearance of the peninsula has attracted tourists in recent years, they are trying to bring more protection to the island. The island awaits inclusion on the UNESCO Cultural Heritage List and is currently on the UNESCO Tentative List.
An Architect Allegedly Constructed the Fingerprint of the Woman He Loved
It has been claimed that the island in the photo shared by a social media account was built by an architect named Helena Isixi in the form of the fingerprint of the woman he loved. However, this claim is not true. The island with these mortar-free walls was built by the inhabitants of the Croatian island of Kaprije years ago to expand their agricultural lands.
With an area of only 0.14 square kilometers, the island of Baljenac looks like a fingerprint from a bird’s eye view due to its long wall lines. However, an architect named Helena Isixi, who is mentioned in the construction of these stone walls, does not play a role. There is no source regarding this claim, and there is no information on the internet about the architect named “Helena Isixi”.
