🟧 Adriatic island summer camp

A slow tourism experiment in Croatia.

Kyle Chayka: I’ve been thinking about some idea of “slow culture.” It’s not a new phrase; the “slow food” movement began in Italy in 1986. But in this newsletter, we’re trying to highlight cultural consumption that’s not just about trends, not about replicating a meme. Instead, like slow food, it’s about connecting supply chain to end product. Knowing where your experience is coming from and what its consequences are. Knowing that it is sustainable for both the creator and consumer. 

That’s why I was struck by The Field School of Hvar, a family-oriented camp on the Croatian island of Hvar, which has been a summer destination for millennia. It’s the project of Carolyn Zelikow, an American who found her way there and fell in love during the pandemic (this newsletter is a Q&A with Carolyn). The concept is that families stay on the island for 3-5 months and children are taken care of, nature school-style, while parents can cowork and hang out. Carolyn talks about “slow travel,” a better form of digital nomadism, and breaking the homogeneity of tourism, as well as building something more sustainable for Croatia. 

Of course, there’s also the achievable fantasy of hanging out with your friend-commune on a beautiful island set with ancient stone villages and having the Croatian equivalent of aperitivo at a cafe overlooking the port every night. French Riviera eurocore is so 2023.

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Kyle Chayka: How did you end up in Hvar?

Carolyn Zelikow: It was kind of a rom com. After my MBA, I had an offer from Bridgewater Associates but that was rescinded. It was the summer of 2020, I was living in a group house, no one was hiring. So somewhat recklessly, I thought I might as well travel, try and make something of this period of time. The only countries that were open were the Caribbean, going into hurricane season, Belarus, and Croatia, which is desperate for tourists. Not knowing anything about Croatia, I went there along with some other friends and stayed in a little cottage in a tiny town. It was everything I’d been missing in my life. 

I’d wake up at 4 AM every morning, hike down to the beach, watch the sun rise. Our host would bring me warm goat milk and we’d eat homemade prosciutto and sing folk songs. People were so kind and authentic; there was a real harmony with the natural world. I just thought, all of the sourdough making and dilettantism of the pandemic, this what that looks like if you actually do it. So I was pretty hooked. Then I was meeting another friend, who was more of a party person. Hvar is an Ibiza type of place, but I booked us an Airbnb in the wrong town on Hvar. On our first night there, I met the guy who is now my husband. He was very persistent that I needed to come back.

What compelled you so much about Hvar, besides the romance?

All of Croatia is really beautiful, but Hvar is special. It has a mountainous feel; it has canyons that make you think of northern California; it has this really glorious, joyful beach landscape; it combines a lot of different moods and topographies into one place. It used to be a Venetian colony, an important military outpost. Most of Dalmatia was under Venetian control in the 17th century, and then it was a colony of Austro-Hungary. There’s a long history of culture on the island. 

On TikTok I’ve heard that Croatia (and Albania) are the new French Riviera — the greater-Mediterranean place the cool kids are vacationing. Are you seeing that happen?

In my day job, I work for a sustainable development firm in Split, a coastal city in Croatia. Croatia is a young nation; it has only been around since the ‘90s. Its modern tourism industry really only has come to blossom in the past 10 to 15 years, and already you can see a pretty rapid erosion of natural assets, but also of cultural assets and social patterns and ways of life. That’s a lot subtler to visitors, but it is very very palpable to the people who live there. Croatia is a country that’s really reliant on tourism, 20% of GDP. We need to turn that firehose toward a direction that is going to be more regenerative, sustainable for Croatia’s future. 

Hvar, for example, was known for growing and exporting lavender. The whole island is a lace of gravel grids that are used to capture water and protect plants from strong winds. That whole, ethos, that proximity to the land, that ethos of hard work, the family orientation, it’s hard to defend that against easy money of tourism, so you have an economy that’s very shallow and fragile, very oriented toward a foreign culture that locals, never experience authentically — they only experience these foreigners as dollar signs. 

With rising tourism, there’s a danger that a place just becomes fully commodified and there’s nothing left for actual locals. 

It’s really dangerous. It’s completely out of control. Croatia has been protected a little bit by the fact that it was socialist country for most of the 20th century; that’s why it looks very different from the coast of Spain or southern France or Italy. It’s really been sheltered from all of that for a long time, but those guardrails are coming off. The past year, the ban on foreigners buying agricultural land ended. There’s a very real danger that in a decade or two these places will be kind of unrecognizable. 

Is the Field School of Hvar meant to be something more sustainable, both for the place and for tourists? 

We live in a time when people go everywhere but get nowhere, orbiting the world like commodities. As you commodify these exotic experiences, you also commodify your role in global cultural exchange. It loses any stickiness and any meaning. I wanted to create something good; I’m just really tired of these copy-and-paste experiences. 

The travel modality that I’m trying to call back, or I’m mining for inspiration, is actually 19th-century resort travel, which was a late-stage form of traditional spa travel, which emerged from pilgrimage travel. In the 19th century you had aristocrats, nobility, bourgeoisie, then the middle class and working class who would do these seasonal outings, often to the seaside or other spa locations, and it was a life outside of life. I used to work at Aspen Institute — that’s a direct descendant. With the Ideas Festival, you take all the people from New York City and DC who see each other anyway and put them on a mountain.

The setting is important because it can heighten your susceptibility to real connection, with yourself and with the environment and with other people. You can reconfigure your life and your routine while you’re in those places.

You have a toddler yourself. What do you have to do to set things up to support families?

We have 16 apartments in a coliving villa and 30 spaces for children in our childcare program. It’s a small program; it will never be a huge thing. Scale is not one of my goals. 

This program really thinks about the pressures that working parents are dealing with, how to find wiggle room and oxygen for them to reconnect with adult friendships, reconnect with hobbies and interests outside of the demands of career and caregiving. There’s a lot of dry powder that people have, an aspiration for connection and intellectual stimulation in adulthood that’s really unmet. that’s something you need to have community in order to achieve and travel is one way to do that. The family vacation is kind of this broken, shitty experience for parents; it’s forgettable for children, maybe we can play with that. 

Check out the Field School of Hvar website for more details. Carolyn can be reached at carolyn@fieldschoolhvar.org. Photos courtesy of Carolyn.

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Editorial note: We’re looking for more projects (who doesn’t love a project?) that explore this concept of slow culture. In the coming weeks we’ll have an interview with a small-scale winemaker in California making “rescue wine.” Send us suggestions for more! Or tell us about your own DIY project.

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OT Discussion Club Questions: 

• How do you travel somewhere without exploiting it? 

• Can tourism ever be authentic to anything other than tourism?

• Does any hint of popularity, especially in the TikTok era, immediately ruin everything?

• Where are you headed for summer vacation 2024?