LIGHTHOUSES - ZAGLAV

Motifs: lighthouses, photos by D. Fabijanić and A. Carli Following Napoleon’s defeat and thereby the settling of the military-political situation on the Adriatic Sea, a favourable climate for the establishment of a secure nocturnal sailing set in. Ten huge shipwrecks in the Gulf of Trieste alone in the course of the year 1816 finally induced the authorized bodies to undertake something. The delegation of the Trieste Bourse decided upon a historical undertaking and independently launched the building of modern lighthouses on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The building of the first lighthouses (Savudrija, 1818; Trieste, 1832; Porer, 1846, and Veli Rat, 1849) was entirely financed by the shareholders. The maritime authorities (Governo Maritimo in Trieste), though established as late as the year 1850 for the purpose of regulating and supervising of all the activities connected with maritime affairs, was given supervision custody of the management and administration of maritime lighting. At the beginning of the seventies of the 19th century this was followed by the founding of their own engineering office which meant that they had taken over the responsibility of the building of new and maintenance of the existing lighthouse facilities. By that time the system of collection of the charge for lighting (lanternaggio) was sufficiently developed so that it helped finance all the port activities including maritime signalling. The charge was collected per freight ton of cargo on all the vessels that carried out unloading in the larger ports from Venice all through to the estuary of the river Bojana. Half the number of all built lighthouses on the area of the Austrian (later Austrian-Hungarian) littoral was activated in the period from 1870 to 1877. Zaglav, 44o 55’N, 14o 17’E At a distance of less than two nautical miles to the west of Cape Pernat and the coast of the island of Cres, there is the stark islet of Zaglav. It was already at the auction for the building of a new lighthouse in 1874, organized in the port captaincy in Mali Lošinj, that it became obvious it was by no means just a plain location. As a matter of fact, though the business of building for a state institution meant a profitable undertaking and without business risk, the auction for the lantern on Zaglav had to be repeated several times for the first time in history. It was only during the fourth auction that the maritime authorities managed to find a constructor who was going to build the facility, but at a 25% higher price than the starting sum. At the centre of the islet of some hundred metres in diameter a polygonal one-storey construction was raised; in its centre there is a fifteen-metre tall tower of the lighting device whose fixed white light was switched on for the first time on May 12, 1876. This ended the marking of the waterway at the entrance of the Kvarner. Originally there were three apartments for lighthouse keepers in the lantern for three lighthouse keepers and their families. After the Second World War the building was re-built into two apartments due to the reduction of the lighthouse crew. There were repeated warnings about the dangers of living on Zaglav. For years lighthouse keepers and their families from Cres used to send tens of written appeals to the maritime authorities to ask for the closing down of the Zaglav lantern and transfer the lighthouse keepers to more secure locations. Thus the brother of one of the lighthouse keepers, strongly impressed by the drowning of two lighthouse keepers from Grujica, mentioned that he understood the need for secure nocturnal sailing and remarked that the lighthouse could have been positioned on the island of Cres, i.e. on Cape Zaglav at a mile’s distance. The lighthouse keepers frequently risked their lives while buying supplies of food or submitting reports; not infrequently there were also women and children in weak boats. On account of all these negative circumstances the lighthouse was abandoned among the first ones on the Adriatic (forty years ago). Nowadays, its lighting has been automatized and the lighthouse building is in rather bad repair. Vedran Trgovčić