The famous captain Ivo Vizin

The entire Bay of Kotorska is full of stories about famous sailors, captains and great maritime ventures. Every place in Boka, even the smallest, behind the old stone walls of coastal houses, chuv

The entire Bay of Kotorska is full of stories about famous sailors, captains and great maritime endeavors. Every place in Boka, even the smallest, behind the old stone walls of coastal houses, preserves an incredible maritime tradition. One of the sailors from Bokelje who experienced the greatest fame is certainly captain Ivo Vizin (1806 -1868) from Prčnje, the first South Slav to sail around the world. Captain Vizin's feat is one of the greatest naval feats of the time he lived in. The thirty-meter-long sailboat with the sparkling name "Splendido", with a load capacity of 311 tons, eleven crew members on its journey around the world covered a total of 100 thousand miles, sailing many world seas and oceans...

The odyssey begins in Antwerp in 1852. Everything looked like just another trading trip and certainly the captain, as well as the crew, could not have guessed that they would sail around the entire globe. After Antwerp, the next port was Valparaiso in Chile and then via San Francisco and Honolulu in 1853 "Splendido" with all its small but extremely brave and capable crew arrived in the Far East. In the Far Eastern seas, Captain Vizin finds many jobs for himself, his ship and crew, so they stay in that part of the world for six whole years, sailing through the China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. On the way home, Vizin and his crew leave Singapore in 1859. year, they return to Europe, docking in the English port of Plyputh. A few months later, "Splendido" arrives in Trieste, where it is welcomed in a truly majestic manner, as befits such great men. Captain Ivo Vizin died in 1868 in his native Prčnje.

Following Vizin's traces today

Prcanj is where to start. The village he came from still lines the shore south of Kotor, and its scale — the great church, the captains' houses along the water — is the direct result of the wealth that voyages like his brought back to a settlement of a few hundred people.

The Maritime Museum in Kotor holds the wider story: the Boka fleet at its height, the navigation instruments, the portraits and the ship models that record what these captains actually sailed. Vizin's circumnavigation belongs in that context rather than as an isolated feat.

Why it mattered. When he completed the voyage in the 1850s, circling the globe under sail was still the preserve of naval expeditions and a handful of merchant houses. That a captain from a village on this bay did it in a merchant barque says a great deal about how far Boka's seafaring reached in that century — and how completely it has since receded.