Cascate di Kerka

“The course of the river Kerka - of which the inlet of the sea at Sebenico may be called the estuary - is short but sublime. Rising in the chain of the Vellebitch, close to the three frontiers of Croatia, Bosnia, and Dalmatia, it is less a river than a series of lakes, connected with each other by a succession of the most beautiful cascades, as if it were the giant staircase of a mountain-piling Titan. The last and most beautiful, though not the loftiest, of those cataracts is only two hours from Sebenico, and, with the lake above it, formed a most interesting day’s excursion. The landscape through which the road passes is of the most singular description. After ascending a hill, I found myself on a wide-spreading table-land of barren rock, with every where deep cracks in the soil, and reminding me of the descriptions of the surface of the moon. […]. I first proceded to the lake above the fall of the Kerka, and, dismissing my horse as unsafe in so precipitous a descent, I scrambled down as well as I could by a narrow gulley without a blade of grass, down which a streamlet bubbled between white chalk-rocks, until the blue lake gradually opened out before us; and on a cape and cornice of a campanile shewing itself above the mountain-side on our right, the gentleman who obligingly accompanied me drew my attention to it as the convent and island of Vissovatz, or “the place of hanging” (pp. 23-24).

We now entered the convent-boat, which took us, by a romantic passage of about an hour’s rowing, to the end of the lake, just above where the Kerka rushes over the precipice. The vicinity of the fall, the column of spray rising in the rays of the afternoon sun, and the roar of the river dashing and resounding, made me rather nervous lest the boat should approach to near; but long practice had enabled the boatmen to know precisely the point at which they must stop and disembark. We now walked along a ledge of the mountain; and just above the column of spray the lake ceased, and became a number of rivulets, flowing between green banks and trees, uniting, for the most part, just before the brow of the precipice, and then, with tremendous roar, bursting over the rocks, not in one unbroken sheet over a sheer precipice, but dashing from shelf to shelf down forty or fifty feet. Many mills are built immediately below the falls, but few were working. The unusual mass of water had caused apprehensions to be entertained during the previous night that the whole of the buildings might be swept away; the rains of some days before having been followed by some late heat, which had melted much of the snows of the Vellebitch (pp. 27-28)”.