The coloured waterfront
Captains'' houses around the bay; walking it is the town''s activity.
K. Korlevic — Public domain · Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0
**The largest island town on the entire Adriatic**, set around a deep sheltered bay on the western coast. Its name means «little Lošinj» while its neighbour **Veli Lošinj** means «big» — and the names **were historically reversed**: Veli genuinely was the larger, then Mali overtook it in the nineteenth century and the names never changed. The cause of that growth was **shipbuilding**: in the nineteenth century Mali Lošinj''s merchant fleet numbered more than **a hundred sailing ships** working the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and the town was among the great shipping centres of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The coloured houses around the bay were built with captains'' money. Then sail collapsed before steam, and the town reinvented itself as a **health resort** after the declaration of 1892. The town holds the **Museum of Apoxyomenos**, built around a single Greek bronze. Note: the waterfront is long and coloured, and walking it is the town''s central activity.
Captains'' houses around the bay; walking it is the town''s activity.
A whole building around a single Greek bronze.
Deep and enclosed, which is what made the town a major port.
Mali Lošinj, island of Lošinj
A life-size **Greek bronze** of a young athlete cleaning his body with a strigil after exercise — a well-known classical subject. It dates from about the **second or first century BC** and is probably a bronze after an older Greek original. It was found in **1996** at a depth of 45 metres near the islet of Vele Orjule beside Lošinj, and raised in **1999**. Its importance is that **complete Greek bronzes are extremely rare** — most were melted down over the centuries for their metal, so the surviving total worldwide runs to dozens rather than hundreds, and most of what we know of Greek sculpture comes from Roman marble copies. ⚠ It underwent years of conservation in Florence, and a museum was then built for it, opened in **2016**, displaying it alone in a hall designed around it.
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