Hum
"Hum has twenty people and has never needed more. I spent an afternoon there and understand completely."
The sign outside the town gate lists the population. The number changes, apparently, when someone is born or moves away or dies — the mayor updates it personally. The day I visited it read twenty-three, though two people I asked gave me different numbers, which probably says something about both the precision of the count and the nature of a town where everyone knows everything about everyone else.
Hum occupies a ridge in the central Istrian highlands, connected to its nearest neighbour Roč by seven kilometres of road along which the sculptor Želimir Janeš erected the Glagolitic Alley in 1977 — twelve monumental sculptures referencing the Glagolitic script, the alphabet invented by ninth-century Slavic missionaries that was used in Istria longer than anywhere else in Europe. The road between the villages is itself a kind of outdoor museum, though a strange one: the sculptures emerge from the landscape at intervals, massive and weathered, in a setting so quiet that you can hear the grass between them.
Hum itself is roughly what you imagine the world’s smallest town might be: a gate, a main street approximately forty metres long, a church of St. Jerome with twelfth-century frescoes in the apse that were painted by someone who didn’t know their work would still be there nine hundred years later, and a konoba that serves biska. Biska is mistletoe brandy — the local spirit of the region, made from the mistletoe that grows on the oak trees of the surrounding forest, infused into grappa and left to do whatever it does for several months. It tastes medicinal and sharp and warm in a way that spreads immediately from the stomach. The proprietor of the konoba poured it without being asked and watched me drink it with the mild satisfaction of someone who has seen this moment repeated many times.
The silence in Hum is not merely the absence of noise. It’s something more deliberate — the silence of a place where the pace of life is genuinely slower, not as a tourist amenity but as a basic fact of how twenty-three people live on a hill surrounded by oak forest. I sat at a table outside the konoba for perhaps an hour, drinking a second biska I didn’t need, and the only sounds were wind in the chestnut tree above me and, at one point, a rooster from somewhere I couldn’t locate.
The town has been continuously inhabited since at least the eleventh century, when it appeared in documents as Cholm. The walls and gate are medieval. The church has been there since at least the twelfth century. Whatever economic or demographic logic would have emptied this place long ago failed to operate with its usual efficiency here, and the result is a living — barely, defiantly — town that has refused to become a ruin on a hill. That refusal feels like the most Istrian thing about it.
When to go: Any time, honestly, since the place is the same in all seasons. Autumn is the most atmospheric — the oak forest colours around the Glagolitic Alley road and the biska tastes right against cold air. Sunday mornings in spring, when the occasional Croatian family drives out from Pazin or Rovinj to walk the Glagolitic road and eat at the konoba, give the place a quiet sociability that’s different from the summer tourist traffic and more revealing.