Lozisca has chosen its site in a very steep stone glade. The stone houses are strung one upon the other along the sloping lanes that stretch from the rather deep valley and reach to the top of the village. The stone, southern fronts are turned to the sun. They are filled with rows of little windows above the large cellar door. The entrance to the house is usually from the northern side, in the wall that is dug into the hill so that one enters the rooms without climbing up many stairs or passing through large porches. Near the door are usually the wooden stairs leading to the lofts that are elevated on the southern, sunny side, with the picturesque, two-eaved mansards where the hearth, the centre of a Brac house, used to be set. Against the walls are set the stone consoles. Those under the windows served to support wooden slabs on which figs, almonds and other products of the hard-working lozisca farmers were placed to dry. Those under the eaves held the stone water-pipes that carried the water to the wells. Everything here is just a stone next to stone or a stone upon a stone. The high, large two-storey houses and the little stone cottages up to the end of the clearing. Lozisca is a munoment to the hard reality of the Brac karst and to the strange choice of theirs, of its inhabitants’ who chose the living stone and crevices to be the foundations of their dwellings in order to make room for a garden, or an olive-grove or a vineyard on the relatively fertile soil.
The broiling heat of summer and the drought dry the leaves, burn and wither fruit that is planted and carefully cherished in the terraced earth. Nazor’s vineyard wreathed with a crown of olives is a product of Lozisca farmers. For centuries the Loziscans sorted out stone creating thus numberless piles of stone and built terraced fields by constantly snatching away from the karst patches of soil. Until the land reform the landlords possessed here the biggest and the most fertile lands while the tennant farmers laboured under hard conditions in their vineyards giving them two fifths of their products. This plunder was known as, na zlu pet, (on the evil five) and it is remembered even today.
Lozisca is a settlement on the crisp karst, a completely Mediteranean settlement, simple, gay and noisy. It privides an example of how to obtain fruits from the bare land. An when the old vines died out and the land was not fit to live on, the emigration to the World began. A village with over thouand inhabitants at the beginning of the century is left today to only 288 inhabitants. There are many deserted homes and neglected vineyards. The destroyed walls appear very weary and sad in the reflection of the sun.
History. Lozisca was not set on the site of any previous settlement. Nobody but the hard-working Loziscans could have survived on this stone in the almost smallest commune that they share with the neighbouring settlement of Bobovisca. Not far from the village, in the region of Mirace on Rat and in Vica luka (The Harbour of the Witch), on the estate of Rakela-Bugre brothers the remains of Roman and pre-Roman, Illyrian settlement were discovered. Many objects belonging to this still unexamined site are now on display in the Archeological Museum of Split. On the basis of the examined archeological items, it is obvious today, that Brac was not excluded from the now scientifically proven existence of the Greek colonies of Pharos, Issa, Tragurion and Epetion. These towns developed a vivid exchange of goods with the original settlers on the island, who in their turn, preferred to raise their forts and cairns in the island’s interior rather than on its coast.
The first settlers of Lozisca were the Krstulovic-Lozic families, who according to tradition, came over from Bovisca in the 17th century. Other families followed their example and soon the new settlement had outgrown its place of origin, Bobovisca.
Name. Lozisca signifies a place in which the vine is cultivated. One neighboring region is even now called Loziscina (neglected vineyard). Although of younger origin, Lozisca developed faster than the place of its origin, Bobovisca, and therefore is known as Velo Selo (The Big Village) to distinguish it from the older village of Bobovisca known as Malo Selo (The Little Village). Many Bracans’ under the name of Bobovisca think of both villages. The archeological locality of Mirace is a Croatized name of the Latin word Murus (the wall) and denotes walls, neglected buildings, ruins.
Monuments. The parish church with the trefoil gable was raised in 1820 in the Neo Romanesque style but was later on enlarged. The gaudiness of the front with three rosettes, the three-nave interior with a stressed apse, follow older examples with delay of a few centuries and in this way recreate many inherited characteristics of baroque.
The sharp edges and big, flat surfaces of the house fronts are in obvious disharmony with Rendic belfry from the second half of the 19th century. Overloaded with flat surfaces it is concieved within the frames of some ornaments which do not match the stone that requires flat surfaces it is concieved within the frames of some misunderstood pseudo-Romanesque conception which is in its essence anti-architectural and completely strange to the architectural tradition in Dalmatia.
The pre Romanesque chapel of Stomorica (Lat. sancta Maria) that is situated in Nerezine in the direction of Mirca, alo belongs to Lozisca. It is raised on a site where some traces of Roman buildings were found. Westwards, across the Veli dolac (The Big Valley), a very long lime dell, during the Austrian administration a big stone bridge was raised - a special curiosity on this waterless island.