About Mali Palac – “Little Palace”

About Mali Palac
Mali Palac (“Little Palace”) stands in the heart of Selca on the island of Brač, finished in 1887 by the self-taught stonemason Ivan Štambuk–Canova and his father. With their own hands they carved every ornamental stone, every console and capital, every detail that made people call it a palace long before the doors first opened.
It was never small: three full floors plus a high, habitable attic under a great pitched roof covered in curved red-orange terracotta tiles. Before the Second World War it sheltered three families and my own ancestors at the same time.
On the 9th of September 1943 Italian troops set fire to the village. Mali Palac burned for days. When the flames died, only the outer walls and the massive central spine wall were left standing – everything else, all wooden floors, the roof, the attic, was gone.
My grandfather, born in this house and returning from the war, did what he could with what little he had: he rebuilt just enough to make it livable again and closed most of the wounds. One quarter on every level he could never finish – that part stayed open to the sky ever since. The great roof never returned, the high attic was never rebuilt, and for eighty-two years the biggest “unfinished ruin” in Selca was still proudly called the Little Palace.
Today it breathes through the same carved doorways, waits behind the same stone.
The old Aleppo pine Canova planted in 1887 shaded her and her balconies for 136 summers until it had to come down in 2023. The stone is tired, but every balcony slab, every arch, every window surround still carries the mark of his chisel. Missing a quarter and her top floor, she still refuses to look small.
This is not, and never will be, a museum piece.
It is a living house of the Štambuk family, built to outlive empires, wars, fires and time itself.
My job is simple: finish what they started in 1887, raise the high attic floor again, give her back the proud roofline she lost in 1943, close the last open quarter for good, and make sure that in another hundred years someone can still sit on the south terrace with a glass of wine and feel exactly what the first people felt when the house was new.