Hum: The Smallest City on Earth

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This sentence is everywhere: Hum is the smallest city in the world. From the publications of the Croatian Tourism Board, the articles in my Croatian language learning books, the posts in any travel guide for Croatia, till the board at the entrance to Hum. Whether this is true or not? God knows. I mean, define city, what is it? The presence of a post office, a bank, a bus or train station, a city hall, and a gas station? None of those things presents in Hum. It is a village, if I can call it a village after all, consists of like no more than 10 buildings including a konoba (typical local restaurant), two or three souvenir shops, a church, two rented rooms for tourists and few houses of locals. I believe that was it. But, above all, this place is incredibly beautiful! The slogan they're selling is probably not true, but I swear you'll love this place the moment you pass the main entrance gate.

The buildings are all made of this light colored natural stones that are broadly used in most parts of Istria. It's more of a ruin that is kept clean and attractive located in the middle of nowhere. The closest city is Buzet, in the northern part of Istria. But it took us really long to get to Hum from Buzet. The village sits on a small hill that is isolated from any other populated area. There is no proper road to reach it from Buzet except this one very narrow asphalt road that has no white line. However, once we arrived in Hum, there was a spacious parking lot available by the entrance of the village. Once you see the scenery from the top of the village, you would regret you have even complained about the road to get there.

We went to Hum on our way home to Bedekovčina from Pula. So this summer we had a week off for vacation in Pula. We decided not to write again about Pula since we had written about that city when we first visited it last year. So Hum was kind of our only new destination this time. Both Kiki and I have never been to Hum, so we were excited about visiting Hum. Thing is, right after we have parked the car in Hum, we realized that both of us had no cash. You know, we're these kind of plastic-card persons. We never really carry cash around, especially today when almost every corner in the world accepts plastics for payment. Does Hum? Kiki was concerned because he saw the konobar and wanted to have some drink there. For sure there was no bank and ATM. So we were like, oh well. We decided to walk around first, enjoy the nature and the old building. We saw plenty of tourists visiting. The church was locked so we couldn't check the inside, but we saw all of the buildings there. There was also an open exhibition of photographs of Hum taken by local photographers. And then we walked to the end of the gate where the souvenir shops and the konobar were, when I saw in instance that magic sticker posted on almost every today's shops' glass windows: text of 'accepted here' followed by the famous logos of Visa, Master Card, Maestro, Amex and Diners. Oh my god! It can be a ruin, it can be not having bank, post office and gas station, but plastics are accepted!

As you could probably guess, we ended the afternoon in Hum sitting in the Konobar having a plate of local cake (I forget how it was called!) which is actually somekind of soft crispy fried cookies served with icing sugar on top.

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