Dalmatian Stone Slab Roof

Along the Croatian Adriatic coast and on its islands, traditional houses and field shelters were roofed with slabs of local limestone, in Croatian kamene ploče ("stone slabs"). These roofs used the same stone as the walls and fields around them and were once common before clay tiles replaced them.

Houses

On Dugi Otok, in the area now protected as Telašćica Nature Park, early houses were built of dry-laid stone, with one part for people and another for livestock, and roofed with natural stone slabs that needed little or no working. Later, walls were bound with a plaster of sand, lime and red soil, and ceilings were carried on timber beams. The park contains more than 200 small old houses. A typical house had a konoba, a cellar dug into the ground that stays cool in summer and warm in winter, with the kitchen (kužina) and its fireplace (komin) above.

Island quarries

Builders chose thin, light slabs for roofs. In Bol, on the island of Brač, houses were roofed with slabs quarried at a small site called Petrore, about a kilometre inland on the north coast of neighbouring Hvar; donkeys carried them to the shore and boats ferried them across the channel. The name may relate to the old Brač word petrade, "quarries". Small quarries with tool marks still survive on Hvar's north coast.

Dry-stone shelters

• Bunje are small dry-built stone shelters covered with slabs, some of them round, built to shelter people in the fields from rain.
• Kućeri are double-walled stone shelters on hilltops, built with the entrance facing away from the bura or jugo winds so that a shepherd could watch the flock.

These belong to the wider Mediterranean family of corbelled and slab-roofed dry-stone buildings that includes the trulli of Puglia and the giren of Malta.

Decline and revival

Modern roof tiles ended the use of stone slabs, and few original roofs survive outside museum-like houses and old photographs. Renewed interest in traditional architecture has brought stone slabs back in new forms.