HOUSE GAVRAN-KAPETANOVIĆ

This house (Kuća Gavrankapetanovića) is the largest and most beautiful in Počitelj. It drowns in the mass with a stone wall, a whitewashed clay cob floor and a limestone slate roof. But it can be identified by the row of nine large windows in the façade: two series of three round-headed windows on the sides and three rectangular ones in the central corbelled part. It was erected between the 16th and 17th centuries for the most powerful family in the region, the Gavran-Kapetanović, whose name is composed from the words gavran (crow) and kapetan (captain). Abandoned from the twentieth century, the house was restored by the Yugoslav state in order to create the International Art Colony of Počitelj, active from 1961 to 1975. Recently, the place is again used as an artists' residence every year in June. It is a residential complex consisting of a main building and two other small houses. Mixing Mediterranean and Ottoman architecture, we find elements common to both cultures (round chimneys, slate roofs). But the stone walls and the widely separated windows evoke the houses of Dalmatia. The hip roof and the corbelled windows are typically Ottoman. The rooms and the interior courtyards are marked by an oriental division between the spaces reserved for the men (selamluk) and those for the women (haremluk).