He remembered that on his first Camino, after two weeks of walking four kilometers per hour, he was taken in a car to a nearby village for Mass. “I was suddenly at 80 kilometers per hour… and I started to think that our bodies and our minds are designed to live four kilometers per hour, not 100 kilometers per hour the way we live with emails, phones, messages, tasks, jobs, responsibilities — it’s simply too much.”
On the Way of St. James, Prazen said, “you live very natural, you eat what you eat, you sleep what you sleep, you walk, you have very simple tasks, just get up, start walking from one point to the next point. And it’s so mentally refreshing, so cleansing.”
The experience of God
For Prazen, the Camino is also a religious experience. He has witnessed many people who began walking as atheists or as tourists and who ended up as pilgrims and believers.
The Camino of Santiago is “one way to help bring people to God, a way which doesn’t act as a structure or an instruction, but which helps people find their own path, to come to their conclusions,” he said.
Prazen shared that a Danish man gave him this testimony a few years ago. “He said, ‘I am an atheist, and when I started to walk, I heard that a lot of people on the Camino have spiritual experiences, but I decided that was not for me. This attitude lasted three days… after three days I started talking to God.’”
Underlining the “huge spiritual hunger amongst the pilgrims” and convinced that “every individual yearns for the Gospel values,” Prazen said he wishes there were more initiatives by parishes to offer spiritual content and formation along the routes. He thinks simple gestures can be powerful.
Camino Croatia events
Besides providing support to people who want to walk the Camino Croatia, the Confraternity of St. James also wants to encourage the initiatives of the European Federation of St. James to revive the routes to Santiago across the continent.
In October 2023, the confraternity presented the entire Camino Croatia project to the European Parliament in Brussels. “The Camino is the first European cultural route proclaimed in 1997. It’s a way to promote the common European heritage and European identity,” Prazen explained to CNA.
This year, from May 2–5, the Adria Camino Festival, a major international event, will take place in Pula, a city in Croatia. Lecturers will come from many European bodies — the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Federation of St. James, and many Camino institutions. The festival participants will also attend the world premiere of a new film about the Camino called “‘The Way, My Way” by Australian filmmaker Bill Bennett.
Prazen said the Croatian Confraternity of St. James still has much to do.
“Despite the fact that Camino roads are marked all over Europe, there are not many people walking those roads. For example, in Austria there [are] about a thousand annually, in Slovakia approximately 1,200, in Germany 17,000 — which is few for a country that size,” Prazen said.
In Spain, the official statistics are more than 400,000 pilgrims in 2023. However, “these statistics only count the people who arrive in Santiago, while a lot of people walk a week, a portion of the Camino, and continue the year after,” Prazen explained. “Realistically, it’s close to 1 million annually in Spain and maybe 30,000 across all other European countries.”
Prazen believes these numbers can grow. “The potential is much greater,” he said.
Emma Silvestri is a freelance writer in Europe.
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