roots to self
Meet our hosts
Tatjana Braĉanov
The woman who walks people back into themselves
Some people calm you the moment they enter the room. Tatjana is one of them. She carries a kind of grounded, effortless strength — the kind that doesn’t announce itself, yet makes everyone around her breathe a little deeper, stand a little taller, and feel a little safer in their own body.
Tatjana has been teaching yoga and meditation since 2007, but to describe her only as a yoga teacher would miss the point completely. She is a Zen yoga practitioner, a Qigong guide, a prenatal yoga mentor, a doula, a Thai massage therapist, a mountain guide, a rescuer, a barefoot philosopher, and a woman whose life reads like a map of landscapes — inner and outer.
In 2019, she walked the entire 1,300 km White Line of the Via Dinarica alone — connecting more than 170 mountain peaks through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania.
No logistics team. No support car. Just Tatjana, the mountains, and 68 days of listening to her breath and the world. She is the first woman from Croatia and Eastern Europe ever to do it solo. This tells you everything you need to know about her resilience, her intuition, and her relationship with nature.
Her work comes from that place: the body that knows effort and ease; the breath that knows storm and stillness; the mind that knows fear, fatigue, and breakthrough.
Tatjana teaches Zen yoga in Šibenik — a gentle but powerful practice rooted in the Chan Buddhist tradition: bring the body into order, bring the breath into order, bring the mind into order. She blends classical Hatha elements with Chinese Daoyin and Qigong, creating a practice that is as physical as it is meditative, as precise as it is compassionate. When she’s not guiding a class, you’ll find her outside — usually barefoot — or in hiking shoes leading groups along the trails of Šibenik-Knin and Split-Dalmatia, or practicing Shinrin-Yoku (forest bathing), where she uses silence, scent, and sensory focus to help people reconnect with the simplest truth: that nature is the original healer.
Most of all, Tatjana has an ability that no certificate can teach: she helps people come back to their bodies — not by effort, but by trust.
When you practice with her, you don’t just stretch.
You soften.
You remember your strength.
You remember your breath.
You remember yourself.
Gracija Požar
The woman who lets horses tell you the truth
Some people learn life through books.
Some through travel.
Gracija learned it through horses.
She grew up in the hills above Šibenik, left for Zagreb to work in costume design, and eventually returned home to what felt truer than anything else — the quiet companionship of the animals she had known since childhood. Today she is a Croatian horse breeder and riding instructor who, together with her husband, runs OPG Gracija Požar, a horse-breeding farm in Oklaj known as Promino Horse Breeding. She is also the founder of the equestrian club Grabarije-Knin, a place where children, adults, locals, and visitors come to learn, heal, and reconnect.
Standing beside a horse, the truth becomes simple. Horses sense tension, openness, fear, calm — and mirror it back without judgment. One touch, one shared breath, and suddenly you understand more about yourself than hours of talking could reveal. This is the world where Gracija works: gently, intuitively, with a grounded strength that makes your whole body exhale.
At NovaVis, she guides a slow and deeply human encounter with horses — grounding, gentle touch, simple movement, and quiet creative reflection — offering a few precious hours where presence returns, emotions soften, and your inner voice becomes clear again.
With Gracija, horses don’t fix you.
They meet you.
And that meeting often becomes the beginning of something new.
Mirna Milkovic
Where mountains, trees, and human souls meet
Mirna is one of those rare people who feels more at home under a pine canopy than under a ceiling.
A certified mountain guide, alpinist, fitoaromatherapist, chemist, and medical masseur, she carries a whole world of knowledge in her hands. But her real gift is something you cannot certify: an instinctive ability to bring people back to themselves through nature.
For years she lived in Italy, designing beautiful things — until she realised that the people around her were becoming strangers to their own bodies, their own breath, their own roots.
So she did something extraordinary: she walked away from the noise and went back to Croatia, back to what her mother taught her as a little girl — how to really see a tree, how to know a plant by its scent, how to listen to the forest with your skin.
Today, Mirna works with people who are very sick and with people who are simply exhausted — the ones sprinting through life like frantic rabbits, craving the simple truth of feeling bark against their palm instead of a phone.
She walks with groups and individuals through the forests she knows like family. She distills the soul of plants into her own line of aromatherapy cosmetics. She cultivates fields of lavender near Zadar, where bees hum and the air itself feels therapeutic.
When you meet Mirna, something quiet shifts inside you.
You slow down.
You breathe differently.
You start recognising yourself again — in the scent of sage, in the softness of moss, in the steady presence of an old oak.
Mirna won’t just guide you through nature.
She guides you back to your nature
Tatyana Laska
Where art becomes a conversation
Tatyana is a monumental painter and mosaic artist with a rare ability to turn any space — and any moment — into something meaningful. Her presence is calm, grounded, and quietly powerful: the kind of presence that makes you exhale without noticing.
She is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at St Petersburg State University, with decades of experience in teaching, research, restoration, and international exhibitions. Her work ranges from intricate mosaics for sacred spaces to playful clay sculptures created together with her son. She is equally at home in academic art history, traditional craftsmanship, and experimental contemporary practice.
What defines her most, however, is not her professional journey but the way she meets people.
If you arrive scattered or overwhelmed, she will simply clear a corner of the table, offer you a brush, a piece of clay, or a moment of silence — and stay next to you until something inside you settles.
Her home has always been a studio, a refuge, and a place for honest conversations. Students, friends, and guests come to paint, argue about ideas, ask difficult questions, or sit quietly next to a canvas coming to life.
At Novavis, Tatyana brings her lifelong belief that art is not a performance, but a dialogue — a way to process, explore, and reconnect with yourself.
In her workshops, you are not asked to “be artistic”; you are invited to notice what happens when your hands start to shape color or form.
With her, creativity becomes a gentle path back to clarity, presence, and inner steadiness.
Maria Clarke
Breathing life, one frame at a time
Maria is the kind of person who doesn’t wait for life to settle before she steps into it. She walks toward new possibilities with her camera in hand, noticing what others might pass by. Give her an unfamiliar city, a quiet forest path, or the soft light of an ordinary afternoon, and she will find beauty in it — gently, instinctively. Photography, for her, is not just a craft; it is a way of breathing, of slowing down, of finding calm in the middle of everything.
Her professional life has taken her far from home. She has lived and worked across countries as a visual and brand designer, web designer, and photographer — always drawn to the question of how we see. Her work blends story, emotion, and light, and much of what she carries from these years lives in small moments behind the lens: glimpses of connection, resilience, and quiet truth.
But the journeys that shaped her most were not on a map. In a single year, she lost her father, supported her mother through cancer, navigated a divorce, and moved with her toddler from Taiwan back to the Netherlands. Recently, she faced her own diagnosis — triple-negative breast cancer — and walked through a year of treatment. Instead of turning away from the world, she did something quieter and braver: she kept noticing the light.
Photography became her anchor — a way back to herself. Through the lens she found focus, softness, and gratitude, not by denying difficulty but by seeing it clearly and staying open to beauty. Her images are traces of healing and presence, reminders that hope often begins with simply paying attention.
What defines her is steady perseverance, warm optimism, and a hands-on spirit that rises again and again. She believes that life becomes richer when we create together, help each other, and share what we discover. Sit with her, and photography becomes more than an image — it becomes a way of seeing yourself, and the world, with gentler eyes.
Ivo Matošin
The keeper of hills, stories, and quiet afternoons
Some hosts guide you through emotions.
Ivo guides you through the land itself.
He is the owner of Matošin Winery, a small family estate perched high on a hill above the villages of Drniš and Oklaj. From the veranda, the world opens wide — olives to one side, figs to the other, vineyards stretching out between them, and just behind the next rise, the soft promise of the sea. It’s the kind of place where time slows down without asking your permission.
Ivo is a simple man in the most beautiful sense of the word: pragmatic, grounded, unmistakably Croatian in his “polako” way of moving through the day. He has stories — about his great-grandfather who crossed the ocean to work in America a hundred years ago, about the family’s return, about harvests, storms, neighbours, and local legends. He tells them without embellishment, as if stories were just another kind of fruit growing on his land.
He has stories — about his great-grandfather who crossed the ocean to work in America a hundred years ago, about the family’s return, about harvests, storms, neighbours, and local legends. He tells them without embellishment, as if stories were just another kind of fruit growing on his land.
Together with his daughter, he runs the winery and tends to the olives and figs. There is no rush, no showmanship, no marketing spin. Just a man, his land, and the glass of wine he pours for you with the quiet pride of someone who shapes his life with his own hands.
The veranda at Matošin Winery is simple — a few wooden tables, shade, a breeze — yet it carries a kind of magic that feels almost literary. Something about it recalls the world of Gabriel García Márquez: slow afternoons, soft voices, heat on stone, small places that hold entire universes.
At NovaVis, Ivo doesn’t offer a “session.”
He offers an atmosphere — a moment to pause, sip something grown from the soil beneath your feet, listen to a story, and feel what it means to be rooted.
Not profound in theory, but profoundly human in practice.
