Our Story: Four Generations of the Duketis Family in Rovinj
Every stone in this house has a story, and most of them are ours.
We're Marko and Eleni, and we're the ones who'll greet you today — but this house was never really ours alone. It belongs to four generations of Eleni's family, who have never left this corner of Rovinj's Old Town, starting with her grandfather, who arrived here with nothing but a suitcase and an idea nobody else in town believed in yet.
Where It Started: A Restaurant on the Riva
Our story doesn't begin in this house. It begins a few streets away, on Rovinj's waterfront riva, where Eleni's grandfather Duketis — an Aegean Greek by birth — opened one of the very first restaurants in Rovinj's Old Town in 1967: a small dining room called Marina.
In those days, most restaurants in Rovinj simply served whatever the kitchen had decided that day. Her grandfather, trained as a graphic designer long before he ever ran a kitchen, thought his guests deserved better. So he designed and printed Marina's menu himself — the very first proper printed menu in Rovinj — so that, for the first time, diners could sit down, read the page, and choose exactly what they wanted to eat.
A House That Kept Changing, and Kept Being Ours
Marina is still there today, on the same stretch of riva, still run by the family and still serving guests almost sixty years later. But the idea behind it — that guests should always get to choose, on their own terms — found a second home too, right here in this stone house.
The house itself has worn many faces over the years, but it has never once left the family. In 2009, we took on a full renovation of the building — stripping it back, reinforcing it, giving the old stone walls a real chance to breathe again for another generation.
In 2015, Marko and Eleni got married, and Villa Duketis as you know it opened its doors that same year — the name they chose to carry Eleni's grandfather's story forward. From that day on, they've thrown themselves into it completely: every renovation, every booking, every small repair, from start to finish, has passed through their own hands. In 2026, they completed their latest round of care and updates, because a house like this is never really “finished.” It just keeps being lived in, and loved.
A Family of Rovinj's Own Hands
If you look at our family tree, you won't find a line of hoteliers. You'll find hosts, yes — but also craftsmen, graphic designers (it started with Eleni's grandfather, after all), shopkeepers, and tradespeople. Ordinary Rovinj people, the kind who fix things themselves, know their neighbours by name, and have spent their lives working with their hands in this town, not just visiting it.
That's who we are too. We didn't learn to love Rovinj from a guidebook — we grew up running through these same narrow streets as kids, taking our first summer jobs somewhere along the harbour, and collecting a lifetime of small memories in between: long summer evenings that never seem to cool down, the smell of the sea mixed with grilled fish and pine trees, the particular sound of waves against the rocks below the Old Town at night.
That's the Rovinj we want to share with you. Not a postcard version of it, but the real one — the one we've lived in our whole lives, and the one our grandfather fell in love with almost a century ago.
Why We Still Do This
Running Villa Duketis was never just a business decision for our family — it was always closer to a responsibility. Every generation added something: a renovation, a new comfort, a better way of welcoming a stranger into this stone house. Now it's our turn, and one day it'll be someone else's in the family.
When you stay in our apartment in Rovinj's Old Town, you're not just booking a room. You're stepping into a story that started with Eleni's Aegean grandfather, who believed guests should always choose for themselves — from Marina's menus on the riva, all the way to the self check-in waiting for you today.
Eleni is the fourth generation of the Duketis family to call Rovinj's Old Town home — and since they married in 2015, Marko has called it home right alongside her. If you'd like to hear more of the story in person — or just say hello before your stay — get in touch or send us a message on WhatsApp.
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