August the 30th, 2026 – Speleologists have explored a deep Biokovo cave that has never been archived and discovered evidence of an almost entirely forgotten craft.
Croatia’s many rugged and imposing mountains hide many secrets of which we’re often not even aware while we admire them from afar or climb them. Putni kofer writes that a very large part of those secrets is hidden underground. On the Dalmatian giant Biokovo, high above Makarska, over 400 caves and pits have been explored. They continue to be explored, so members of the Speleological Section of HPD Biokovo recently descended into a pit near the mountain hut below Sveti Jure, which they themselves described as one from their series “it’s not in the archives.”
vertical walls in a 25-metre-deep pit
As Rikardo Škorlić from the speleological society revealed, the cave in question is called Kašogijeva jama, which was first explored back in 1987. “The pit is 25 metres deep and is located 120 metres east of the mountain hut,” he explained. Not unlike other Dalmatian caves, it is a typical karst pit, with almost vertical walls and narrow passages into which only a little daylight penetrates.
evidence of ice harvesting was discovered
What the speleologists found inside this Biokovo cave surprised them, as the pit hid many traces of an old craft that was important for decades on Biokovo. It seems that it was an ice house.
“This pit, quite like many other pits on Biokovo, was still full of ice about 30 years ago and once served the local population as a source of water in the dry summer months for watering livestock, and with the advent of tourism the ice was used for storing food and cooling drinks in Makarska. Today, due to climate change, there’s no more ice left, but traces of ice harvesting remain in the pit, including the remains of beams that the ice harvesters used to descend into the pit and extract the ice,” Rikardo Škorlić revealed.
harvesting ice on biokovo was a dangerous task
The ice houses on Biokovo are natural underground pits in which, due to the specific climate and cold air, eternal snow and ice are retained. In the past, local people called ice harvesters or cutters entered the dangerous pits. They broke off pieces of ice weighing up to 30 kilograms and then transported them on donkeys down to the foot of the mountain for cooling food and drinks in the Makarska area.
Fishermen, butchers and wealthier residents all came and bought it, and for many families, the sale of ice represented an important, for some even the main source of income. Before the appearance of electric refrigerators, what is everyday life for us today was a commodity that literally had to be extracted from the belly of the mountain. These old ice houses are also the subject of the international scientific project called IceLink, within which research of the Dusa and Crna ledenica pits in the area of Nature Park Biokovo was carried out this year.
