A somewhat sweet-and-sour story of the last builder of wooden ships on Korčula.
Tanja Giovanelli wrote last year about Marin Šale for Slobodna Dalmacija.
He says that he’s the last person on Korčula who still knows how to build a wooden boat from the scratch. He says that shipbuilding is no longer his job, or much of a pleasure, but it’s the love of his life and he’s been doing it since he was 13. Now he’s in his mid-eighties, and still occasionally buys old wooden boats, that need a bit of work, a bit of love by the hands of the person who has the knowledge and the skills needed to fix the wooden boat. Marin Šale was one of many such people on the island, but these days, almost all of them are gone. Barba Marin (uncle) says that there’s a youngster in Lumbarda who would know how to fix an old wooden boat, but that he probably wouldn’t know how to make one.
In his workshop in Žrnovska Banja barba Marin has built over 130 boats in the past 50 years, since he left the shipyard where he worked. He’s had the oportunity to see first-hand the changes that have happened to the old craft, as when he started working they had to create all 500 elements of a boat by hand, and these days he has the machines to help him with it.
One of the items he holds dearest are “buške” (please don’t hold it against me that I have no idea what they’re called in English. I’ve never heard that word in Croatian before, and I know close to nothing of English ship-building vocabulary, so there’s no way I can translate that). They are the templates used to create the basic shape of a boat, and barba Marin is not quite sure how they made their way to Korčula and his shop. Some people say that they came from Syria, but others say that it’s possible they were made on Korčula as well. One notable thing about “buške” from Korčula is the story of grave betrayal: a member of a famous Korčulan family Filipi was, supposedly, chased away from Korčula (not clear why exactly), so he went to Betina on the island of Murter and took his buške with him. Barba Marin says that this is the story of how shipbuilders on Murter got their head-start. These days, barba Marin’s buške on Korčula don’t have great prospects: he says that there’s no-one there to inherit them after he passes. He has no sons, his daughters are not interested in shipbuilding at all. He says that he doesn’t feel like he owes anyone anything in terms of passing his knowledge to someone else, and that building of wooden ships is a thing of the past, as new materials, especially plastics, are taking over and even his wooden boats are being covered in plastics to make them last longer.
Toni Lozica, whom you might remember from an earlier article on Total Korčula, also purchased his sailing boat from barba Marin, and he’s also had it protected with plastics. He sees the future of wooden boats only for tourism purposes, but it’s unclear if anyone will continue the tradition after barba Marin is no longer able to build boats.
