March 18, 2018 – Tourism has changed the lives of many on the Dalmatian coast, bringing much prosperity. Things were very different just a couple of generations ago. A drone flight over the cultivated fields of Hvar.
One the first things that visitors to inland Hvar (and other islands) notice is the intricate patchwork of stone walls surrounding small parcels of land. What is going on here? was the most frequent question I was asked when driving potential real estate buyers around the island when i had a property business all those years ago.
“Winters are long on the island,” I explained, “and so we organise an annual best-dress stone wall competition. As you can see, it is very popular.”
And at least 30% of people believed me. The real reason, of course, is somewhat different, and beautifully explained by serial entrepreneur and Hvarophile, with whom I had coffee in Varazdin recently. It did not take long for the conversation to turn to Hvar. After the meeting, he sent me this video and a little explanation of life on the island as it once was. Things are a lot easier these days. Thanks, Nenad, great stuff.
Hvar cultivated land from Nenad Bakic on Vimeo.
“The people of Dalmatia were certainly one of the hardest working people in the world! Look at these remnants of once cultivated land on the hills of Hvar Island. Once those where vineyards and then lavender growths. Imagine what it looked like back then when all of this was farmland and the hills held cultivated crops.
This probably wasn’t just small stones that needed to be collected but larger boulders buried into the earth that needed to be broken apart and taken out to get to a bit of farmland.
Imagine how much hard work was needed not only to make use of this land but also to maintain it (first of all you needed to climb up to these fields).
Many of our ancestors, maybe just a generation or two ago, had to work extremely hard, they got sick (and there was no medicine) or they died early and they hadn’t fulfilled their potential or realized their dreams (although their dreams were much more modest than ours) …. Let’s be thankful for what we have today.
p.s. And here is a note I received from a witness (but this was less cruel landscape around Dol):
“I am also from the Island of Hvar, my family is from Vrbanj and had land in the plain. But my father in law is from Dol (a different village on Hvar) and was not so lucky, most of their land, which was in his time planted with vines, was in the hills in a region called Krušvica.
With a lot of pride he used to show me a place where five vines used to grow and where once was a very large boulder that his father and he broke apart manually for seven days and from that stone they made a fence around those five vines. After that for three more days they went around nearby groves collecting the soil needed to fill that space.
So, it took the two of them 10 days of hard manual labor from sunrise to sundown with a heavy hammer and a pick axe to produce cultivated land for 5 vines. They used to harvest up there for even as long as a month. Sleeping in a little field house and transporting stum on animals down to Dol. Today this whole field is unreachable since nobody keeps animals anymore and all the paths are overgrown with blackberry and bramble.”
