25-26 October
Karanac, Croatia
Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Slovenian are all closely related languages, although they have different vocabularies and some differences in grammar and pronunciation. They’re not much help if, like me, you’re familiar with the Romance languages. I don’t understand a word. I can’t even read it properly.
For reading, this is the land that vowels forgot. But not to worry because sometimes R is a vowel. So it’s A, E, I, O, U and sometimes R. There is no Y in Croatian. Examples are Mount Srđ overlooks Dubrovnik, and Trg means a public square.
Also, the letter J is always pronounced like a Y. And then there are three ways to pronounce the letter C.
- C is pronounced like “ts”. So here we are in Karanac (roughly, “Karanats”), and one of our hosts is Goca (roughly, “Goatsa”).
- Č (C with a caron) is pronounced like the “ch” in church.
- Ć (C with an acute accent) is similar to Č, but softer. I’ still can’t hear the difference between this one and Č.
So the main square in Zagreb, Trg bana Josipa Jelačića, is roughly pronounced “Terg bana Yosipa Yelachicha”. Easy, right?
One of the features of all OAT trips is a “day in the life”, when you get to see how some locals live. We spent the day with the Sklepić family on their small farm in Karanac, Croatia, near the borders with Serbia and Hungary in the Baranja plains. Did you pronounce all that properly?
It was a fascinating day. The village, with a population of about 800, consists largely of small farms, each occupying roughly two acres. The typical property has about 15 metres of frontage on the main road and stretches back some 400 metres. Apparently, when the Austrians established the farms a few centuries ago, taxes were calculated on road frontage. The result was a collection of long, narrow properties.
The village operates largely on a barter system. Our hosts are seventh-generation farmers: Denis, affectionately known as “Denis the Menace”, his wife Goca, and their 23-year-old son Steven. They keep chickens, geese and quail, and grow their own vegetables. They make sweet and hot paprika powder, pickle just about everything, produce cheese, and have a smokehouse for preserving food. They also have plenty of eggs. They now have gas, but traditionally their ovens were wood-fired.
On our first evening, we had dinner at a neighbour’s house. His wife was working, so he and their six-year-old daughter looked after us. I was expecting a harrased Dad to serve reheated frozen pizza, but it turned out that he makes award-winning sausages. So much for my assumptions!
Meanwhile, back at the farm, we had helped make two blocks of cheese from whole milk and rennet, adding garlic and dill to one of them. Breakfast the next morning was fresh eggs, the cheese, fry bread, regular bread and an assortment of homemade jams. Lunch was bean goulash.
They had their patter down – it was both fun and funny to particpate and watch in the preparation of meals. They work very hard – they were responsible for 3 meals and an overnight stay for 14 guests plus our guide and driver in 12 rooms that they had renovated for OAT. This is their busy season with back to back visits of groups every day
As I sat in their dining room, I realised that virtually everything around us had been made by someone in the family or elsewhere in the village — the furniture, the decorative stencilling on the walls, and, of course, the food. People grew things, made things, preserved things and traded with their neighbours. They even had pear brandy that the Dad with the sausages had made.
It was a remarkably self-sufficient way of life, so different from our own. Simple, practical and deeply connected to the neighbours around them. There was something rather appealing about it.
