The Colours, Voices and Nectar of Konavle at the 30th Book Fair(y) in Istria

Author: Vlaho Bogišić

In the summer of 1941, my grandfather Vlaho Bogišić sailed on a large Italian ship along the west coast of Istria towards Trieste. For several years now he had been the chief of a small municipality in Konavle, in fact the small country of Konavle nested on the Adriatic coast between Župa dubrovačka and Boka kotorska, when he realised around Easter that spring that the fascist scissors cut it in half, together with the rest of the world he once knew and believed in, so his office in Gruda came under the power of the Italian Duce. But the chief from Konavle was not travelling north to perhaps try to understand how to cope in trouble in Istria, the land where Mussolini had been strutting for decades. He is on the deck, tied by wire and being taken as a prisoner to the islands of Lipari, where native Istrians had long forcefully felt at home. From a historiographic point of view, Bogišić’s sin will be interpreted as significant, because he was among not that many subjects of Duce who refused to swear allegiance to him in the civil service. But had he known of that then, it probably wouldn’t have meant much to him. On quiet Mediterranean evenings of the archipelago of political lepers, he and his Istrian friends dreamt of freedom as life on the soil, among olive trees and vines. When the fascists offered him to go to Croatia freely, he replied that he didn’t know other homeland apart from the one where his vineyard was, and that it was upon them to decide whether to keep him or send him home. That was the Istrian theorem I heard from his as a boy.

Bogišić’s contemporary heir, the chief of Konavle Božo Lasić, is privileged to indeed make arrangements with Istrian friends, because Istria has remained important in our language and world, as well as the measure of finding our way around it. Lasić is also the president of the Croatian Association of Municipalities, as well as a collector and book lover. Therefore, I was not surprised to see him in the past years at the Istrian book feast, or in the gesture of maintaining his discretion, otherwise hardly relatable to his political involvement. Somehow last year I managed to connect him with the maker of this famous European cultural event, where people still dream like on the Lipari, Magdalena Vodopija, so in a blink we agreed that, after Macedonia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Vojvodina, Konavle is simply ideal for a visiting country in Istria. That was how last year, with Magdalena and Božo Lasić, I designed the Konavle event: an exhibition displaying the colours and landscapes of our mystical region, the conversations to hear its powerful literary and musical voices, and finally a tale of the wines ripened under the southern skies. In the Cvajner Gallery in the Forum itself, which as a hub connects Istria and Konavle, these two bordering lands of Hellas, the festival catalogue of Konavle will be opened by Antonija Rusković Radonić with a large exhibition of landscape colours Fairy Flight. The books are next; the Fair’s shelves will host a not so small Konavle library never before seen in a single place (monographs, poetry collections, picture books), and book presentations begin with Rječnik zaljubljenika u Konavle. The famous poet from Konavle Luko Paljetak, with whom we were trying to arrange a pilgrimage to Istria, Pula and the Fair just before he settled on the Parnassus, will get an evening of his own. Without the Poet we will speak in the Konavle dialect about the Poet, and the musical diva who swept the world with the sound of Konavle, Tereza Kesovija, will get her morning – Breakfast with the Author.

Through these straits of Konavle, especially its wine history, named after the connection of Border People, we are guided by the safe stern of the Cavtat ship in the hands of actor Nikša Kušelj, a native of Konavle himself, a poet and a musician. The winemakers of Konavle, a bit contrary to my hope of inebriating Istria with a strong, red nectar, insisted primarily on Malvasia. In the wine story, as it usually happens, boundaries are blurred, not only kept.

Malvasia earned fame in Konavle around the time when my father Ivo worked on the first large plantation vineyards in Konavle, whose grapes were processed in the plants of a modern winery in Gruda. However, the renewed patches of Malvasia of the famous variety from Dubrovnik’s ancient period do not yield enough, so people insisted on growing other traditional varieties, at least as a basis for an affordable wine distillate. Such was kadarun in Konavle, which the imprisoned chief dreamt about on the Lipari, to which he would remain to the end of his life, despite the fact that when he returned home he planted a few rows of vranac behind his house. And that there is life and strength yet in kadarun, not only in Malvasia, it has been proven in another, a bit forgotten wine connection between Istria and Konavle. The people of Konavle sold their kadarun distillate to the large Istrian industrial cellar Istravino, which used it to make its famous Premier brandy.

And in the catalogue of brandies from the heroic age of our industrial brands, which casually sailed oceans, next to Cezar, Zrinski, Glembay and Stock, the Istrian and a bit Konavlian Premium had a prestigious, privileged place. The bid quotations at auctions where is still achieves a high price, as collector Lasić will surely confirm, testify to that. Much before the winemakers of Konavle, the wines from Konavle arrived in Istria. Konavle was a regular address of ancient mariners, and even the Argonauts on their sail to Pula stopped in this terra eterica, as the young Konavlian winemarker Petar Cvirk helps us understand it, loading there several amphoras of the homemade local red aphrodisiac. The dry sugary sediment filled the walls of the vessels so thoroughly that archaeologists in Pula’s museum were stunned by this millennial, indelible print. At that time, Konavle was formerly well-known as Aesculapius’s garden, which might be the origin of the modern-day winemakers’ passion to give aromas to their distilled wines to keep them in their own, impenetrable ban of the man’s marriage with nature. For, Konavle is, like Istria, a land whose regions are alive, where, as the outstanding Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk said at the moment of receiving her great honour, “even rivers, woods, roads had a life – they were living creatures mapping our space and building a sense of belonging, a mysterious Raumgeist.”

Much more than Konavlian sausages or prosciutto, which differ from the Istrian ones to a minimal degree, the union of this world is comprised by mountains and rivers, tunnels and bridges, forests and groves, settlements that are not cities, but seem so in a historical perspective. The borderline condition is a Raumgeist, an inner, spiritual quality of the Istrian and KOnavlian man, his connection with the soil, giving him the right to be a guest, not only a host. My uncle Rafo found himself in such integral world. In his life he dealt more with words than with wines, although he taught me to drink half a glass: “We disembarked in silence and carried on without stopping. Two or three rests, climbing uphill, and at dawn we found ourselves in the field, at the end of an Istrian village. We sat, said nothing, dozed off. When the day broke, when sides and hills outlined clearly around us, the commander said – Take the flasks, go to the village, ask for some water to wash our eyes. The village was all peaceful, silent, not a sound was heard. A came close to the open door of a hearth by a little house. An old woman with a black shawl on her head was squatting by the hearth, bent down, trying to flame up the embers. Abve her head and those few pieces of wood, black pans were hung. Suddenly I was home, in Konavle, looking at my grandmother or mother in the morning as they are stirring the embers.”
And I myself got to know my first white fairies, with which Antonija Rusković is coming to Pula, by Rafo’s hearth in Konavle. Our small home library had a brochure published by the Istrian Society of St. Mohor. Under the title Istrančice, it consisted of stories about fairies and the wondrous world which still flickers even when the fireplaces seem to be put out. These Istrian fairies connected me with a world that cannot fit an encyclopaedia, which is exactly why it should be called Istrian, for every true encyclopaedia is unfinished. I had never felt the strength of my country so powerfully like when we gathered in the assembly hall of Pula’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, so many of us there, to promise ourselves to write it. Although I haven’t written a line in that encyclopaedia, I nevertheless feel it as my own, Konavlian, more than any other thing which I signed myself.