Olives - Masline
Olives and their precious oil are an everyday staple of traditional Croatian cuisine. They are a part of our traditions and culture beyond the kitchen, too. This goes back to our ancestors and to those days when tending to olive trees, and the harvesting and crushing of olives was done mostly by hand. Today the crushing is done by fewer people using sophisticated computerized methods but the connection for us remains in the trees themselves. Many of the olive trees that you see dotting the hillsides and valleys are hundreds of years old. By simply touching one of those old olive trees you are touching a link to generations of our ancestors and the touch is a connection to them.
“We used the olive oil on everything: from fish to greens with potatoes and added it to our homemade bread. We used it to keep our sheep’s cheese moist and to nurture our own dry skin. Dispensing of the oil was monitored by our baba. Under her watch we rarely ran out of our reserve before the next harvest.”
Me with the trees. Photo by my brother ©Peter Baricevic, 2017
The roots of the old olive trees go deep sustaining them season after season. Many of the oldest olive groves today are partially or fully abandoned do to demographic changes, however many of them thrive regardless. Now, as with many things in Croatia, we have a song for this situation, because with a long coast line, many of our people have left and returned throughout our history as mariners, laborers, fishermen, explorers. Maslina je neobrana, is a melancholy song we sing, about olives left untended. The lines “Maslina je neobrana Nema koga da je bere.” roughly translates to “The olive tree is unpicked, there is no one to do the picking.” You can scroll down to the bottom of the page to hear a version of it being sung.
Photos ©Peter Baricevic, 2017
Sturdy and stubborn, a bit like our people -- it seems that even the forgotten trees, have hope! Some say that the olive trees are patiently waiting for us to remember them, but sometimes they really turn on the charm to recapture our attention. Every once or twice a decade the untended trees will yield a very rich crop, and that bonanza renews the excitement around them. Smart trees!
Walking through the old olive groves brings back wonderful memories, I can still see the pictures in my mind of the entire family participating in the harvest. I can see the people long gone and hear their voices as we did the harvesting. Men and women would chat, tell stories and yes they would sing as they worked. As children we would listen to the stories that often started as “Remember when…”, and would sing along or at least would be learning the songs. No one is saying the harvest was easy, as my older cousin reminded me. Collecting olives is very labor intensive. Every pair of hands was needed to reach up into tallest trees or into the tiniest cracks along walls. We would only pick the most ripe olives, returning to the same trees more than once to get each olive at its peak. We would often hear that “Every olive is a spoonful of oil!” as a way to keep us motivated.
Anka Bak harvesting olives at home, 2017- More on Anka and her husband Robert coming soon!
As a child, you got a basket that was proportioned to your age and size. You would proudly fill it up, then add your collection to the big sacks. We children would count how many baskets we collected, and the more we collected the more we were considered grown-up people. As the harvest season was short, there was excitement around collecting the olives. If we were done with our own trees we would often help other families to collect theirs. Our reward was the fresh fried pugacice and even some small change to buy caramels at the only store in our town.
Men and women would carry the bigger baskets, dumping the olives into large sacks periodically.The men would carry the sacks home and would temporarily store the olives in big containers/barrels covered with sea water until it was time to bring the harvest to the mill. They carried the sacks on their backs or if they were lucky they maybe had a donkey that transported the sacks in style. An entire town and some neighboring island towns would bring the olives to the community’s mill. Each family's olives were crushed individually, guaranteeing that the oil was from your own olives. The process included cold pressing and then hot pressing, until every drop was extracted. The cold pressed oil was saved for very special occasions and often it was used for children or the sick, as a special boost to their diet.
The day the mill would deliver the oil to the house was sort of like a holiday. Finally we were getting the reward for the hard work. Men carried the urns balanced on their shoulders, walking two by two to each house. The oil would be put into stone containers that every house owned. These are called kamenice (kah-men-its-eh) – meaning they were made of stone. They were specifically made for this purpose because they kept the contents at a stable temperature which was critical for storing olive oil the whole year.
“Svaka maslina je puna zlica ulja! - Every olive is a spoonful of oil!”
Thinking back, I can still see the large aprons my mother and all the women wore, specifically for the olive harvest. I can see them gathering the black fruit of the different types of olives. I can see the men, in their button down shirts and if they were lucky a hat, squinting at how much work still had to be done. I can hear the laughter and feel that autumn sun as I raced to gather another basket full of my contribution to the family and our neighbors. Some people are coming back to this way of being, even as tourists, and it makes me smile. The trees have deep roots and so do we.
