Julia Molden continues her in depth reporting of our annual summer trip, this year to Brač and Šolta islands. Today, Monday we explore Šolta.

Of Shoes and Ships and Beeswax and Cabbages and Storms

On Monday afternoon when lessons had concluded, we all set off for Milna and found our boat and Mario our skipper, who was to take us to Šolta.  We all climbed aboard and off we set accompanied by loud Croatian and English nautical music, including Sailing and The Skye Boat Song, kindly provided by Zdravko, the husband of one of our students.  He also told us a story about the little island of Mrduja situated between Brač and Šolta.  The ownership of the island is disputed between the two.  Every year hundreds of boats assemble from both islands and attach ropes to Mrduja in an attempt to pull it towards their island.  A winner is declared and they must pay for the party that follows.  Unsurprisingly the winner alternates from year to year. The journey took about half an hour and was a much welcomed pause in frenetic activity.

On arrival on Šolta our first visit was to a bee keeper named Goran Tvrdić who told us all about the world and lives of bees, which basically boiled down to the queen eating royal jelly and sex for all, which ended up badly for the drones. The queen is fed royal jelly by the female worker bees and when she goes on her nuptial flight, all the male drones chase after her.  The “lucky” drone, who gets to mate with the queen, finds that she has also kept his genitals and so he dies.  All the other drones at the end of the summer have their wings bitten off by the female worker bees and are then expelled from the hive, where they die.  So it is a lose, lose situation for the drones!  Meanwhile the queen carries on living for three to five years and never bothers to leave the hive again, being fed all the time by her workers.

After that we met a lady called Sandra Marie Vrandečić who told us about how the islanders lived in the past.  It was a subsistence existence and, as there were no springs on the island, rainwater had to be collected.  This entailed building communal water cisterns with families sometimes having an allowance of only twenty litres per day.  The women used to go to the cisterns to collect the water and carry it back in gourds on their heads. They also carried baskets of hard baked bread, which was then dipped into wine to make it edible, and sometimes they even had to carry fifty kilos of agricultural lime in baskets on their heads.  Were they to slip and fall on a stone bridge crossing a ravine, the concern would have been more for the loss of the lime than the death of the women.

Then we moved on a family winery called OPG Balić.  OPG indicates that it is a family business and deserves support.  There we enjoyed a delicious ‘pod peka’ meal of meat and vegetables cooked in a vessel under a metal lid surrounded and covered by glowing charcoal embers to bring out the flavour over some hours. During the meal we sampled their wines: white, rose and red, and found them delicious.

While eating, a storm was brewing and it was dark and raining when Dario set off with us in the boat at top speed, trying to get back to Brač ahead of the worst of the storm.  During the journey, however, we were treated to a wonderful display of lightening  and the evening wasn’t even over for two of us, who had to drive to Supetar to collect teacher Zoran, who was arriving on a ferry from Split. The return to base was even more traumatic with driving rain and lightening, and an enormous clap of thunder just after arriving back at base. One way and another the electrics in the school had been knocked out by the storm, so that the team had to spend the night without lights and air conditioning.

You can read more about life as an islander on Šolta in our interview with Sandra: CLS: Stories from Šolta

And more about Šolta itself on the tourist board website: Visit Šolta