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| Getting high on oysters |
Here are some of my photos, with the NY Times story and pics below.
The story mentions the famous wall. A useless wall if you look at it. A folly of a wall. Tell Trump.
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| The wall to nowhere. |
Croatia Dispatch
Oysters Lead Lives of Excitement and Danger. Especially in the Balkans.
Bode
Sare, the owner of highly regarded seafood restaurants in Croatia (and a
former weapons smuggler), champions locally grown oysters.CreditZoran Marinovic for The New York Times
By Marc Santora
MALI STON, Croatia — “An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life,” M.F.K. Fisher observed in her classic book about them, “full of stress, passion and danger.”
The oyster, in other words, fits right in with the beleaguered Balkans.
In
his 62 years in this tumultuous region, the life of Bode Sare has been
at least as eventful as an oyster’s. Mr. Sare has been a partisan
warrior, a weapons smuggler, a cafe owner and a prisoner (twice).
Now,
as the owner of highly regarded seafood restaurants in Croatia, he
champions locally grown oysters, and is part of a collective of 75
farmers that tends oyster beds in Mali Ston Bay, part of the Adriatic
Sea along the southern Croatian coast.
One
early morning, as a mist shrouded the ancient wall that snakes around
the hills overlooking the town of Mali Ston, Mr. Sare’s son, Tomislav,
guided the family’s boat past the plastic markers bobbing in the
shimmering blue waters and marking the collective’s oyster beds.
He
stopped at one floating pontoon to pluck a string of European flat
oysters, known as Ostrea edulis, from the water. He quickly shucked a
dozen, topped them with a touch of lemon and smiled.
“Be careful, it is true what they say,” he said. “There is a reason Croatians have big families.”
The
cultivation of oysters here stretches back centuries, to the days of
Roman rule. Through wars and political upheaval, the harvesting may have
been disrupted, but it never ended.
80 miles
SLOVENIA
Zagreb
CROATIA
BOSNIA AND
HERZEGOVINA
Neretva
River
Split
Detail area
ITALY
Bosnia and
Herzegovina
Mali Ston
Ston
Croatia
Dubrovnik
Adriatic Sea
10 miles
Oysters,
like the people living along the Dalmatian coast, are survivors, Mr.
Sare said. Around five million of the bivalves are pulled from the
waters every year.
But they may soon face a threat from the swift and significant change to the ecosystem brought on by the headlong rush in the Balkans to embrace hydropower, often with little regard to the broader environmental consequences.
In
a region still heavily reliant on coal, hydropower offers a clean and
relatively cheap alternative energy source. Across the western Balkans,
about 3,000 hydropower plant projects are underway or being planned — a 300 percent increase from just two years ago, according to a study by Fluvius, an ecological consultancy in Vienna.
The
oyster farmers of the bay are most concerned about projects that would
involve damming the Neretva River, which flows from Bosnia into Croatia
and then empties into the bay.
A
recent plan to build a dam in Bosnia on the river was scrapped at the
last minute only when the Chinese company contracted for the project
pulled out.
Local residents who
depend on the bay fear that it is just a temporary reprieve. And they
worry that other projects in Bosnia could be pursued.
The cultivation of oyster farms in Mali Ston Bay, part of the Adriatic Sea, stretches back centuries to the days of Roman rule.CreditZoran Marinovic for The New York Times
Bosnia is still split by ethnic division,
divided into two entities — a Serb-run Republika Srpska and a mixed
Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Political decisions
are often made along ethnic lines, with little thought for the effect on
the nation as a whole, much less adjacent countries.
Mario
Radibratovic’s family has been farming oysters here for more than 500
years. Now a member of the oyster-farming collective, he worries about
what will happen to the oysters if the hydrodam on the Neretva River is
revived.
Oysters are only as good as the waters that feed them, he explained.
The
unique blend of nutrients in Mali Ston Bay — the salt from the sea
mixing with the fresh water from the rivers, with a rich bed of
phytoplankton on the seafloor — creates the crisp, balanced flavor in
the local oysters, prized since Roman emperors first funded farms here.
“The oysters need the fresh water from the river, and the proposed dam will cut that off and kill the ecosystem,” he said.
Even
in the best of circumstances, an oyster’s “chance to live at all is
slim,” Ms. Fisher wrote in her book “Consider the Oyster.”
Tourists at an oyster farm in Mali Ston.CreditZoran Marinovic for The New York Times
Oyster
eggs are devoured by the millions by other sea creatures, and a
fertilized egg will develop only if the water is warm enough, above 70
degrees Fahrenheit. The lucky few develop into free swimming larvae,
which float about as they like for a few weeks — each a “carefree
youth,” as Ms. Fisher wrote.
Mr.
Sare’s son, Tomislav, 22, explained what happens next on a tour of the
family’s farms and the small island in the bay, which oyster lovers can
rent for private parties.
The young
oysters are captured in a net and after a year, he said, the ones deemed
mature enough are cemented to a rope. For two years, they live hanging
in the sea until harvest time.
The
elder Mr. Sare started his seafood empire in 1980, when he opened his
first cafe, not much more than a small shack on the side of the road
that runs along the bay.
Mali Ston
and the adjacent city of Ston were built as fortress towns during
medieval times and became renowned for the 3.5-mile Great Wall that
snakes around them. So in those days before the war, there were plenty
of tourists to feed, Mr. Sare said.
But local businesses did not know how to cater to their needs, especially foreign visitors.
Young oysters are captured in a net and after a year, the ones deemed mature enough are cemented to a rope.CreditZoran Marinovic for The New York Times
Image
“In
socialism, what you get is warm wine,” he said. But he paid attention
to what customers wanted. He saw that Italians liked short coffee and
the English black coffee.
Advertisement
“Americans
want ice,” he said. So he bought what he believes was the first ice
machine for miles around. The price for nearly everything on the menu
was the same: $1.
Soon, he was raking
in money, and the authorities started to take note. But he refused to
give local officials a cut, and it cost him: When some vandals were
caught near his cafe urinating on a monument to anti-fascist fighters,
he was branded an enemy of the state and sent to jail.
A
few years later, Yugoslavia would be convulsed by violence, and when
war came, Mr. Sare took up arms with the Croat nationalists and was
again briefly imprisoned for smuggling weapons.
As
recently as the 1990s, the oyster farms were left unattended as the
area became a front line in the war that followed the break up of
Yugoslavia.CreditZoran Marinovic for The New York Times
He
has since become one of the most successful restaurateurs in Croatia,
expanding from his flagship restaurant in Mali Ston to outposts in
Split, Dubrovnik and Zagreb.
And the
draw at all the restaurants remains the oyster, so he hopes no dam or
ethnic division ever affects their farming or flavor.
“Oysters
know nothing of nationalities or ethnicities,” Mr. Sare said. “But
politicians? They prosper on dividing people. So instead of protecting
this heritage, they are still fighting about things stretching back to
the Second World War.”
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