The next day was very low key, which was fine by me. Cynthia and I took a walk into “town” to pick up their milk. The house here and other villages we’ve passed through in the car are often painted bright colors, such as lemon peel yellow, pumpkin orange, butterscotch, black raspberry, pistachio green, watermelon red, and cerulean. Makes for pleasant effects on the eyes and contrasts well with all the green around.
The older houses are also built in two ways. One way has the roof constructed first, with four posts holding it up, and then the rest of the house built from underneath, instead the posts. Another way is to have the walls of the houses constructed of young saplings woven together and then stuccoed over. They used to have thatched roofs, but today these are prohibitively expensive. They cost a lot to construct, are high maintenance, and the insurance premiums are astronomical.
Sovjak is built on 5 small hills, with a lake at the bottom and off to the side. Here, as in other villages we’ve driven through, there is often a small chapel-shrine, or just a crucifix at a center intersection. You can’t get away from all the churches, they’re everywhere, but are built harmoniously with the homes. I find the crucifixes oppressive, however.
After we picked up the fresh milk and talked with her neighbor, Cynthia and I returned home. We had a nice lunch, including corn Slavko picked a few minutes earlier. There’s lots of corn grown here, but it’s virtually all for the pigs. It’s not very sweet, and a little tougher than I’m used to. But cooked quickly and fresh, it tastes good. We left shortly afterward to pick up the honey Slavko forgot at the winery. He had also requested the wine owner to put some ice wine on ice for us to sample. Ice wine is the latest harvest wine, where the grapes actually freeze. you can look it up. It’s very sweet, but in a completely non-cloying way, delicious. I’d never had it before, and it didn’t disappoint. It was from 1998, and when first introduced to it, Slavko bought 19 bottles, nearly all that was remaining. Before that we had a “Sipon” wine. This grape I had never heard of, but the wine, again, was different and very tasty. I spoke to the winemaker through Slavko about the Seattle merchant who works out of a warehouse, Garagiste; I will try to hook these guys up with each other, as this kind of small, high quality winery is exactly what he is looking for.
We returned home and had a late night tea and conversation. I found out more about Slavko’s musical past, including that he had written some of the music for the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo. He mentioned how the Yugoslav government used to finance bringing the Newport Jazz Festival to Beograd when it finished its run in the states. When he was 9, he attended a concert with Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima. It was so popular it had to be re-located to a stadium, and 40,000 people showed up. The army was called in to fix the lights (the stadium didn’t have any, so they flew them in from Zagreb). The concert, which was supposed to go from 8 till 10, lasted till 4 in the morning. The crowd certainly won over the performers, who’d been expecting “Communists.”
