Cornelian Cherries - Drenjak
Last Saturday we dropped in to Banja Luka, to visit a small outdoors exhibition of products made from Drenjak (Cornelian Cherry).
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Hello and welcome to another multi-media newsletter from Čardačani.
It’s such a pleasure to read comments that are left on our newsletter. So thank you so much to:
Zora, Julz, Trish, Martin, Will, Rob, Richard and Lana for taking the time to write to us.
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Tamara and I appreciate your faithful readership, your comments, and your generosity!
THANKS SO MUCH ❤️
Our Weather.
A quick round up from the village.
The weather is starting to turn decidedly Autumnal here in the north west of the country. We seem to fluctuate between sunny and 26C to rainy and 15C. Great weather for ‘flu!
It’s been a busy week for Tamara and me. We have been putting into place some new procedures, so we can create more meaningful content and most importantly topics that you will find interesting.
Tamara has also been making really tasty homemade Granola and surprisingly a super homemade crisp bread as well.
We have also been “out and about”, visiting the border town of Kozarska Dubica and learning some more about World War Two history in this area.
More about that in coming newsletters.
Cooking “Beef in a Jar”.
We’ve been experimenting again!
The original recipe for this, we saw on one of our favourite recently discovered cooking channels - "Wilderness Cooking".
Of course we didn't follow the recipe to the bone, we put our own twist on it.
We did not use an open fire, also, the cuts of meats are slightly different too and some of the seasoning.
Tamara always likes to adapt recipes according to our own taste, and what is available to buy here where we live.
We are also trying out a different, more relaxed and raw feel for our videos.
What do you think?
Drenjak.
Last Saturday we dropped in to Banja Luka, to visit a small outdoors exhibition of products made from Drenjak (Cornelian Cherry).
The exhibitors were mostly from the town of Drvar and it’s surrounding villages.
The Drvar area is famous for its Drenjak (the cherries).
We have more information about both Drenjak and the exhibition on our blog.
The Sarajevo Haggadah.
700 years after it was created, a priceless Sephardic Jewish book whose wine-stained pages have somehow survived exile, the Inquisition, the rise and fall of an empire, two world wars and the Bosnian conflict, is making it’s way home,
Well, sort of.
The Sarajevo Haggadah named after the city where it has been kept since at least 1894, is thought to have been made in north-east Spain in about 1350, possibly as a wedding present to mark the union of two prominent Jewish families.
Like all haggadahs, it contains the stories, prayers, rules and rituals of the Passover feast. But unlike most of them, and in contravention of the prohibition on “graven images”, many of its 142 bleached calf-skin pages are decorated with vibrant illustrations of the creation of a resolutely round Earth, of slavery in Egypt, and of Moses leading the Jewish people towards the promised land.
The pictures, last seen in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, is now in Madrid at an exhibition organised by the Spanish government’s Sefarad-Israel Centre and the embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“This exhibition is about sharing this remarkable story and showing people the beauty of the book and how it survived,” says Jakob Finci, a retired lawyer and diplomat who serves as president of the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“It’s an important book for Jews all over the world, but most of all for the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
After leaving Spain during the expulsion, the haggadah turned up in Italy in 1609 when a priest working for the Roman Inquisition read through it and added a note confirming it contained nothing to offend the Roman Catholic church’s sensibilities.
From there it eventually made its way to Sarajevo, where in 1894 it was sold to the national museum by a local Sephardic family for 150 crowns. Museum staff hid it from the Germans when the Nazi occupation of Sarajevo began in 1941, stashing it in a mosque in the mountains. Just over half a century later, the haggadah survived the heavy shelling inflicted on the museum during the siege of Sarajevo.
The book has come to be seen as something of a talisman by the country’s Jews and its wider population.
“It was always saved by people who weren’t Jewish, and it became a kind of symbol of Sarajevo,” says Finci. “It’s liked a phoenix that rises again after each catastrophe. The history of the Sarajevo Haggadah has become a kind of legend in Bosnia and all over the world.”
Jakob Finci, was born in a concentration camp on the then Italian-occupied Croatian island of Rab in 1943, he now oversees a community that lost 85% of its members to the Holocaust.
Today there are around 1,000 Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina, more than three-quarters of them Sephardic.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has Two Islands?
Recently Tamara and I spent 6 gorgeous days at Neum, a town located on the Bosnian Adriatic coast, “ The Second Shortest Coastline in the world”.
Just out of sight, but not too far away, we found on the map, two “islands”, Mali Školj and Veliki Školj.
They looked not only tiny, but to be honest, insignificant.
BUT.
These two rocky outcrops are at the centre of an international dispute.
Coming in the next Newsletter.
We visit Kosarska Dubica.
Music from our Local Town.
The latest Track from Trag, an Ethno Group based in tour local Town of Laktaši.
And Finally.
That's our update from our village here in the north of Bosnia and Herzegovina for this week.
We hope you'll continue to follow our adventures, and to engage with questions and comments.
We are always so excited when we receive them.
PLEASE, do stay safe wherever you are.
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Thank you for the update, wonderful food and such moving music, how i miss being in Bosnia and Herzegovina