Guerino Kučić in his essential oil distillery in San Martino in Valle in Cres – photo by Davide Sighele
In San Martino in Valle, on the island of Cres, the distillation of medicinal herbs has a centuries-old tradition. To keep it alive even today there are Irena and her husband Guerino
In this late winter, San Martino in Valle, in Cherso, is like a painting: the historic houses spread out with their orchards and gardens along the sea, motionless. Only the ripple of a regular wave motion interrupts this fixity. A veiled sky with clouds made the atmosphere more muffled.
The contrast with the liveliness of the summer period is strong, even if San Martino is one of those places in the Croatian islands that has not yet been cannibalized by tourism, even though autumn and winter are almost a waiting parenthesis of the tourist season .
On the other hand, there is no one idle a few hundred meters from the town centre, rising slightly in altitude to straddle the promontory which divides the town from the historic Slatina campsite. It is there that Guerino Kučić and his wife Irena have their farm. They are – like everything else in the year – in full swing. Guerino arranges equipment while his wife tidies up the patio. The next day, in fact, a group would arrive from Trieste, to visit the distillery.
Guerino and Irena are essential oil distillers. This, together with the production of olive oil, is the main income activity of their company. We sit outside, under a portico, at a long solid wood table.
Guerino has a book with him. His strong, calloused hands delicately leaf through the pages in search of a specific paragraph. “It’s on page 179,” his wife tells him.” “Ah you know it by heart”, he teases her. The book is an American publication from 1949 which collects the existing literature on medicinal herbs at the time. And there is also talk of San Martino in Valle. “Americans have dollars. They then imported sage from here, then looked for a land similar to that of Cres but in America, to be able to plant it. To not have to import it. And here it says that they tried but they didn’t succeed”, chuckles Guerino.
This place of few souls, in the past like today, reached the pages of a publication in the United States thanks to the entrepreneurial vigor of a fellow villager of Guerino, Andrija Linardić, also from Vidovici, a small village in the immediate hinterland of San Martino. The latter in 1903 founded together with his son an essential oil distillery, the first industrial production on the island of Cres. Sage grew wild and abundant on the island, and Andrija Linardić learned that a modern machine for steam distillation of essential oils had been installed on the nearby island of Hvar. After three years of failure they decided to present their products in London, during an exhibition dedicated to Dalmatia. From there came the first order from the German company Aroma-Werk Carl-Heine & Co. Then exports expanded to the main chemical and pharmaceutical companies in Germany, the United States and requests also came from Japan.
The delivery of wild herbs collected in San Martino
The book kept by Guerino on the distillation of medicinal herbs – photo by Davide Sighele
Irena at work – photo by Davide Sighele
“At that time it was easy for no one, especially not for the Linardić family – says Guerino – Andrija Linardić however saw the potential that existed on the island. Then his son continued and the tradition started. At that time only wild plants were harvested. They started with sage, then moved on to helichrysum and other plants. That’s how it worked until 1945, then those cursed communists arrived and as they destroyed everything else they destroyed the Linardićs too. They confiscated the distillery from them and kept it running for another ten years. When I arrived here in San Martino, for the first grade, from the village above where I lived, the distillery was still in operation. It smelled all around here. But then they didn’t guarantee the quality of the product and in ’56 they closed down”.
Guerino feels that he is walking in the footsteps of the Linardić family. But not always. As a young man, like many here, he spent some time away from the island, working on ships, on oil rigs in the North Sea. Then he returned home. “I started dealing with medicinal plants at the end of the 80s. Cres is known to be a place in the Mediterranean where a high variety of plants, both medicinal and other, grow. Today we produce excellent quality worldwide, but not so much because I do it, but because of the richness of our island”.
With Irena and Guerino oils they also produce natural cosmetics, creams and soaps. Most of their products are sold directly to tourists who pass by the farm. On the walls of the warehouse which houses the large steel kegs of the distillers – about two meters high and which are loaded thanks to a trap door in the ceiling above – a post-war poster invites the citizens of the island of Cherso to spontaneously collect and deliver San Martino: “As in past years, the undersigned will be the buyer of medicinal sage leaves”, we read.
“It is now difficult to find manpower – underlines Guerino – for this reason we have rationalized the entire harvesting process, in order to be able to use the machines. I am the only one who does this in Croatia. For example I have a plot of land sown with sage, I uprooted the trees that were bothering me, I leveled it with the excavator, the sage was initially crushed, but then it grew back from the remaining seeds. And now my wife and I can do the harvesting work by ourselves”.
Unfortunately, Guerino’s activity is not widespread on the island. “I’d like to be able to share the experience, I produce too little for the demand that there could be at an international level. If there were at least two or three other families we could respond to a market of that kind. Institutions don’t support young people and without support it’s difficult to start something new. And then they leave.”
Despite this note of sadness, Guerino continues to plan. These days he is working with some huge drills, bought in Sweden second hand. “I’m digging wells to intercept the aquifers”, he says. there is and it is perfect for agriculture because it is rich in minerals”.
We leave Guerino and Irena, a last look at the farmyard, with a horse, some chickens and some sheep. Symbol of a food – genuine – still produced at home. In the background the sea. A landscape that is unfortunately unusual, to our eyes accustomed to monoculture tourism along the coast.
Nicole Corritore contributed to this report
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