Harvesting lavender near Chichester (
via). Seeing this brought back memories of
Hvar, which I visited while it was part of Yugoslavia. The
island has long had a lavender industry and, as this photo from 2010 indicates, the harvesting methods there must be very different -
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| Lavender fields of Hvar (via) |
Our tour guide (that was in 1987) told us that young people were leaving the island, looking for work in the cities, and we could see that the lavender farms were being abandonned, the plants sprawling untended.
This is how I remember it -
I was in Hvar for a conference - the
Society of Indexers - and have been travelling down memory lane via the pages of its journal, which I was deputy editor of around then. We had some rather charming articles, for instance
this one on indexes to
clerihews,
this one on indexers in
Penelope Lively's novels, and
this one on
Barbara Pym as an indexer. And quietly mind-boggling fillers like this -
Back issues of The Indexer, since 1958, are available free online, with links to specific articles, via
theindexer.org. Curl up with a cup of cocoa...
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| Here's one I compiled earlier! |
We spent a week on Hvar as part of our honeymoon in 1972. I was not aware of the lavender but perhaps it did not exist then. We travelled around Yugoslavia with virtually no money but we spent time in Sarejevo (wonderful museums), having crossed over the original Mostar bridge in the middle of the night, and had a week on a Croatian island called Pag. We have never been back and I would not want to go as some of the places we went to, including Pag and Split, were very badly damaged in the wars and I would sooner retain my memories of how it was.
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