Citadel and Countryside

For the incomer missing domestic comfort, the Hercegovinian countryside must have seemed timeless, a place that used the same wooden equipment as it had in the time of Alexander of Macedon. ¹ Heavy types of plough (ralo and crtalo) were remarked upon. ² Josef Perkonig contrasted urban life with the surrounding countryside. For him, time passed much slower outside the city: “around Trebinje there are small villages.… The farmers are poor, but they feed on small portions of timeless contentment prepared for the frugal. They sow tobacco and plant the olive tree, they harvest corn and press tart wine, and they weave the wool of their own sheep.” ³ The high quality of local food in Hercegovina was often commended. ⁴ In the fields near Trebinje, potatoes, buckwheat, wheat, corn, beans (probably a local variety, poljak), rye, millet, and barley were already grown at the time of the Habsburg takeover. ⁵ The existing cultivation of tobacco, indigo, hemp, flax, olives, wine, apples, figs, mulberries, rowan, pomegranate, medlars, and “ancient nut and cherry trees” was further developed after 1878, ⁶ as regional links were built and artisan goods produced in workshops in Trebinje.