My European Adventure, 2025: Back Home in Croatia
I try to make a trip back to my small village in Croatia more frequently to visit my mother and family on their farm. This time, I had the pleasure of visiting some neighboring villages in my home country.
Kotli
Kotli is a small historic village whose name roughly translates to “cauldron”, which is the shape that the natural river has carved into the local stones. This small town originally hosted 17 families, or about 100 people, until about the 1950s. There was no running water, electricity or jobs, so eventually everyone but one family left for the city. Now it is a popular tourist and hiking destination with a beautiful natural spring of pristine water.
Many people have begun purchasing the historic buildings and carefully restoring them here. Someone even recently purchased the original mill on the river with the intention to restore it to working order.
The buildings are fascinating, as they were designed and built merely with stones and dirt, and yet they are still standing. Each stone was laid with the intention to support surrounding stones without the technology like cement available.
Hum
Close to Kotli, Hum is an even more historic city – it was built in the eleventh century, long before Latin languages came to this part of Europe. It was built as a self-contained city inside of a wall, with only one door to get in or out of the city.
You can see the original language of this region – called Glagoljica – on the door. The letters appear more like characters, similar to many Asian languages. Since this language, our region has known many languages over the years.
The message on this door warns citizens that the doors lock promptly at 7pm daily. The reason being they were frequently attacked at night by enemies. This is also the reason it is built on a hill – attackers would have to fight uphill, giving the village an advantage to defend themselves.
Inside, the city had everything its citizens needed: a church, city hall, shoemaker, general store, tailor, pharmacy and distillery.
The distillery still runs today and is a popular spot for its regional brandy!
The city now acts as a museum, and locals even restored the original frescos that are the oldest in the area.
Here is the distillery still in action:
Here is the original pharmacy:
Here is the schoolhouse, with some neighbor friends to show you the scale - only about 8 students could learn at once. You can see the original language of the region on the chalkboard:
Here is the post office, as well as an early outhouse (with not much more than a hole to collect waste, and a wash basin for your hands):
On my way to Medjugorje, I travelled along the Adriatic Sea coastline – perhaps what Croatia is most known for. This sea contains over 1,300 islands, most of which belong to Croatia.
Farm Life
Back on my mother’s farm, the growing season is gearing up.
Radicchio is a local favorite - a tough lettuce with slightly bitter notes that you plant in the fall – and it grows all summer and into the winter. It is frost-resistant, so that is how you get your greens in the wintertime!
Did you know that bitter foods are good for your health? They stimulate digestion and aid in gut health, while preventing inflammation, oxidative stress and some diseases. So I recommend adding radicchio or dandelion greens to every salad!
This radicchio and lettuce salad was a common dish on the farm growing up. We added potatoes, onions and other lettuce with our own homemade dressing. People always ask me what the dressing is, but it is as simple as apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Pre-made dressings were not available in Croatia growing up, but now that they are, they can only be found with preservatives or poor ingredients.
This is stinging nettle. As the name suggests, it will sting your hand when you touch it. It grows wild and you use it to make tea.
Whenever I made nettle tea in America, people always thought I was weird – until Martha Stewart’s stinging nettle ravioli recipe came out!
Now you can find stinging nettle tea in the grocery store. Being a bitter leaf, it has all the health benefits of bitter foods like radicchio.
It is common for farmers to make their own cheese here. This particular cheese is made from cow’s milk, but in our region, people also enjoy sheep and goat cheese.
As a child I enjoyed the process of making the cheese, because it starts as liquid milk and becomes a solid cheese just by working it with your hands.
We ate it in multiple ways – soft when freshly made – or you could add salt to preserve it and let it sit and age until it was hard. In this state you would chew on it for a while. Special aging containers were built with a screen to keep flies out while the cheese dried.
Farmers here also dry and cure their own meats, like prosciutto. These days it is much harder to make prosciutto due to increasingly humid weather in the region, so foods cannot dry out safely. Sadly I have heard stories of food getting thrown out, or farmers needing to invest in dehumidifiers to prevent mold, which is increasing the price of prosciutto. This has made everyday food-making harder for small farmers.
What’s Next
I made two more stops while I was in Europe. In addition to visiting my family in Croatia, I visited regions in France for recipe research for Sweet Designs. Stay tuned to learn all about what I discovered in France! If you are not already signed up for our email newsletter, you can do so here to get notified of my next adventure.
Thanks for reading along!
-Ines