Colin: Today our hike took us to Upper Tucepi (pronounced Too-Chep-ee), a town in the mountains above Makarska. Our guide for the day was "Joe", a Dalmatian who grew up in this town, then emigrated to Australia (apparently there is a fair-sized Croatian population there), and has since moved back.
We discovered on our hike, as we had already seen in our visits to Biokovo Nature Park and DESA-Dubrovnik, Dalmatian mountain culture is in decline. Joe explained that the combination of the 1962 earthquake, migration to the cities for work, and the "Independence War" are only a few of the reasons that these small towns are dying and their distinct culture is in decline.
One of the main reasons is the lack of land. The size of the individual land holdings has gotten too small to be able to adequately be able to farm or herd the land and be self-sustainable as centuries of dividing lands among large families has left everyone with unusable plots. When the plots have not been divided, the problem regularly becomes that not all the members of a family can agree on the use of the land, so rather than maintain, develop, or sell it, they let it decline. This is the story in many of the mountain towns apparently where the family members no longer live there, cannot agree on what to do with the land, and therefore do nothing. Because of this, these beautiful Dalmatian mountain towns, and their unique culture, may be a thing of the past.
We stopped into a mountain town church (yes, another church), and saw examples of a painted faux marble effect that apparently is very traditional here before taking the customary end of trip group photo that they do here every year.
Since our traditional Dalmatian Dinner in Topici had been pushed from tonight to the night that we toured Biokovo, this left us free to hike back to Makarska, go to the beach, or do whatever we liked in preparation for our last day off tomorrow.
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