I did go to school to tell you the truth, I went up to the fourth grade. I went and did not. That’s how it was among the people of Janjevo, they wronged us here, and maybe somebody regrets that now. I was a child, you know, for home. My mother sent me, I was no fool, I crossed the world and I could attend school. But they rebuked her, it’s a girl, she’ll marry, you know, she doesn’t need education she will deal with diapers. But the boys too, they will carry packages, he will work at the market. This is how it was. 

Mother was giving birth, there they mowed the land, and she let me and stopped me from going to school. ‘She will marry, what school?’ Like that. When she gave birth to that brother, I was at home for a month, she did not let me go to school and she had to pay a fine for that. I was in the fourth grade about to get to the fifth. She paid a very large fine, then she had to let me go to school, but without notebooks, books, wasting my time at school.

Three years later, after I passed fourth grade and was in the fifth, three years later I went to the fifth. I always joke about it. I said to the present school principal, ‘Give me a diploma.’ She says, ‘Why Marija?’ ‘But, I did go to school, I want a diploma.’ She says, ‘What diploma?’ I say, ‘I went to school for three years, that should mean something. You know what, that too is a sacrifice. I want a diploma, I won’t show it anywhere.’ I said, ‘I don’t need it for job applications, but to…’ They promised they would give me one for the eight grades I completed. I want to put in a frame because I went for three years in fifth grade.

Janjevo is known for its craftsmen. An anecdote still circulates, it has been passed on from person to person, there’s nothing written of a sort, however… when Nastradin visited Janjevo, he had asked the people… in fact, before asking them what are they doing, he bragged about his garden, about the size of his cabbages, and that there are no carts to fit his cabbages. Now the people of Janjevo remembered what he had said when he first visited. When he visited for the second time, they were working with their hammers, making noise. He asked one of them, ‘What are they working on?’ ‘Oh, they are making that cart for your cabbage.’ So when he realized they have… he had cursed them, ‘May you never become neither a city nor a village.’ We tend to believe that because of the curse, Janjevo is neither a city nor a village.

Janjevo, as I recall it in my childhood, it was really blooming, it was experiencing a renaissance. So, we had everything in Janjevo. That was a small town, which had everything that people, citizens needed to live. You know, all sorts of stores. Not only what we produced, but also had in the center the so-called bazaar, where that mercantile life took place.

From the morning, early in the morning, when the morning church bells rang, people woke up, prepared themselves for work, those that went to their stores, those that went to the markets or to their workshops, some farmers. Mainly, people worked the entire day. In the evening, the bell rang again, and that was a sign that they should stop working. Then the men, the head of the house would go out to the bazaar, in the center they would do their business, trade, goods exchange agreements.

Our elderly had around 300 hectares of grape vines. We say, we had to dig it with our hands, rummaging, we used to call it then, you know rummaging. You had to dig at least half a meter deep to plant the vine. And, in the third year, the vine would sprout. In the meantime, there we planted onions. We call it karamide, onions were planted there so that the vine would sprout later. 

Then we also had rakia and wine cellars. Well-known cellars. Rahovec was built later. Romans were in these hills of ours, they had vineyards then that turned into a desert when they left. Our people came here and started rummaging again. I think they planted vines. We had black, white, Hamburg grapes. We had all kinds of grapes. We had all kinds of grapes that existed in Yugoslavia, and all kinds of cherries and apricot, apple and pear. 

Our people were then what we call ‘merchant wanderers.’ That’s how we called them skitači. No matter if they went to Macedonia or Slovenia or Croatia, Bosnia, whenever they learned about a fruit, they would take it and place it in a potato so it doesn’t dry out. When they came back, they grafted it. There was no fruit that Janjevo did not have.

Everything was in order, to be fair, the Croats, they had it as an obligation on Friday evenings, everyone cleaned up the cobblestone in front of their doors, and left no bits of it dirty… as for the dirt, God forbid, but there was no dust even. They cleaned it up with water and on Saturdays the streets were… those narrow streets of Janjevo were clean. This is what I remember, in other words, that is of material value, it is culture, right?

Why exactly on Fridays?

On Friday so it is ready for Saturday and Sunday… on Saturday they worked, but on Sunday the Croats, Catholics don’t work. And they, if you ever went to do business with them, they said, ‘I am sorry, but this is my day off, it is a holiday for me.’ They considered it a holiday. And I asked them, as you are asking me now, ‘Why on Friday?’ Because the priest goes for a walk in the streets of Janjevo on Saturday at a certain time. When the priest passes by… now I don’t know. But when the priest passed by, everyone went out in front of their doors to salute him.