Carob Days Komiza

All of you who rent an apartment or a room in Komiža in the first half of September will have the opportunity to attend an unusual festival called Carob Days. This festival was held in 2011 for the first time. Although it takes place only for a few years, it is dedicated to the longest living plant in Mediterranean, which is quite unfairly ignored for centuries. It is an evergreen plant which, along with olives and vines, nurtured many generations of islanders and coastal residents of Mediterranean. Carob is growing on the southwestern shores of island Vis where days are warmer. Plantations around Komiza are the most famous. Carob is the oldest resident of the southern Dalmatian islands with some bushes here for more than a millennium. Carob is resistant, grows in rocky ground among olive groves and vineyards. The first fruit is beginning to show after ten years, with the long period of maturation. It blooms in the fall, and gives fruits only in the late summer of next year. Carob pods are sweet whit intense aroma. It was used as a substitute for chocolate in this region. Pastries, flour for the preparation of various dishes and spirits can be made from it, along with `rogacica´, specialty form Komiza households. It is used in food and pharmaceutical industry as a natural preservative. Carob Days in Komiza can be the opportunity for you to learn about the wide application of this plant, which is increasingly used as `organic food', but also as the natural remedy to solve indigestion and as a dietary problems. It is assumed that the carob was used 4000 years ago and that builders of the Egyptian pyramids were feeding with carob bread. Carob beans (Gr. - Keration) owes its name to the measure of gold - carat; because of the fact that carob grain was used as a unit for weighing gold in ancient times. Astonishing is the fact that each carob bean, regardless of its size and storage conditions, always has a mass of 0.18 grams! So, do not weigh much, visit Komiza in September, taste the specialties of carob and store the aroma of this unusual plant in your memory. It will become a measure of the pleasures that only an island such as Vis is, can and know to provide!