But let us examine one of these homesteads where the house-fathers and house-mothers still preside—and the description of the one we saw first will serve for all. In order to find our way to the dwelling-house we had to enter by a yard, enclosed by a rough wooden fence, called the ‘plot.’ Within this, to the right, was the ‘Kucica’ or common cottage, and then followed in order the pig-sty, the barn, the hay-loft and cart-shed, the round conical-peaked hay-stack, and another store-house. This homestead square reminded one of old English, Norse,[160] and Franconian farms; and we found the dwelling-houses trisected into a sleeping-room, a kitchen, and a store-room, like the homesteads of Scandinavian backwoods. The centre room of the three is the kitchen, in one corner of which is a flat stone hearth, a small paved square for cooking on, such as is universal in Illyria. In the other corner there was a stove of a kind which also occurs throughout all these lands; it was of baked clay, square below, and bell-shaped above, bayed all over with circular pigeon-holes, which in Bosnia, where still ruder forms of this stove occur, are actually pots embedded into the clay; though whether this practice arose from a scientific desire to gain a greater heating surface, or whether for the celebration of certain culinary mysteries, or whether for ornament, or, what is more probable, by reason of some exigencies of structure—we were never able to determine.
Before the kitchen was a kind of fore-hall, as in a Northern cottage; but, in this warm climate, open to the air, and forming a verandah, which in the larger houses runs along the upper storey, where the family live. We peeped into the dormitory, which was the largest room of the three, and saw beds ranged round the room, and a picture of a saint suspended from the wall. The house itself was of wood, and showed in parts the rich time-stains of an Alpine chalet. Yet in places one might notice the Sclavonic tendency towards whitewash and mud plaster. The roof was double; first a shingling of short wooden planks, and above that a substantial thatch.
Stupa
As to the inmates, they were engaged in the yard in a very curious occupation. Just outside the store-house was the most greedy-looking machine we ever set eyes on—all teeth and jaw, without even the decency of a stomach. It turned out to be a stamping-mill for beating flax, which we had already noticed on our way, going through preliminary processes of water-retting and grassing. At first sight the masticator looked like a monstrous variety of the trap which children use for ‘bat and ball;’ it was all of wood, except a metal pivot or axis, on which the upper jaw worked, and its motive power was supplied by two Croats, a man and a woman, who took their stand on the upper jaw, and, placing one foot on each side of the pivot, imparted a see-sawing motion to it, by throwing their weight simultaneously first on one foot and then on the other, from which treading the mill gains the Croatian name Stupa or tread-mill. Meanwhile another woman took a wisp of the ready retted and dried flax, and fed the wooden crocodile with it; and when it had been sufficiently chewed, and the useless stem or boom separated from the useful bark or harl, she handed the wisp on to another woman, who combed out the fibres in a heckle, made by the simple process of sticking iron nails through a paw of wood fixed into the fence, and being now both clawed and chewed, the flax was laid in a heap, and the preparation was concluded. The mill seems a very primitive form of the Scotch foot-brake, but it is at least better than the hand-mill of our forefathers, for the principle of co-operation of labour is invoked, and the flax therefore prepared more expeditiously.
One would think that the fact that the rude Croats of the Granitza have arrived at a stage of manufacture even so comparatively advanced as this, may be due to an advantageous influence of the Communistic system. For if self-interest is in the long run the best spur to industry, yet it sometimes keeps it back, owing to a want of readiness to combine with others. But here we find the common interest of the house-community in the results of labour, teaching the great economic lesson of combination, though it certainly discourages extraordinary energy in individuals. Thus the land is tilled in common, the harvest gathered in in common, and, ceteris paribus, it is far more probable that agricultural machinery could be introduced in one of the large Granitza families, containing some three hundred members, than in a village of the same population tenanted by the small, selfish peasant-farmers of France or Germany.
Besides this readiness to combine, another favourable aspect of this Communistic society was especially striking to one fresh from among the somewhat churlish, close-fisted Nether-Saxons. This was a certain geniality, an open-handed readiness of good cheer, whether of homely apples or homelier wine. Nothing here of that jealous attitude towards strangers so characteristic of your peasant-farmer or petty ‘Eigenthümer.’ You have only to muster up unabashed intrusiveness enough, and you may spy out the land and all the ins and outs of a Granitza dwelling-house without let or hindrance. You may rove at your sweet will through yard and garden, take stock of horned and feathered, seat yourself on the three-legged stool before the culinary hearth—and pray do not let false delicacy or closed doors deter you from unclewing the inmost mysteries of the bed-chamber! The inmates are only too proud to see a visitor. A comfortable sense of co-partnership grows upon you. You find yourself arguing some post-liminal right of adoption as you cross the threshold, and end by asking yourself whether after all there can be any gulf ’twixt meum and tuum when every potsherd and goosequill is common property?
‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!’ Let this, then, be the motto of the stranger who visits the Granitza homesteads. Obviously new rules of social decorum must be invented for the occasion, and our code was simple—‘Make yourself at home.’ The idea that we could be intruding became really too preposterous; and as for the truly insular notion that a house could be a castle, we laughed it to scorn! We were Communists for the nonce. The Genius loci inspired us. We penetrated without the introduction of a guide into yards and houses; or if we came to larger farms, where the ground-floor of the house is apportioned to cows and the dwelling-rooms of the scansorial part of the family are above, only approachable by external ladders, we hesitated not to effect entrance by escalade, and the inmates were as little taken aback, and received us with as hearty a good-day as if they had been expecting us for weeks.
We could not help thinking of the contrast they presented to the people of the same Sclavonic race, and almost the same language, beyond the mountains that fringed the north-western horizon; to the Wends, namely, and Slovenes, of Carinthia and Carniola. For when Goldsmith tells how
The rude Carinthian boor