Fatima Džumhur
Rose petal specialties; raft on Salakovac Lake; old style fishing
Ms Džumhur comes from an old respectable Bosnian family and when you meet her you immediately understand the real meaning of a well-known saying – “Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind.” This energetic woman grows a big rose garden around her house in Blagaj with special species of edible roses that were brought from Middle East a few hundred years ago. According to the Middle East tradition they were once used for making juices and special desserts. You can hardly find a house today where you will be treated with such delicacies made from fresh rose petals.
Women in the Middle Ages
An ideal woman, suiting the taste of a medieval man was described as it follows: A woman has to be pretty, moral, and borne of honourable parentage. She does not have to be rich, as most of the young men who search for wealth and not a wife think, and then when they get it - their life is miserable. There are generally three goods in a woman – honesty, consisting of her virtues; usefulness, regarding her dowry, inheritance and wealth and pleasure seen in the beauty which is a God’s gift to the one who has her. The woman has to be reasonable, loyal, serious, lovable, diligent, gentle, modest, compassionate, devout and religious, kind, moderate, generous, hard-working, not gluttonous, sober, clever and always busy since leisure and poverty cause a deep fall of a woman and she can defend herself against it only by working. According to her class a woman should wear appropriate clothes and jewelry and her skin should be clean. She should never, for any reason, put make up on her face because appearing with the face painted is considered not only a shame but also a misdemeanour. It is a woman’s duty to be nice and useful to a man, to comfort him and treat him in illness, to bear his children and raise them and soothe her sorrows for the children who died through giving birth again.
