Str 185 - After Everything (Summary)

AFTER EVERYTHING (SUMMARY)

The focus of this book are the inhabitants of the small island of Krapanj, located close to the city of Šibenik on the Eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. What makes Krapanj special is its topography: its area covers nomore than 0.36 square kilometres, its highest point lies only 1.5m above sea level, it is situated 350m from the mainland, and up to the early 1960s it counted about 1500 inhabitants. It was the most densely populated is-land in the Mediterranean.

Next to farming (agricultural land is on the mainland) and fishing - which are usual for all islanders - the "Krapljani", as the inhabitants of Krapanj are called, used to and still harvest sea sponges. First they did so freediving, by some accounts probably from as early as the second half of the 16th century, then from around 1700 onwards using tridents from small boats with a crew of two. The maritime area that they have been covering to these days stretches from Trieste all the way to the northern coast of Albania. In 1893, the Krapljani began to harvest sponges – and then from ca. 1930 also corals - using the heavy diving gear or standard diving dress that they called "skafander". Immediately after World War II, as workers of "Brodospas", a company from Split, they salvaged ships that had been sunk during that war in the Adriatic. Later, they also salvaged ships off the coasts of Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Iran and Egypt. They also worked in underwater construction building ports and bridges in the Adriatic and Cyprus, Syria, the Red Sea (Ethiopia and Sudan), Iran and Ghana. From 1970 onwards, the Krapljani started to dive in modern, light diving gear as we know it today, consisting of a wetsuit and scuba apparatus. These significantly more mobile and effective divers gradually supplanted the divers in heavy diving gear. By the mid-1980s, the divers in heavy gear completely ceded the depths of the sea to the scuba divers.

This book describes in detail the techniques and peculiarities of sponge harvesting with tridents, as well as the lives of the two-man crews on their 20 to 25-day long voyages. It also describes the lives and work of the crews of the divers in heavy gear on bigger boats, consisting of eight members and usually comprising two divers. During the dives, numerous accidents happened, which took many lives. Some divers fell victim to decompression sickness and were forced to spend the rest of their lives severely physically handicapped. Many dramatic occurrences, recounted by the divers themselves or by other witnesses of these events, found their way onto these pages. The reasons for these accidents were ignorance, inexperience, poor diving equipment that at times was not fit for purpose, overconfidence in one's own abilities, and respectively an underestimation of the dangers, negligence of assistants and helpers as well as external, unpredictable factors, which affected the diver while he was underwater.

The sponge harvesting and diving activities of the Krapljani are depicted in the context of the socio-political circumstances of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Federal Peoples' Republic of Yugoslavia respectively the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and today's Republic of Croatia. It is not only its unusual topography but also its century-old traditions of sponge harvesting and diving which make Krapanj - with the exception of a number of Greek islands - unique in the Mediterranean - and maybe even in the entire world.

Translation / prijevod: Tomislav CURAVIĆ, Sally TAYLOR