Poets cannot always be trusted. We have read a lot about the Karst above Trieste, about its archaic atmosphere, its stony force, its dazzling white. “Rocks and junipers and stars and my way in between”, the Slovenian poet Srečko Kosovel wrote about his karst in 1921, and the Trieste author Scipio Slataper also heard the “cry of the stones” in the karst. But where is the white stone landscape that has so often been described? Between the old Karst villages Dutovlje and Tomaj stretches a magical garden of grapevines, fig trees and pumpkin fields. Not through a stone desert, but through a fruit paradise, we walk to the house in Tomaj, where the ingenious Srečko Kosovel died at the age of only twenty-three. So you can't believe the poets at all?

“Yes,” says the geographer Andrej Bandelj from the Karst town of Komen, who guides us through this landscape in a knowledgeable way. “But in the meantime the stone has turned green. When the two of them wrote, our karst was really still a desert. ”To prove this, he shows photos from 1890. You only see an area without trees or bushes. Today forests of black pines, holm oaks and acacias grow in the same place. “We owe that to the Austrian monarchy. Your gift to us was the reforestation of the Karst. At that time, the poets could not have suspected that the matter would be so successful. ”Andrej Bandelj is right: The Danube Monarchy, to which the inhospitable area above the port city of Trieste belonged until 1918, began a first-rate landscape-changing cultivation work on the arid high plateau. There,where the bora once swept away every crust of the earth and the water ran into the crevices, a layer of humus gradually developed. In the past, people used to collect the scanty earth in the sinkholes, the circular incursions in the karst surface. Some of these circles can be found just behind the train station in the karst town of Divača. Rows of shrubs and rows of potatoes run straight through the round of the sinkhole.

All bees come from Slovenia

“That used to be our gardens,” says Bandelj. “Earth and water are precious here. Perhaps that is why we are a people of passionate gardeners. ”To prove this, he invites us to his grandmother's farm. It is located in Kregolišce, a hamlet in the middle of nowhere big bushes and small paths. At the end they actually lead to some stone houses that crouch like partridges in the bush landscape. A green gate is open, behind it lemon trees, chickens, beehives and the wonderful smell of Malvasia grapes. The greeting is full of warmth and "šnops". Everything here, wine, schnapps, fruits, eggs, is from our own production. And of course the honey. What kinds of varieties are there: white, brown, golden, even red. Every honey fan inevitably gets excited. Bandelj's father shows us his beehives:“Our bees are like us Slovenes: good and hardworking.” And we learn that the European bee, the “Carnic”, originally comes from Slovenia - a gift from the small country to the world. Then Bandelj shows us an old irrigation channel. “You see, it's still from the Austrians. It worked until the Italians came. "