The Italian occupation ended, but the small island in the middle of the Adriatic was surrounded by British destroyers and gunboats, German ships, submarines and magnetic mines. In the air dogfights were raging. That year nobody dared to go fishing. Breakfast was chard, lunch was limpets and sea urchins, dinner was potatoes, but winter came and soon there was nothing to eat. The mainland was far, far away. Islanders lacked food, but since the times of Dionysius they had something else.
On Vis in 397 BC ancient Greeks founded Issa. That was their first colony on the eastern coast of Adriatic. It is believed that, at that time, in the area of Vel polje, they planted the first vineyard in our region. This was how islanders made wine in times of peace and of war, wine that even Agarthid called the best.
Centuries later, Vis residents grandma Franka and great granddad Jure Vojković poured their plavac into a bottle and set out to meet British soldiers, Englishmen, Scots, Welsh, Irish, the boys from the islands far away in the Atlantic, that protected the secret allied Air Force Base on Vis.
They exchanged their plavac with the soldiers, the fruit of the mighty Vis sun and a sandy soil, for food.
They traded plavac for a military meal.Since then, the islanders, Visans and Britons, exchanged wine for food, a dry military meal for Plavac, and in 1944 they won another victory. Victory over hunger and hopelessness.
A great victory on a small island in the middle of the Adriatic.
