We've been following the cork story of this region since Corsica. High in these mountains we learned that most of the wine packaged in Italy is stoppered with Calangianus cork. The trees are a lush green and have tiny green leaves, a gnarled trunk skeleton, and about an inch thick bark that is harvested first when the tree is about twenty-five years old, and thereafter, every ten years. It can live for 150 years. Just after harvest the bared trunk is orange. Later it turns black. The mountains, right to the tree line, are thick with picturesque cork trees, and rocks.
Nearby is Luras, goulish Luras. So high and so remote are these villages that in days long past they were pretty much a law unto themselves. Up in these high parts a chilling act of euthanasia for the terminally ill, 'la dolce morte: the sweet death, was practised for centuries, the last here, in 1929.
The local woman of death, sa femmina accabadora, would arrive in the deep of night. With her face covered and her clothes all in black, she would enter through an arranged unlocked door and quietly, with a very basic hammer made of olive wood, skilfully dispose of the terminally ill patient then leave without a word, or without payment. The law looked the other way. The church did the same. But, just imagine being that woman, that village woman whose job it was to do that deed. Try to imagine her night dreams. Did she have a husband? children? How did they cope knowing what she did in the middle of the night? How hard would all that have been to do, to accept? Ah, these remote isolated societies how unusual they seem to my psyche.
Down the hill a few hundred metres we find our first Sardinian nuraghe: the Nuraghe Majori. This is what we came to Sardinia to see. There are some 7000 Nuraghi (stone towers) left in Sardinia: the product of a Nuragic group of people from the Bronze Age who built these magnificent stone towers as places of shelter, storage and safety.
This one is quite complex. On the ground floor it has a corridor through the middle of two cone-roofed circular spaces, built rather like igloos. The corridor links directly to a stone encircled open yard, then a wraparound stairway links the roofs of the first level to an upper nuraghe, used as a silo, to preserve food.
This Nuraghe looks down over several other similarly built complexes on the surrounding mountains. So many of them everywhere, so many rocks. We will never see them all. The boulders that were used to build these ancient towers are massive. The construction is drystone. How many men must have been needed simply to move the stones that make up this tiny Majori complex, let alone all the others? How did they move them in days when there were no roads up in these rock pitted parts: no smooth tracks to haul large boulders to and fro. Such precision, such mathematical skill. How little we know of these amazing people. How much we need to extrapolate from what they left behind.
We came home to a swim in our infinity pool and noticed again the tall mature eucalyptus trees soaking up the spare ground water of Sardinia. Who bought these trees to this land? And why? Why would you want these water sapping gums in this hot dry country? So much we have still to learn.
oooOOOooo
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| And here we swam |
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| A forest of cork trees |
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| Cork harvest scars close up |
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| Nuraghe Majori |
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| Linking corridor in the complex |
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