Balkan Vital Graphics

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BALKAN VITAL GRAPHICS

BACKGROUND

MINING

WATER

NATURE

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“I didn’t even want to earn any money. I just wanted to get my school books. Seven kilo- grams of camomile was the price. Too high? [...] Later I drank nothing but linden flower tea. No use. First, I definitely had to get hold of a good camomile-picker. This appli- ance, equipped with a rusty iron comb with twenty-nine teeth, was a primitively assem- bled box. The wooden box weighed almost two kilograms and could hold two to three pounds of camomile. Full of verve I swept the iron comb through the camomile, pulled the box up, and about thirty flowers fell into the belly of the wooden box. In three hours it was full. My arm had long since gone numb. I was breathing heavily, the strain made me sweat and I measured time in camomile- flower-gram-units. My summer was called “camomile” and weighed seven kilograms, from mid-June to mid-September.” Translated extract from 7 Kilo Zeit by Rum- jana Zacharieva .

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Camomile summer The Balkans are home to an outstanding number of medicinal, cosmetic and aromatic plants, with a long- standing tradition of harvesting them. The tradition is handed down from one generation to the next and most pickers know a great deal about harvesting methods, which plants are picked and for what purpose, and the best times to go picking. But such knowledge is declin- ing, despite the fact that Balkan countries still harvest high quality products. The area is remarkably rich with the potential to play an important part in the regional and global market for me- dicinal plants. In terms of quantity, Bulgaria and Albania are the two leading exporters in southeast Europe, the

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former ranking among the top 10 exporters worldwide. Harvesting wild medicinal and aromatic plants is also a major source of income in rural areas in all the coun- tries concerned. Lastly, the Balkans are one of the most competitive sources on the world market. However, stocks of many wild species have recently de- clined. Some species are now rare or endangered due to the loss of their natural habitat, excessive picking, soil erosion and other factors. Protecting wild medicinal and aromatic plants requires an effective management system to ensure harvesting is sustainable. Among oth- ers, the environmental awareness of pickers and their understanding of the stakes needs to be improved.

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