Olive Oil and Soparnik Are Indispensable for Croatians at Easter

Croatian Christians can­not imag­ine the most impor­tant hol­i­day of the year, Easter, with­out olives and olive oil. The Holy Week began on Palm Sunday with the bless­ing of olive branches.

“On enter­ing Jerusalem, the peo­ple cheered Jesus, wav­ing olive and palm branches,” said Milan Zgrabljić, the arch­bishop of Zadar, Croatia’s fifth-largest city.

After the bless­ing, Zgrabljić led the pro­ces­sion to the Cathedral of Saint Anastasia in the cen­ter of the ancient city, con­sid­ered older than Rome. Everyone held olive branches in their hands.

“It is not enough to hold olive branches in our hands; it is nec­es­sary to turn olive branches into tro­phies of love, tro­phies of vic­tory over hatred, unrest, quar­rels, intol­er­ance, unrest, quar­rels, dis­cords and every form of immoral­ity,” Zgrabljić said.

The Holy Week con­tin­ues on Maundy Thursday with the mass of con­se­cra­tion of olive oils donated by olive grow­ers from Žman on the island of Dugi Otok. The olive oils were trans­ported to Zadar by brac­era, a tra­di­tional boar.

The bishop will bless three oils: sick oil, used to anoint the sick; cat­e­chu­men oil, used to anoint the bap­tized; and chrism, a mix­ture of olive oil and fra­grance (mainly bal­sam), used in bap­tisms, con­fir­ma­tions and priestly and epis­co­pal ordi­na­tions.

Good Friday com­mem­o­rates Jesus’s pas­sion, cru­ci­fix­ion and death. On that day, fast­ing is oblig­a­tory for believ­ers.

In con­ti­nen­tal Croatia, beans, dried fruit, com­potes, cheese strudels and dough with wal­nuts and poppy seeds are most often eaten, along with fresh­wa­ter fish such as carp and pike.

In coastal Croatia, includ­ing Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia, locals break their fast with a vari­ety of seafood and salt­wa­ter fish, accom­pa­nied by extra vir­gin olive oil. Along with numer­ous del­i­ca­cies of the Mediterranean diet, the spe­cial one is Soparnik.

“Once upon a time, it was the food of the poor, but today it is widely pro­duced and con­sumed,” said Josip Roguljić, from Kučina, a small town on the south­ern slopes of Mount Mosor.

Kučine is a sub­urb of Solin, about ten kilo­me­ters from Split, the largest city in Dalmatia and the sec­ond-largest city in Croatia.

“The pro­duc­tion of Soparnik is a fam­ily tra­di­tion,” Roguljić said. He is the youngest mem­ber of OPG Roguljić, a fam­ily busi­ness con­sist­ing of his mother, Mirjana, father, Marin and older brother, Ivan, along with him and his wife, Antea.

They con­tinue the tra­di­tion of their ances­tors, grow­ing 500 olive trees and tend­ing 180 bee­hives in Kučine and on the island of Šolta.

They pro­duce cold-pressed extra vir­gin olive oil, honey and other bee prod­ucts. At the foot of Mount Mosor, they have a cor­ral with 30 heads of cat­tle, cows and calves. The autochtho­nous vari­eties of figs Poljarica, Bilica and Mletkinje grow in the Kučina field with sea­sonal veg­eta­bles.

“Agriculture is an open-air fac­tory,” Roguljić said. ​“That’s why we deal with sev­eral activ­i­ties. You never know when one will fail. If the olives do not bear fruit for one year, we have bee prod­ucts and vice versa. Of course, it’s best when every­thing works out.”

A for­mally trained agron­o­mist, Roguljić also pre­pares Soparnik, a tra­di­tional pas­try.

“My moth­er’s and father’s fam­i­lies have been pro­duc­ing Soparnik for time immemo­r­ial,” Roguljić said. ​“The desire to pre­serve tra­di­tion prompted us to con­tinue in the foot­steps of our ances­tors and save old recipes and meth­ods of pro­duc­tion from being for­got­ten.”

Soparnik, also called Uljenak and Zeljanik, is a tra­di­tional dish orig­i­nat­ing in the hin­ter­land of Split. This sim­ple dish was pre­pared using ingre­di­ents that were avail­able to almost every house­hold: wheat flour, red onion, olive oil and gar­lic.

The dough is kneaded from wheat flour and rolled out on sinia, round tables. The fill­ing is made with Swiss chard, which is washed, finely chopped and salted to soften it. Thinly sliced red onion is added, then the mois­ture is squeezed out by hand so it is not too wet. Olive oil is added last.

The fill­ing is spread over one stretched crust and cov­ered with the other. The dough is stretched using a wooden roller. The pie is baked on the stove and cov­ered with embers. When the pas­try is ready, it is coated with oil and gar­lic.

In the past, Soparnik was pre­pared only on fast­ing days. However, since its inclu­sion on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, it has become indis­pens­able at every Dalmatian fes­ti­val.

Although some food pro­duc­ers started mass-pro­duc­ing the pas­try, the Roguljić fam­ily still fol­lows the tra­di­tional recipe and pro­duc­tion method.

“The essence of a good Soparnik is in high-qual­ity, nat­u­rally grown chard, extra vir­gin olive oil,” he said.

The most com­mon prepa­ra­tion method is Poljica, which is savory. However, there are also two sweet ver­sions of the dish called Kučinski and Žrnovački. The prepa­ra­tion method is the same until the final stage, when ground wal­nuts and raisins are added with olive oil. Unlike Žrnovački, it is sweet­ened with sugar and chopped almonds or wal­nuts.

“We received a record num­ber of orders, and they con­tinue to arrive,” Ivan Roguljić said. Freshly baked Soparnika, olive oil, honey and bee prod­ucts are deliv­ered to the home addresses of well-known cus­tomers, and their num­bers are increas­ing.

The tra­di­tional Easter table in Croatia does not tol­er­ate many exper­i­ments: pinca, kuglof, boiled ham, horse­rad­ish, spring onions and boiled eggs are typ­i­cally served for break­fast.

For lunch, a roast is usu­ally pre­pared: veal and pota­toes, less often poul­try, pork or steaks, and most often young roasted lamb, with spring onions and new pota­toes.

The recently appointed United States ambas­sador to Croatia, Nathalie Rayes, also could not resist the tra­di­tional meal dur­ing a recent visit to Slunj, near the Plitvice Lakes in Lika. She ordered this tra­di­tional del­i­cacy in a well-known restau­rant, which was served with the indis­pens­able spring onion.

“A lot of you sug­gested that I try the lamb. And I did, here in Slunj, and it was absolutely deli­cious. No won­der it’s so pop­u­lar,” she wrote on social media plat­form X with a video of her sam­pling the lamb for the first time.

According to recent research, most Croatians intend to spend €50 to €70 on Easter lunch prepa­ra­tion, 20 per­cent less than last year. However, olive oil, Soparnik, and lamb are not among the ingre­di­ents they plan to cut back on.