Measure for wood

Location: Soline, N 45 09.052, E 14 36.561

Necessity is the best teacher, goes the old saying. The people who earned a living for themselves and their families by selling wood for heating in Rijeka, Crikvenica, etc. probably lived by it as well. Many of those ‘shippers’ were unalphabets, i.e. illiterates. They were wise nevertheless: in order to avoid being cheated during a trade-off, they had a ‘mould’ made for the so-called ‘islander’s wood measuring tape’ (‘bodulski metar drva’). As many meters, that many coins and later bills! You can witness a part of that history at one of the departing points of the former merchants, i.e. on the waterfront (pier) in Soline.