PITS

Pits

One of the witnesses to the difficult life of the former Neretva people are the agricultural arable lands intersected by canals, known in the Neretva valley as jendeki. The word jendeki is of Turkish origin. The jendeki are the remnants of the process known as jendečenje, in which, by hand, with the help of special long-handled hoes and large shovels known as badilji, the previously unsuitable marshy soil for agriculture was transformed into arable land, which is why we could call it primitive melioration. The jendeki were usually made in autumn or early spring when the vegetation was dormant, and by pulling the marshy soil out of the water to the surface, channels perpendicular to the flow of the river were created. They were usually between 1.5 and 2 meters deep, 2 to 6 meters wide, and about 200 meters long. The result of this was the elevation of the surface between two jendeki by about 80 centimeters, which provided protection from the tides and protection from the destruction of crops that were still abundantly supplied with water. Thus, in addition to the arable land along the immediate edge of the valley, they also spread deeper into the former swamp, which ensured the further development of agriculture and the improvement of the living conditions of the Neretvans of that time. Later, after World War II, in the process of land reclamation, human labor was replaced by machinery, which played an important role in the reclamation of large swampy areas, especially in the area downstream of Metković.