Fishermen
Fish was not considered a delicacy in the past like it is today. Fishermen traded fish successfully in the spring and autumn, while they could not sell it in the summer, no matter how rich the catch was. According to an old folk wisdom, fish should be eaten only in the months containing the letter “rˮ (which means not in May, June, July, and August, when the temperatures are high) because fish spoils quickly. There were no refrigerators, so the goods the fishermen exclusively traded were kept in so-called “iceboxesˮ or boats and carts covered with grass.
To be able to buy flour to feed their families during the winter, fishermen were forced to work in the fields as day labourers during the summer. Fish were best sold during fasting periods and on religious holidays like St. Nicholas, when people eat Lenten food. The trouble was that during these holidays, before the construction of the Đerdap hydropower plant, the Danube used to be so low that people could wade across this powerful river near Krčedin. Without water, there were no fish, so clever fishermen were drying and smoking their summer catch to have something for trade during the “peaksˮ in autumn and winter.
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Mihajlo Petrović (1868–1943), the famous Serbian mathematician and pioneer of a high mathematical education in Serbia, is equally known as a big lover of fishing and the Danube, after which, in fact, he has got his vernacular name, Mika Alas. As the word ‘alas’ itself become rare and almost forgotten (from the Hungarian halász – fisherman, a river fisherman by occupation), so all the life on the river and off the river went into history, in order to largely become a part of the ‘sports and entertainment’ domain, the so-called ‘fishing’ (of course, at those times there were fishermen fishing for fun as well, but they were the subject of mockery by real fishermen; it used to be said: „The fishing rod is a rod that has one catfish at both ends!ˮ)
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