ON THE BALL (BOĆA, BUĆA, BALOTA…)

As its name says, the game of bocce was named after the essential part of the equipment – the ball. The Croatian term boća comes from the Italian name for a ball, a sphere – boccia. Along with boća, the term balota is also frequently used. With the development of the game, the material used to make the balls has changed: from stone, to wood and artificial materials, to metal. It is interesting to watch, as a spectator, how each bocce player is characterised by a specific game style, a unique way of tossing the ball. As our interviewee from Brod Moravice pointed out, some throw palm up, others palm down.”

The memory of “old” bocce balls is kept in the publication Jakovarski boćari (Bocce Players from Jadranovo): “The balls were first made of stone, and later of wood. The stone ones were made by our ancestors who were stonemasons, because they were real craftsmen. (…) The wooden ones were made from tree stumps, and, being much better than stone balls, they have, little by little, replaced the stone ones over time.” An interesting source of information is also the photography log book of the already mentioned Rijeka photographer Viktor Hreljanović, which is a carefully kept record of photographs he took. The note describing the photo of a wooden bocce ball states that it was made from a type of maple tree called Montpellier maple. In addition, he provides the valuable information that, in the mid-1990s, such balls were still made by Milan Hlača Matejčinov “on his lathe in Dražice”. We also know that in Brod Moravice, the local turner called Marković, who learned his trade on the Goli Otok island, made bocce balls. Other sources also state that wooden bocce balls were made from roots of various trees (dogwood, oak, hornbeam, yew, etc.). In a chance encounter in Milovčići on the island of Krk, the information was collected that bocce balls were also made from Jerusalem thorn by children herding sheep. Since wood tends to become dry and to crack, wooden balls were kept in manure slurries in order to preserve the humidity of the wood. Today, bocce sport competitions exclusively use hollow balls made of brass or steel. The maximum weight of the ball is 1400 g, and the diameter is from 90 to 110 mm. However, the possibility of finding such balls at a smaller local bocce court, in the hands of traditional players, is not unheard of.

We have highlighted the bulin or balin (from Italian pallino ‘a small ball’) many times as the star of the game because every player tries to toss his bocce balls as close to it as possible. Its being under constant attack has resulted to a Croatian saying Ne drži me za bulina, meaning ‘don’t take me for a fool’. In the traditional game of bocce, the bulin is somewhat smaller than the other balls, but in the bocce sport, its size is specifically determined and its colour has to be different than that of the others. Each team and the referee have a measuring rod of 50 cm in length, used to determine the distance of the balls from the balin. During the game, each team has to mark the positions of their balls, when the balls have come to a complete rest, by drawing lines at a right angle under the balls’ centre, so that, later in the game, illegally moved balls could be returned to their former position.