Otavio Štokovac Rapatočki was born the 3.4.1921. in Kolari, a small village close to Grožnjan-Grisignana. From small childhood he has begun to work with wood. Maybe that’s because every journalist that came to visit him write about his love for wood and blablabla and so on in order to make the readers content. He worked as a carpenter in Kolari and then, in the fifty’s, moved to Trieste .
Nearly like Kafka that has worked in Trieste for the Assurances Generali or the Lloyd or something similar apart for the fact that Otavio worked as a carpenter.
He is a music lover so he played in his free time, but the extra time of the being in pension allowed it to give him self completely to the construction of the Bajs (the Istrian variation of the viola da gamba), a very popular instrument in the north-west part of the the Istrian peninsula. He became the only constructor of Bajs to the world, because the construction and the use of the Bajs were practically dead at that time. Many ethno-musicologists have written about him. Renato Pernić and Dario Marušić, just to name a cople of them. Obviously, also many journalists have written about him in order to earn a decent salary. He became a star in the local press.
However.
He is still alive. Now he is situated in Novigrad, he doesn’t work at all, maybe because of his age (84). If you came to Kolari 60, Grisignana, Istria , Croatia you will probably see me and anybody else.