Cockta: The Rosehip Soda From the Former Yugoslavia
The neck of the plastic bottle has 1953 stamped into it. A plastic bottle boasting the year when plastic bottles didn't exist, and the label adds "Legendary Taste" in English - anyone seeing it on a shelf for the first time would guess it's a new brand buying itself a past. This one already has one.
Cockta (Macedonian: Кокта) is a Slovenian fizzy drink made from rosehips, lemon and eleven herbal extracts, caffeine-free, born as the Yugoslav stand-in for the Coca-Cola nobody could get, and in the shops of North Macedonia it sits next to the homegrown gazoza as if it had always been there. Its color is as dark as cola. That, though, is where the resemblance ends.
Why Cockta Isn't Cola, and Where It Really Comes From
Travel sites call it "Yugoslav cola" and they get it wrong twice over. Cola it isn't: the recipe has no caffeine and no phosphoric acid, just rosehips and herbs. And it's only half Yugoslav - it was dreamed up in Slovenia, at Slovenija vino, a Ljubljana company, and Yugoslavia as a whole took it up afterwards. The one thing Cockta really shares with Coca-Cola is the name: the chemist Emerik Zelinka, who mixed the drink, picked a name that sounded like the American brand and hinted at the English word cocktail, because rosehips, lemon and herbs are a cocktail, after all. These days Cockta belongs to the whole of the former Yugoslavia - they drink it in Croatia, where people treat it as their own, across the rest of the old federation and here in Macedonia too, where it arrives from Slovenia; I never found a Macedonian clone of the sort Cedevita has in Cevitana. And while we're on national answers to Coca-Cola: Iran's Zamzam also started out as a licensed Pepsi that the revolution nationalized. Cockta never had a license, only rosehips.
How Cockta Came About and Nearly Went Under
Shortage fathered it, and it got a grand debut. A year before the launch, the company director asked Zelinka to come up with the first Yugoslav fizzy drink to replace Western cola, and on 8 March 1953 the company showed off the result at the ski jumping competition in Planica: saleswomen dressed as Cockta lined the road from the railway station all the way to the jumping hill and handed out samples to the crowd. In under a year four million bottles were sold. Then came 1968: Coca-Cola entered the Yugoslav market and stripped Cockta of first place within a few years; in the nineties, when Yugoslavia broke apart, the drink almost went with it, and only nostalgia pulled it back.
The Rosehips Inside and How Cockta Is Drunk
The main ingredient is the rosehip, the fruit of the wild rose that otherwise ends up in tea and jam. Here it gives the drink a sour backbone and a slightly astringent finish, caramelized sugar lends it the color anyone would mistake for cola, lemon and orange add freshness, and the eleven herbs are guarded by the maker as jealously as Coca-Cola guards its own recipe. If you want to know what Cockta tastes like, picture the rosehip tea people brew for children with a cold - only chilled, fizzy and with a herbal bitterness at the end. The Free version you can see in the photo skips the sugar and uses artificial sweeteners instead; it has only been around since 2019, so anyone curious about what the crowd in Planica was drinking should reach for the Original.
There's no ritual around Cockta, as Slovenian sources readily admit: it's an everyday drink, served ice-cold, with anything at all, best from the small glass bottle whose neck is now shaped like a rosehip. In Macedonia you'll find it in every larger supermarket in PET bottles. One practical detail: Cockta only poses as cola - anyone expecting Coca-Cola will be taken aback, anyone expecting rosehips will be pleased. Financial Times writers once put it fourth in a taste test of thirteen cola drinks, ahead of Pepsi.
My Bottle From Skopje
I bought a bottle myself in Skopje, at the supermarket in the Skopje City Mall, along with a bottle of gazoza. Going by the color I was braced for something like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, and the taste was a very long way from both of them. Half a liter cost 51 MKD (0.80 EUR).
What you mostly get for that money is a pleasant surprise: rosehip tea with bubbles in it - and none of what the color promises.
