Tourists in Western Yugoslavia Clamor for Mushroom Fabled to Pep Up Sexuality

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — A wild mushroom reportedly capable of restoring virility and enhancing fertility is causing quite a scramble among tourists in western Yugoslavia.

Hundreds of foreign visitors, mostly men, are tramping through fields and forests in search of the morel, or Morchella Esculanta , which grows in the region around Mt. Romanija in the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said.

Villagers tell visitors of the wife of a retired woodcutter who had 12 children, the last one when she was 57. Or there’s 101-year-old Zada Smajic, mother of 10, whose husband died a few years ago but was “full of vigor until his last day.”

The fungus grows mostly around the village of Preljubovici--the name translates as “adulterers”--and is named after a Turkish governor several centuries ago who is said to have discovered the mushroom’s powers.