A Knowledge Older Than Written Memory
September 26, 2026 · Azra ZK
The Botanical Inheritance of the Balkans, the Ancient East and the Apothecary Tradition
With eleven years of dedicated research across four continents, Collection Nº 99 is a living inheritance of time-honoured ancient traditions of healing and renewal through botanicals from God’s garden.
For thousands of years, humanity has looked to the natural world for nourishment, restoration and remedies.
Before the modern apothecary, there was the garden. There were mountain herbs gathered in season, flowers dried for winter, leaves steeped into water, seeds pressed for their oils, roots simmered slowly, resins warmed and burned, botanical oils prepared by hand.
Knowledge was learned through observation, experience and repetition, then carried from one generation to the next. Across ancient cultures, the names of the plants and the methods of preparation differed, yet the relationship endured: between people, plants and place.
An Inheritance of Bosnia and the Balkans
For House of Excelsior, this history is not distant. It is also part of our Balkan inheritance. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a land of extraordinary botanical richness, mountains, forests, valleys and meadows where knowledge of medicinal and aromatic plants has remained woven into everyday life for generations.
Within Bosnian homes, herbs were not regarded as something exotic. They belonged to the rhythm of life. Plants were gathered in their season, carried home, dried and preserved. Leaves and flowers became herbal infusions, while other botanicals were prepared as decoctions, oils, compresses, syrups and balms.
The traditional Bosnian mehlem, a botanical balm prepared from herbs together with ingredients such as resins, beeswax, oils or honey, became its own distinctive expression of this herbal knowledge.
Much of this wisdom was not learned from books. It travelled through families, from elder to younger, from mother to daughter, from one household to another. Research into Bosnian ethnobotanical traditions has documented knowledge transmitted verbally across generations, preserving an extraordinary relationship with the plants of the surrounding landscape.
Plants such as Calendula, Nettle, Yarrow and Plantain, alongside many other familiar Balkan herbs, appear repeatedly within these traditions. They were plants people knew, plants they gathered, plants they prepared, plants that became part of the household vocabulary of natural healing.
And perhaps most beautifully, the infusion itself has remained one of the simplest and most enduring forms of botanical preparation: water, herbs, time. A practice almost elemental in its simplicity.
Herbarium & Medicine from God’s Garden
This is not only a history I studied. It is one I lived.
Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, my love for the natural world began in primary school, where my favourite project was creating a herbarium, gathering herbs throughout the four seasons and studying their mesmerising colours, textures, fragrances and traditional uses.
My family carries a rich inheritance of Balkan herbal knowledge, and herbal remedies, infusions and natural preparations formed part of my upbringing.
Long before I understood botany as a subject, I understood plants through experience.
Through fields and seasons.
Through herbs drying in the home.
Through watching my mother prepare herbal blends with knowledge that was not always written down, but remembered, practised and passed from one generation to the next.
Later in life, after navigating significant health challenges of my own including Hashimoto’s autoimmune condition and surgeries I found myself returning to many of the simple things I had known since childhood.
My beautiful mother would prepare nourishing Bosnian soups and traditional meals for me - the kind of food we call na kašiku, “on the spoon” alongside herbal infusions.
She would often say, “Drink your food and eat your tea,” a simple reminder to slow down, nourish deeply and receive with gratitude what had been prepared with intention from God’s garden.
There was no grand ceremony around it.
Just the instinct of a mother caring for her daughter in the way she knew best.
Today, I find myself carrying that same instinct into my own home and preparing herbal infusions for my two boys.
And perhaps that is how these traditions truly survive.
Not only through books or formal study, but through memory.
Through observation.
Through what we watch our mothers do.
Through what we later find ourselves doing for our own children.
That childhood herbarium has stayed with me.
Only much later did I understand that the fields, pressed flowers, household remedies and botanical rituals of my childhood had already planted something in me.
Something that would eventually become Divine Apothecary.
From one generation to the next, the language of healing and renewal remained remarkably simple:
Prayer.
Love.
Na kašiku.
Herbal remedies.
Sunlight.
The Ancient Apothecary
Long before wellness became an industry, the apothecary was botanical. It was found in gardens, forests, mountain meadows and household stores: a handful of dried herbs, a bottle of infused oil, a jar of resin, a bundle of flowers hanging to dry, a pot of water warming over the fire.
There is something profoundly human in this history. Across geography and generations, people repeatedly returned to the natural world during moments of change, recovery, rest and renewal.
Modern botanical science has transformed our understanding of plants, identifying their chemical constituents and studying mechanisms that earlier generations could never have known. Yet the older inheritance remains important. It reminds us that botanical knowledge did not begin with the modern wellness movement. It has been accumulating for millennia.
The Garden as Living Intelligence
At House of Excelsior, we approach this inheritance with reverence. Nature is not simply an ingredient source, it is a living archive of botanical intelligence. Every plant has its own character, its own composition, its own season, its own history of relationship with humanity.
Sacred Herbal Intelligence is our way of honouring divine creation and that relationship, bringing together historical knowledge, botanical research, traditional practice and intentional formulation within a contemporary ritual of renewal. We do not seek to recreate ancient medicine, nor do we claim ownership over traditions that have belonged to cultures and communities for generations. We honour their enduring lesson: that the relationship between the human being and the botanical world is ancient, intimate and worthy of remembrance.
From the Balkans to the Ancient East
Within Divine Apothecary, these botanical traditions meet. The herbs of the Balkan household sit beside botanicals whose histories belong to the ancient Middle East and surrounding lands: Nettle, Yarrow, Chamomile, Plantain, Hawthorn, Calendula, Cleavers, Goldenrod. And at the centre, Sidr.
Together they form a bridge between landscapes and traditions, between the mountain herb and the sacred tree, between the household infusion and the ritual apothecary, between ancestral memory and contemporary formulation. This is where the botanical language of House of Excelsior becomes its own.
Sidr - The Sacred Seal of Nº 99 Collection
The Sacred Herbal Intelligence of the Nº 99 Collection is anchored by Sidr, the Lote Tree of Paradise. Honoured across Middle Eastern tradition, Sidr carries a long association with cleansing, purification and blessing. Within House of Excelsior, it has become the sacred botanical seal of Nº 99 Collection.
Sidr is woven throughout the collection not as an isolated hero ingredient, but as part of a greater botanical composition. It meets olive and black seed, rose and resin, mineral and herb, ancient botanical traditions and contemporary ritual. Together, these ingredients form what House of Excelsior calls the Sacred Alliance of Renewal, botanicals selected not merely for what they are individually, but for the relationship created between them.
The Garden Remained
Civilisations changed. Empires rose and fell. Knowledge travelled across continents. Methods became more sophisticated. Science revealed what earlier generations could only observe.
Yet through it all, the garden remained: the leaf, the seed, the root, the flower, the resin, the oil, the water and the human instinct to gather them, study them, prepare them and pass that knowledge forward.
For me, that story is also circular.
What began as childhood observation became curiosity. Curiosity became study. Study became eleven years of research. And eventually, that research became Divine Apothecary.
Only later did I understand that the fields, herbs, dried flowers, household blends and herbarium of my childhood had already planted something in me.
Divine Infusion Nº 99 carries this inheritance into the everyday ritual. Its carefully selected nine botanicals bring together herbs familiar to Balkan household tradition with Sidr, creating a contemporary infusion shaped by memory, research and reverence for the healing traditions and natural medicine of God’s garden.
Sacred Herbal Intelligence is my remembrance of that inheritance - a meeting of ancestral botanical knowledge, personal memory and the ritual philosophy of House of Excelsior.
From the mountains and herbal traditions of the Balkans to the ancient botanical traditions of the East, Nº 99 continues a relationship that has existed for thousands of years: between nature, ritual and renewal.
For me, it is deeply personal.
Divine Infusion Nº 99 is prepared with love, reverence and the same respect for herbal tradition that has lived within my own family for generations.
And from my family to yours, this knowledge older than written memory is offered with sincerity, reverence and love with the heartfelt hope that it brings moments of stillness, remembrance and renewal into your home, your life, and the lives of those you love.
With sincerity and reverence,
Azra ZK
Founder, Divine Apothecary by House of Excelsior
Born in Ancient Wisdom. For the Elevated Soul.
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