engleski

A Portrait of Mediterranean Lifestyle of the Inhabitants of the Island of Drvenik Through the Pen of a Nostalgic Islander

This paper discusses the significance of a collection of short stories „Viling krug“, entitled after one of the island’s toponyms, originally created as a personal diary, that was eventually published. The sequence of episodes depicting the everyday life of Drvenik over several generations, represents a debut of literary work of the individual originating from Drvenik, driven by profound love and nostalgia for folk customs, rituals and local idiom in extinction. In order to preserve a rich oral tradition from gradual oblivion, the author Slavko Pijerov cleverly created a representative piece of art in dialectal prose. The result is an expression of personal memories supported by historical facts and empirical evidence. The author with no pretensions to be a litterateur, documents local legends and anecdotes and revives memories of the island’s eminent and legendary residents. His process also explicates some uncleared toponyms, so the collection represents not only pleasant reading for the targeted intimate public, but it is also useful for researches and academics studying toponymy and lexicology. This paper provides a short historical framework of the linguistic status of Drvenik, including an analysis of dialectal lexical structures and etymological study of Italian loanwords, most of them being from the Venetian language, reflecting four centuries of close interaction and Venetian occupation of Dalmatia. The dialect of Drvenik is a powerful instrumentality, reflecting the Mediterranean mentality and the temperament of the inhabitants. Pijerov shows how life on a small island is determined by the weather and the morphology of the land. Mastering that knowledge enables inhabitants to develop viticulture and olive growing, which, besides sailing and fishing, are among the dominant occupations of the inhabitants. The collection, which on this occasion, is analyzed from a linguistic point of view, offers valuable source of data for various anthropological and ethnological research of this Mediterranean island.

Mediterranean island, Drvenik, folk habits, local idiom, loanwords

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