engleski

Borderlands, marginality, environment:The Croatian interplay

Borderlands, marginality and environment are issues that are generally strongly interrelated and have particular expression and meaning in Croatian Dalmatia. In a wider sense, Dalmatia is a border region throughout much of its history, since the Middle Ages. Specific position between the borderlands and the littoral developmental axis has launched the marginal character of the karst Dalmatian interior with considerable environmental response. Environmental response has different expressions due to the multiple factors interplay and their changing significance in the course of the centuries: borderlands, karst, and littoralization as inner and outer marginality factors. After the border stabilization between Venetian Republic and Ottoman Empire on the territory of Dalmatian interior in the 18 th century, the marginal borderland region gained strategic importance. The Venetian Republic fostered the colonization, settlement and agriculture by a number of documents of land assignment and land use conditions in order to fortify the newly acquired territory. Consequently, narratives and graphic sources of the time well documented the environmental response to population and cattle number increase. Deforestation is the general feature of the 18 century Dalmatian interior. The second half of the 20th century brought the turn in man-environment relations .The Dalmatian hinterland with its traditional livelihood was strongly affected by the littoralization processes. Depopulation, land abandonment and dissolving the traditional livelihood induced the corresponding environmental response in terms of natural process of vegetation succession and the re-afforestation as well as less favourable change such as traditional cultural landscape loss.

environmental history; historical geography; borderlands; marginality; environmental change; Croatia; Dalmatia

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