Medical and food ethnobotany among Albanians and Serbs living in the Shtërpcë/Štrpce area, South Kosovo

Abstract

Ethnobotanical research in the Balkans is important for providing concrete insights aimed at developing small-scale markets of local medicinal plants and food products to support rural development. An ethnobotanical field study was carried out in the spring of 2017 among Muslim Albanians and Christian Orthodox Serbs living in 20 villages located in South Kosovo. The aim of the study was to assess if two different ethnic affiliations played a role in shaping traditions of local plant uses by ethnic groups living in the same natural environment in South Kosovo over many centuries. The field survey was conducted via semi-structured interviews with 181 local adults who were chosen for their retention of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) regarding traditional uses of wild and cultivated food and medicinal plants and fungi relevant to either human or animal health. A total of 122 botanical and fungal folk taxa, belonging to 51 families, and 19 other domestic remedies were recorded. The most common plants species cited by the study participants belongs to family Rosaceae, followed by Lamiaceae, and Asteraceae. Approximately 10 % of the total reports have not been previously recorded in the Western Balkans.Comparison of the recorded reports between the Serbian and Albanian demonstrated that only 28.4 % of the recorded remedies are shared between the two ethnic groups, thus confirming the importance of religious and ethnic divides in shaping divergent traditional uses of natural resources. A more “herbophilic” attitude of the Slavic population (pointed out in previous studies) was not evident in this survey.