Walks through the multi-layered landscape of Šavrinkas’ Istria: eggs, books, backpacks and stony paths

Abstract

Istria, a peninsula in the Adriatic, has always been a place through which many roads have passed and where boundaries have constantly changed. This paper takes up a concrete route and discusses it from three different perspectives: as a trade route connecting rural Istria with the city of Trieste and used in the twentieth century by women traders called Šavrinkas; the Šavrinkas’ route as transposed into a work of literature; and as an ethnographic route, specifically the track that we ourselves traversed and documented. The purpose of our study is to discuss the interrelation between routes, narratives and walking, while walking is deployed as a cognitive and methodological tool. By discussing these questions, the article contributes to the general debates within landscape research, while it also elaborates on walking as a practice of understanding as well as a method enabling a smooth entrance of the researcher into the research field.