Abstract
BackgroundBelarus is an Eastern European country, which has been little studied ethnobotanically. The aim of the study was to compare largely unpublished 19th century sources with more contemporary data on the use of wild food plants.MethodsThe information on 19th century uses is based on twelve, mainly unpublished, responses to Józef Rostafiński’s questionnaire from 1883, and the newly discovered materials of the ethnographer Michał Federowski, who structured his data according to Rostafiński’s questionnaire and documented it with voucher specimens. Rostafiński’s questionnaire was concerned mainly with Polish territories, but for historical reasons this also encompassed a large part of Belarus, and we analyzed only the twelve responses (out of the few hundred Rostafiński obtained), which concerned the present Belarus. These data were compared with a few 20th century ethnographic sources, and our own 40 interviews and questionnaires from Belarus.Results and discussion58 taxa of wild food plants used in the 19th century were identified. Some of them are still used in modern Belarus, others are probably completely forgotten. In the 19th century several species of wild greens were widely used for making soups. Apart from Rumex, other wild greens are now either forgotten or rarely used. The list of species used in the 20th and 21st century encompasses 67 taxa. Nearly half of them were mentioned by Rostafiński’s respondents. The list of fruit species has not changed much, although in the 19th century fruits were mainly eaten raw, or with dairy or floury dishes, and now apart from being eaten raw, they are incorporated in sweet dishes like jams or cakes. Modern comparative data also contain several alien species, some of which have escaped from cultivation and are gathered from a semi-wild state, as well as children's snacks, which were probably collected in the 19th century but were not recorded back then.ConclusionThe responses to Rostafiński from 1883 present extremely valuable historical material as the use of wild food plants in Belarus has since undergone drastic changes, similar to those, which have taken place in other Eastern European countries.
Highlights
Belarus is an Eastern European country, which has been little studied ethnobotanically
The responses to Rostafiński from 1883 present extremely valuable historical material as the use of wild food plants in Belarus has since undergone drastic changes, similar to those, which have taken place in other Eastern European countries
There has been a renewed interest in wild food plants in recent years due to world-wide concerns about the quality of food made from mass-produced crop plants, which are poor in micronutrients and grown in petroleum based agricultural systems [1,2,3,4,5]
Summary
Belarus is an Eastern European country, which has been little studied ethnobotanically. Over the last few years, reviews of archival ethnographic studies concerning wild food plant use have been published in some eastern and northern European countries: Poland [6,7,8], Estonia [9], Hungary [10], Sweden [11] and Slovakia [12]. At the same time it is a country with a very rich folklore It was Kazimierz Moszyński (1887–1959), the author of Kultura ludowa Słowian (the Folk culture of Slavs), who pointed out that the present area of Belarus is one of the parts of Europe where many vestiges of traditional culture had been preserved [14,15]. Due to its political isolation and the fact that a part of its population still lives in traditional-style villages scattered over this heavily wooded country, Belarus is a very important place for European ethnobiology
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