CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

The people of the Karst and their ability to adapt to the karst landscape deserve the most credit for the fact that the Karst was entered on UNESCO's World Heritage Cultural Landscapes list.

Karst soil is unforgiving and sometimes hostile to man, because it provides few natural resources. To use what little it can provide, the inhabitants of the Karst had to substantially change the landscape in order to survive.

Above all, the karst landscape is a result of human work and visible proof of the symbiosis man can establish with nature. The people of the Karst have not left nature to its own devices - they have tamed the nature and made it more benevolent to man.

Even a short walk around the karst landscape reveals hundreds of years of tenacious work of people, who were able to create fertile fields in places where only piles of stones used to stand. It is enough to see the stone and dry-built walls which protect plots of land, meadows and paths for one to realise how, generation by generation, the Kraševci have been picking up stones and rocks from their fields and meadows and putting them away to create a bit more fertile land.

The effort of these people can be seen in numerous man-made sinkholes, which are different from the natural dolines, as they no longer contain stones. The latter were placed at the bottom of the sinkhole, then fertile soil would be scraped from the neighbouring slopes and pockets and poured over the stones. By doing so, the farmers artificially created larger, flatter and deeper croplands.

Numerous sinkhole ponds are another example of man's ingenuity and hard work - these artificial watering holes were used for cattle. Since water is scarce in the Karst during the dry summer months, people have learned how to collect rainwater in typical stone wells, called štirna, next to their houses or in the middle of the village.

In the middle of commons, there are stone houses for shepherds, who used them as a shelter from the summer storms. Karst villages are unique in terms of architecture, with their narrow streets, stone crosses (called pil), monumental main gates, typical chimneys and stone roofs - a rather rare, but still very recognisable element of karst architecture.