THE BOOKSHELF OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY IN PULA IS (NO LONGER) THE LAST STATION OF THE TRAVEL

When arriving by train from the North to Istria, the last stop is the railway station in Pula, so the Library is the last station for travel books. We searched our fund for the travelogues exhibition and found that we have very little travelogues about Istria, and disproportionately more travelogues about distant parts of the world. The catalogs of other libraries in Europe and the world show many travel books about Istria, which are digitalised and now can be read on the internet.

Travelogues are the oldest form of tourist promotion. For today's visitors to the Adriatic coast at the time of mass tourism it is hard to believe that our coast has been until recently scarcely known in Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century travelers reported that Dalmatia was less known than Africa, that this was "the Middle East", "wild Europe", "the edge of the Orient", a periphery.
Travel has always meant education. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims looked at the travels to the sacred places as spiritual discipline, the acquisition of divine knowledge, and the enterprise that will bring them a reward in the after life. Sudden development of foreign trade in the 16th century after geographic discoveries influenced publication of practical guidances on travel and manuals for merchants, starting from the age of when it was time for travel (between ages 40 and 56). In the lists of products to be searched for in the distant countries there are left many informal, unpublished notes about paying attention to the customs of the countries to which they were traveling. In these manuals it is rarely recommended for travelers to describe natural beauties, they have to look at how the country is populated, whether the land is fertile and how it yields. Romanticism later brought enjoyment to the wild landscapes and nature, and in the 18th century a new interest in archeology is represented by travelogues such as Alason's, which was dedicated to the display of ancient monuments.
Travelers had unclear misconceptions about the delimitation of ethnic groups, and had little knowledge of the boundaries and names of geographical or administrative areas. These old works have a disadvantage for us, they have no data about the things we are interested today; they list new and old names of places, talk about administrative institutions, but don't describe homes or everyday life. The travel writers were asked to provide information about the geographic location and the origin of the place names in the manuals and from these manuals they often accepted attitudes about the characteristics of the people in the countries they have traveled to. This can be seen in description of the inhabitants of our regions. Travelers didn't come into contact with the inhabitants, although they described the characteristics of these people. The inhabitants avoided foreigners especially if they were traveling with Turkish military escorts. So, travelers didn't have the opportunity to observe the lives, customs, looks and costumes of the hosts.
The journey was a difficult venture that needed enough strength and endurance. Traveling to Western Europe was relatively safe with the help of a chariot. Temptations for passengers were a bad road situation, poor supply, shortcomings that were exposed at a time when a stranger was a rarity and provoked hostility or at least anxiety and a conspiquous physical effort to travel. With the transition to a province under the rule of the Turks, difficulties were increasing. Trips were more expensive than today because of the real cost of transportation, accommodation and nutrition, but also because they lasted longer and could have come to an unexpected retention. It is difficult to estimate how much did the trip cost, but probably ten times more than today.
Due to its geographic position, the Croatian coast was the preferred natural bridge of the European West and the Middle East. In the 15th century there was a rise of pilgrimage on the Adriatic. Improving economic opportunities in northern Europe enabled noblemen, churchmen and not particularly rich knights to embark on daring and long-lasting tourist adventures. The journey usually lasted six months or longer, depending on the route they were passing. The Turks were robbing the Balkans, and as the Middle East was stabilizing, the northerners rushed to see the southern countries. It was easier for the Germans, the French, the Dutch and the Danes to cross the Alps and come to Venice to use ships than to go on an unsafe journey through the Biscay Bay and Gibraltar to get to Palestine. The Venetians have established a tourist service and advertised shipping services and they traveled as guides. Caravans were exhausted and hungry when they arrived to Venice, where cunning hosts would hold them down for weeks because of weak winds, storms and pirate ambitions, forcing travelers to spend their money. The pilgrims themselves had to buy daily travel necessities, like spoons and plates for themselves. They bought mattresses, blankets, domestic animals for food on the way, food for those animals, wine and medicines, necessary for long sailing trip, but pirates and thunder storms were waiting for them on the sea. The passengers packed into steerage of the ship were exposed to vermin, dirt, sicknesses, days without fresh food and water. Contracts of the Venetian carriers and the pilgrims, due to such conditions, had a clause regulating the procedure with the body and property of passengers who would die on the trip. Before starting the journey the tip was to supply the traveler with wine he usually drank, because good wine could only be bought upon the arrival to Zadar and later to Dubrovnik.
The islands and shores of the Adriatic coast provided a shelter for sailors and ships from storms that could take human lives. Our ports were the only place where they came into contact with inhabitants of deeper inland territories. Those who sailed along the Adriatic coast had a lively imagination when they wrote about where the territory named Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia started and where the unclearly restricted territory that they called Sklavonia ended.
Travel books that mostly refer to other countries -Syria and the Middle East, Equatorial Africa, India and Asia, Australia, Central and North America, the North Pole and of course the Old Europe -have reached the last station on their journey (and arrived into our Library) while the travelogues that describe Istria are stored in other places in Europe. Today we have the opportunity to inspect the texts that describe our regions, because a lot of the books have already been digitalised and are available in this way, so we have to change the paradigm of our time -Europe has first met us before almost some 500 years ago and now we can read about it.
There already exists a project of the Institute of Art History from Zagreb: "Dalmatia -a destination of European Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th century", on the website http://grandtourdalmatia.org. There is also a similar project about the Italian part of the Adriatic coast the data is collected by the project http://www.viaggioadriatico.it/ of International Interuniversity Center of Studies on the Adriatic Journey, University of Salento, from Lecce, Italy. We should also mention The Archive of Adriatic Studies in Venice asa.archiviostudiadriatici.it, and a project pro.europeana. eu/project/europeanatravel.
Below is a selection of more than hundred and seventy of such books which describe Istria during all those years, with links to the full texts visible on the internet: