Original scientific paper
“The age of light has arrived! Stratiko has came to Hvar!” - Bishop and Enlightenment scholar Ivan Dominik Stratiko on the people of Hvar
Ana Perinić Lewis
; Institut za antropologiju, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Pavao Rudan
; Institut za antropologiju, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
This paper offers an analysis of an 18th-century letter on the Croatian central-Dalmatian island of Hvar and its inhabitants. Ivan Dominik Stratiko (1732–1799), Italian and Dalmatian enlightenment scholar and the Bishop of Hvar, who belonged to the enlightenment circle associated with the island of Hvar (Alberto Fortis, Julije Bajamonti and Ivan Dominik Stratiko), composed this letter in 1786. Stratiko’s description of the inhabitants of the village of Bogomolje (in the eastern part of Hvar) largely corresponds to Fortis’s description of Morlachs in his Travels into Dalmatia and inherits the stereotype of the “noble savage”, embodied in the figure of the inhabitant of the mountainous Dalmatian hinterland. The letter provides a representation of the island space, at the time ruled by the Venetian Republic, which is primarily directed at the intellectual European public of the Enlightenment era; it further describes the islanders as the European Others. The letter is moreover an imaginarium, a collection of ideas about the island “natives” used to describe the Hvar highlanders.
Keywords
the island of Hvar; Ivan Dominik Stratiko; island highlanders; Morlachs
Hrčak ID:
72676
URI
Publication date:
16.9.2011.
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