Zlarin, August 26th, 2013
KUD Koralj
Boris GregovASSOCIATION PUNTA ARTA –
Marina Viculin
Vedran Perkov
Ivana JelavićDear Zlarinians,
We need your help to collect information about everything that makes the history and identity of our island and still exists as a saved object in your families.
We are asking you to accept us and talk with us about what is saved in your family so we could record and save that for future generations.Our small museum that was set up by KUD Koralj has a small collection of donated objects. Now we would like to find out what is still saved and could be a part of our collection that is a memory of our island.
We are interested in documents, letters, seamen’s books, old photos and frames, clothes, costumes, everyday items in kitchen, for working in a field and similar, parts of furniture, souvenirs brought by deckhands from travelling, objects brought by immigrants and everything else that you think is valuable and interesting.Documents as old seamen’s books, letters and photos we can only keep in a digital form so the original would stay with you. We’ll take a photo of any other object that we recognize as interesting and describe it for our record.
Contact the Tourist Office for when we could visit you, talk and take photos of the objects. We would like to be done with this job by the end of October. Vedran Perkov and Ivana Jelavić will be working on this project.
In the contribution of the letter we are sending you our idea of museum’s development and its importance for the island.
Respectfully,
Marina Viculin
Boris Gregov
Association Punta Arta
KUD Koralj
ZAVIČAJNI MUZEJ OTOKA ZLARINA
Cultural Artistic Society Coral leads a small museum exhibition in Kažerna along with the Museum of city Šibenik. This beautiful object (with not such a beautiful history, because it was barrack and prison during the World War II) is placed in Zlarin, but belongs to Šibenik.
As the first step in developing the base for starting the process of forming museum institution we would like to record and professionally process the artifacts. The first part of listing we would be doing by ourselves, but for the second part we would engage experts for certain groups of listed objects.:
Coral processing
Fishing
Farming
Maritime
Traditional construction methods
Traditional clothes
Furniture
Dishes
Food
Music
Dances
In our vision, the future museum would be core of the cultural life for islanders and guests. The museum would have contents that would enable more intensive development of eco-tourism.
Zlarin remains preserved as a small local community and architectural core with high ambient value and as an area of biological and landscape diversity.
Today that kind of preservation of the environment and authentic island life is shown as big competitive advantage, even in the context of the ongoing decline in population. The desire to return life and permanent residents to island is also a desire to preserve the high quality of living of small communities and a reason to search for concordant sources of earnings.
The trend of permanent abandonment of the island, especially departure of young families, has to stop. Solutions need to be found in a quality way. Those solutions need to preserve living on the island by which preserved values won’t be destroyed.
Collecting and synthesizing traditional and historical experiences of life within a modern ecological museum would shape and test possible forms of modern economic activities. Primarily we talk about small family entrepreneurship because it covers extremely broad field of activities, from tourism, catering, fishing, and agriculture to culture and traditional crafts. Size and ways of conducting such activities are consistent with the concept of sustainable development of eco-tourism on the island.
That’s how the mission of the museum wouldn’t only be collecting, keeping and presenting cultural and historical materials, but also exploring possible lines of development, encouraging and showing socially cohesive effects of culture and cultural activities.
The museum is a place which produces new qualities and new meanings of values through the ways of life and making food inside the local community.
These are the qualities that we feel as being a part of the background, like an insatiable love for “the homeland”, like wish and need of emigrants who want to get back to the island.
The mission of the museum can’t be reduced to a traditional procedure – the desired effect is to encourage the members of the local community on active thinking. It seems especially important today, when people all over the world are treated as working drones instead of human-beings, deprived of all human dignity and cultural identity. That’s why the museum’s goal is to rethink about the relations between the work, culture and existence.