Istrox

𝐃𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨-𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭 (𝐃𝐢𝐜𝐭̦𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐮𝐥 𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐥𝐮𝐢 𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐚̂𝐧, 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐲 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒) 𝐢𝐧 𝐙𝐚𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐛.

Two members of our team – Martin Maiden and Oana Uță Bărbulescu – were in Zagreb on the 25th of September for a presentation of the fifth and last volume of the Dictionary of the Istro-Romanian Dialect (Dicționarul dialectului istroromân, Romanian Academy Publishing House, 2024), which represents a lifetime’s work by the eminent Romanian linguist and dialectologist Professor Petru Neiescu

The event took place thanks to the kind auspices of the The Romanian Embassy in Zagreb and of Mrs Mihaela Cămărășan, Romanian ambassador to Croatia. It was attended by Croatian guests, including Professor August Kovačec of the Croatian Academy of Science, also a world authority on Istro-Romanian and on Romanian, by Staša Skenžić, head of service and Viktor Koska, advisor within the Directorate for National Minorities of the Croatian Ministry of Education and Mass Media, by representatives of Croatian publishing houses, by Associate Professor Dr Petar Radosavljević, head of the Department of Romanian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - University of Zagreb, by Associate Professor Dr Ivana Olujić, editor-in-chief of the Romanian-Croatian bilingual magazine "VERSO", by Dr Silvia Giurgiu, lecturer at the same department and for the Institute of the Romanian Language, by students at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Romanian Language and Literature - University of Zagreb, as well as by members of the Association of Romanians in Croatia.

In recent years, Dr Uță Bărbulescu and Prof. Maiden, working with Prof. Ana-Maria Pop and Prof. Gabriel Bărdășan of the Universitatea de Vest, Timișoara, and with the constant support and expert advice of Professor August Kovačec, have been working to publish the final volume of the dictionary, which had sadly remained unfinished at the time of Professor Neiescu’s death in 2020. Particular thanks are due to Prof. Neiescu’s daughter, Mrs Lucia Neiescu, for giving us access to all her father’s materials and thereby enabling us to bring to completion his extraordinary achievement.

The dictionary is an invaluable tool for linguistic researchers. It also stands as a monument to Professor Neiescu’s scholarship and to the life, language, and culuture of the now small but still lively community of Istro-Romanian speakers without whom—as Professor Neiscu would have been the first to acknowledge— the dictionary would have been impossible.

... And here we are with Bruna Staraj, a new acquaintance whom we met the other day, while interviewing Mirjana Peculić.
Many thanks for your time - and for kindly opening the church in Brdo so we could visit it.

We also visited Mirjana Peculić at her house in Kostrčani.
We first met Mrs. Mirjana - together with her late mother Nerina - back in 2019, on our first visit to Istria.

Their house in Kostrčani appears in the cover photo of our project (top of this page), where you can see Nerina and Mirjana (a child in the 1960s), alongside Tony Hurren, Frane Stroligo (Cattolico), Valeria Jurman-Posidel, and Dolores Posidel (also a child at the time).

We couldn't pass through Istria without revisiting an acquaintance from our very first trip, back in 2019 - Pepo Glavina.
Here with Ștefania Costea and Fabian Helmrich... and with a new notebook where we hope that he will continue to record the history of the community in Šušnjevica and beyond.

After Žejane, we moved on to Lovran.
Many thanks to Ana Štroligo and Andrija Herceg for talking with us!

And here we are, in Žejane, with Biserka Doričić, Boris Juračić, and Mauro Doričić.
Many thanks for taking the time to talk to us
(Martin Maiden, Ștefania Costea, Fabian Helmrich).

Moving on to Žejane. More to come soon.

Part of our team is already in Istria. Here they are with two of our interviewees, Mrs. Vilma Afrić and Mrs. Sonja Simone, at the Zvončarnica café in Matulji.

As we are preparing for a new trip to Istria, here is a brief report on our trip from April 2025.

From 11 April to 18 April 2025, the hISTROX team made a field trip to the Istrian peninsula, to renew and reinforce the links we had established with speakers of Žejanski and Vlaški during our previous visit in 2019 and during the exhibition we organized at the Muzeum Lapidarium in Novigrad in 2022. Our main aim, through free or semi-directed conversation and by linguistic questionnaires, was to find out more about the recent developments in the life of the community and about its language. In addition to visiting Žejane (for the northern variety of Istro-Romanian) and Šušnjevica, Oprič, Rijeka, Kastav, Matulji, Opatija, and Labin (for the southern varieties), a visit was also made to Trieste (Italy) to meet members of the diasporic Istro-Romanian community there. Uță Bărbulescu focused on Trieste and then Žejane, while Costea, Brădeanu, and Helmrich concentrated on the southern dialect area.

Link to the report in comments.

Od 11. do 18. travnja 2025. hISTROX tim boravio je na terenskom istraživanju na istarskom poluotoku, s ciljem obnove i jačanja veza koje smo uspostavili s govornicima žejanskog i vlaškog jezika tijekom našeg prethodnog posjeta 2019. godine i tijekom izložbe koju smo organizirali u Muzeju Lapidarium u Novigradu 2022. godine. Naš je glavni cilj bio saznati više o nedavnim promjenama u životu zajednice i o samome jeziku kroz slobodne ili poluusmjerene razgovore i jezične upitnike. Uz posjet Žejanama (za sjevernu varijantu istrorumunjskog) i Šušnjevici, Opriću, Rijeci, Kastvu, Matuljima, Opatiji i Labinu (za južne varijante), posjetili smo i Trst (Italija) kako bismo se susreli s članovima iseljeničke istrorumunjske zajednice. Uță Bărbulescu fokusirala se na Trst, a zatim na Žejane, dok su se Costea, Brădeanu i Helmrich usredotočili na područje južnih dijalekata.