Page 108 - Mocarelli, Luca, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2020. Maize to the People! Cultivation, Consumption and Trade in the North-Eastern Mediterranean (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century). Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 108
maize to the people!
Map 4. Maize’s gateways to Slovenian regions (sixteenth-eighteenth c.)
that it gained importance in the diet of the western region faster than it
progressed in the fields. The second half of the eighteenth century marks
a large and definitive affirmation of maize in both the east and west, with
an attested relevant diffusion in the fields and omnipresence on the peas-
ant tables. In central Slovenia, on the contrary, maize becomes a foodstuff
in times of crisis and nothing more.
Just as in the case of timing, we may add some details to the directions
via which maize entered the Slovenian lands. The prevailing picture of the
trajectories of maize diffusion is indeed already half a century old and it
goes as follows: “In the Gorizia region, maize spread under Venetian influ-
ence (named sirk from the Italian sorgo); in Carniola it was established only
in some places in Dolenjska (as turščica, turška pšenica – Turkish wheat);
but most of all they started to sow it in Styria, where it had arrived from
Hungary in the seventeenth century (under the name kukurutz)” (Gestrin
1969, 3). The evidence we have collected allows us to agree with Gestrin on
this, as well as with Valenčič, who wrote that maize came to the Slovenian
lands independently from the West, that is from the Italian lands, and from
the East or, as he put it, from “Turkey, Hungary and Croatia” (Valenčič
106
Map 4. Maize’s gateways to Slovenian regions (sixteenth-eighteenth c.)
that it gained importance in the diet of the western region faster than it
progressed in the fields. The second half of the eighteenth century marks
a large and definitive affirmation of maize in both the east and west, with
an attested relevant diffusion in the fields and omnipresence on the peas-
ant tables. In central Slovenia, on the contrary, maize becomes a foodstuff
in times of crisis and nothing more.
Just as in the case of timing, we may add some details to the directions
via which maize entered the Slovenian lands. The prevailing picture of the
trajectories of maize diffusion is indeed already half a century old and it
goes as follows: “In the Gorizia region, maize spread under Venetian influ-
ence (named sirk from the Italian sorgo); in Carniola it was established only
in some places in Dolenjska (as turščica, turška pšenica – Turkish wheat);
but most of all they started to sow it in Styria, where it had arrived from
Hungary in the seventeenth century (under the name kukurutz)” (Gestrin
1969, 3). The evidence we have collected allows us to agree with Gestrin on
this, as well as with Valenčič, who wrote that maize came to the Slovenian
lands independently from the West, that is from the Italian lands, and from
the East or, as he put it, from “Turkey, Hungary and Croatia” (Valenčič
106
