Page 257 - Changing Living Spaces

The Neverlake: Water and Land Management in a Dry and Soilless Place

The Karst represents an exceptional example of the relationship be-
tween man and the environment, as it poses particular problems and
challenges to humans and their activities. It is a rather inhospitable land
for humans, because there is a lack of land suitable for food production,
and in addition, the surface is very rocky and surface water is lacking.
Nevertheless, it has always been populated, and over the centuries and
millennia humans have adapted it to the needs of agriculture, animal
husbandry and viticulture. Precisely because of the special challenges it
poses to humans, the Karst is an example of a completely transformed
living space, where it can be said that every square metre bears the marks
of human adaptation. The best known and most expressive elements of
the Karst cultural landscape are man-made dry stone walls, cultivated
dolines and, last but not least, ponds for collecting and storing rainwa-
ter (Panjek 2015).
In this article we deal with the topic of water resources management
in the Karst, but in a somewhat unusual way, as we deal with a seeming-
ly strange case. Our work stems from the discovery of an archival docu-
ment from the seventeenth century, which testifies that a small lake near
the village of Štanjel was drained by its inhabitants. Where is the log-
ic in people draining one of the few water sources in the proverbially dry
Karst? This is the main question of this paper, and the search for an an-
swer takes us into historical and geographical waters. Our approach to
this topic is inspired by Satoshi Murayama’s concept of ‘Living Spaces’,
which is in fact much more than a concept, but rather an interdisciplinary
approach to taking a long-term, holistic view of human-environment re-
lationships, linking the past to the present and possibly to the future.
Based on our findings, in the concluding sections we first address the so-
cial and economic factors that influence the environmental adaptation
initiative and its livelihood outcome by discussing the initiators of the re-
vealed water management model. Finally, we address what natural and
environmental factors influence the outcome in terms of sustainability
and change by proposing some hypotheses on the reasons for the area’s
gradual deterioration.
Historically, Štanjel is a particularly interesting settlement with a stra-
tegic location, controlling one of the passages between the hinterland and
the Adriatic coast. The hill on which it is located (312 m) was first settled
in prehistory and then again in antiquity (a hilltop site, Roman); in the
Middle Ages a tower was built on the top of the hill. It is believed that on
the slope at the base of the tower a settlement gradually developed on

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