Zalozba ZRC Publications, Carsologica Series
Paperback, 151 pages, 200 x 270 mm, ISBN 961-6568-78-7.

Price : 27.– CHF; 16.– Euro Order this book

OVERVIEW:

Very many of the place names in the caves derive from natural, architectural and other familiar objects such as animals, birds, plants, rain, parts of churches, curtains and human anatomy. Other are pure descriptive. Some result from likeness to specific places. Then there are people (saints, emperors, heros, and explorers).

370 individual places in the Postojnska jama cave system have been given names over the centuries, usually in three or more languages. The tabulated list forming the main body of this book lists all these names, together with locations and the period for which each name is known to have been used, derived from examination of original sources – cave plans, guidebooks, travellers’ records, unpublished archives and contemporary pictures. More than half the sources are from before 1900. Often the names have changed; sometimes they have ceased to be used at all. The total number of names now current is much less than of old. Reasons for these changes are discussed and a comprehensive index allows places to be identified from every one of their names.

CONTENTS:

The names – An introduction
Purpose
Treatment
Sources
Identification and location
Presentation
How and why the names changed
Name changes
Decreasing numbers of names
Acknowledgements
Tabulated list of places and objects
Key to sources
References
Index of names in the tabulated list
List of illustrations
Illustrations
List of plans
Plans
Abstract

AUTHOR:

Dr. Trevor Shaw has been an Honorary Research Fellow of the Karst Research Institute (Postojna, Slovenia) since 1992, and in 1997 was made an Honorary Fellow of the Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Born in England in 1928, he spent 38 years as an engineer in the Royal Navy. During this time he explored caves as a recreation and studied their history as a second vocation. This culminated in a PhD at the University of Leicester in 1976 for research on the history of karst studies over the centuries. At the Karst Institute his interests widened to study the scientific and other travellers as individual people, with the problems they met in finding information beforehand, their modes of travel, routes and inns.

Recent publications have included the books:
Foreign Travellers in the Slovene Karst 1537–1900 (2000)
Royal and other Noble Visitors to Postojnska jama 1819–1945 (2002)