50 Years of the Istro-Romanian Language: from the Oxford-Hurren collection to the ISTROX project - Exhibition in Novigrad, Croatia

During the spring of 2022 we worked with the Lapidarium Museum in Novigrad (Croatia) to prepare an exhibition entitled 50 Years of the Istro-Romanian Language: from the Oxford-Hurren collection to the ISTROX project, which was open in Novigrad from 26 June 2022 to 24 August 2022.

Lapidarium is a regional museum about 70km from the Istro-Romanian villages in the Istrian Peninsula and its focus is the cultural heritage of Istria. Through this co-curated exhibition we aimed to familiarize the public with the history and current state of the Istro-Romanian community in Croatia and to present some of the research done at Oxford University on this community and their language.

Tony Hurren’s research and profile as an Oxford scholar, Vera Hurren’s role in her husband’s work, the long-term relations that they developed with Tony’s interviewees, followed by our own work building on the Hurren material, provided the main narrative clusters of the exhibition. The basis of the display was provided by a selection of audio recordings and by the fifty black and white photographs taken by the Hurrens in Istria in the 1960s. To those we added a second body of digital images produced by the Croatian photographer Bojan Mrđenović in the spring of 2019, during our trip to Istria, when he documented our meetings with Hurren’s former interviewees or their relatives. The exhibition also included other items from the Hurren donation – most importantly Hurren’s notebooks, but also a range of newly discovered items that Vera Hurren had kindly lent to us. Among these were the couple’s passports (with Yugoslav visas from the 1960s) and the letters of recommendation that Tony Hurren carried with him to ensure that he was accepted in the country and the region, both by the Yugoslav authorities and by the villagers themselves.

The exhibition opened with a special preview for the members of the community from the Istrian villages, for whom we arranged transport to Novigrad. We particularly wanted to involve the more senior members of the community, who were perhaps less proficient online and for whom this opportunity to see the Hurren material directly was likely to feel more natural than through our online Zooniverse site. We were delighted also to welcome members of the community of all ages, whether speakers of the language or not.

Around sixty members of the community, of all ages, came to the opening and they were enthusiastic about our project and exhibition. For us, the preview was an exceptional chance to meet them and thus to extend our reach into the community for further research. According to the estimates of Dr Jerica Ziherl, the director of Lapidarium, the exhibition attracted some 1, 000 visitors; these included members of the Istro-Romanian community, of the Croatian public, as well as international tourists.

We hope that this exhibition will mark the beginning of a return to offline encounters and interviews following the recent pandemic years – in particular with members of the community who are not online.

The exhibition was partly supported through a Knowledge Exchange Innovation Fund grant offered by TORCH - The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. We are deeply grateful to the Museum’s Director, Dr Jerica Ziherl, for her kindness and support in making the exhibition possible.

The ISTROX exhibition in the Croatian press (selection): KulturIstra; Istra24; Radio Pula; TV - Novigradska kronika (10’50” – 22’50”)

Click here to view the exhibition brochure (PDF)
Click here to view photos from the exhibition opening on the ISTROX Facebook page.