September 2020
·
713 Reads
In 2015 the Slovenian Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage was enriched with the description of how to make a characteristic extended logboat, called a drevák. Its presence can be traced to the 17th century when the first written sources witness its use in the basin of the Ljubljanica River—a region of karstic fields (called ‘polje’) in Notranjska. The boat is made from spruce and is still used for fishing, rescuing, recreation and heritage promotion. The drevák is made from C-profiled chine-girders and embedded with one to three bottom planks, which are no more than 70cm wide. The flat central bottom rises towards the bow and stern where it rounds into an ellipse. Based on iconographic sources and boats still in existence, we can gather that the drevák was between five and 12m long, but, unlike similar boats, it has no knees or floor timbers. Until recently, it was believed that this type of logboat originated in the basin of the Po River in Italy. However, new research into the Roman Age shipbuilding tradition through excavating a shipwreck in the Ljubljanica River in Slovenia and another in the Kupa River in Croatia, provided a reason to reconsider its origin. In Europe, there is wide-ranging evidence of boats constructed similarly to the drevák; the closest can be found in Krefeld-Gellep II in Germany, which is a logboat from the early Middle Ages. During our research, we also found a surprisingly similar extended logboat in Lake Suwa near Nagano in Japan.