BATTAGLIA1925-010 - ethnographic attestation
Boys of the Buie (Buje) countryside, Istrian Carso
Croatia - Buie - Buje, Istrian Carso - Southeastern Europe
Play / practical
The Buje bullroarer survived because a museum man could not forget it. A. Vigini, preparator at Trieste's natural history museum, built Battaglia a copy of the toy of his boyhood in the Istrian Carso: a plain rectangular tablet, eighteen centimetres by five, cord knotted through a hole. He remembered the technique exactly — whirled vertically, arm stretched out before him, not swung overhead in the usual way — but the name, after a lifetime, was gone.
Il Vigini lo ricorda come un semplice balocco del quale dimentico il nome.
Vigini remembers it as a simple toy whose name he forgot.
Battaglia 1925:210
- Object
- Simple rectangular tablet, 18 x 5 cm, single cord tied through a hole; Figure 7 shows the reconstruction A. Vigini built from memory of his boyhood examples.
- Function
- Simple boys' toy, whirled vertically with the arm stretched forward rather than horizontally overhead; its local name was already forgotten.
- Map confidence
- high - Buje town centroid, Istrian Carso.
- Source location
- printed p. 210; Figure 7
- Toy / secular survival