About the Cover Illustration

On the cover of Mesos in Action is “Girl from Petrovo Polje, Dalmatia, Croatia.” The term “Polje” derives from the Slavic for “field” and is used to denote a large flat plain. Petrovo Polje is located in Dalmatia, a historical region of Croatia on the Adriatic coast. Dalmatia was once a province of the Roman Empire, and over its history has been fought over and controlled by the Goths, the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The illustration is taken from a reproduction of an album of Croatian traditional costumes from the mid-nineteenth century by Nikola Arsenovic, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2003. The illustrations were obtained from a helpful librarian at the Ethnographic Museum in Split, itself situated in the Roman core of the medieval center of that town: the ruins of Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace from around AD 304. The book includes finely colored illustrations of figures from different regions of Croatia, accompanied by descriptions of the costumes and of everyday life.

Dress codes and lifestyles have changed over the last 200 years, and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different continents, let alone of different hamlets or towns separated by only a few miles. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.