About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Sass and Compass in Action is captioned “Silanka,” a woman from a Slavic tribe that lived in the Gail River Valley. The river, called Zilja in Slovene, originates in southern Austria and flows through some of the most picturesque landscapes of the Julian Alps. This illustration is taken from a recent reprint of Balthasar Hacquet’s Images and Descriptions of Southwestern and Eastern Wenda, Illyrians, and Slavs published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2008. Hacquet (1739–1815) was an Austrian physician and scientist who spent many years studying the botany, geology, and ethnography of many parts of the Austrian Empire, as well as the Veneto, the Julian Alps, and the western Balkans, inhabited in the past by peoples of many different tribes and ethnicities. Hand-drawn illustrations accompany the many scientific papers and books that Hacquet published.