Rovinj Eco Museum selected for European Museum of the Year Award

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Rovinj’s eco-museum, the “Batana House”, which presents the traditional life of fishermen and of the other inhabitants of Rovinj, has been placed in the top selection for the prestigious European Museum of the Year Award 2007 (EMYA 2007) which has been conferred since 1977 by the European Museum Forum, based in Great Britain. The final winner’s ceremony will be held at the beginning of Mayin the Spanish city of Alicante.An international commission that will, in the meantime, visit and evaluate all the candidates, will give the bulk of its attention to innovation at each of the presented museum projects, its influence on the national and international museum scene and on how imaginative its presentation is, the pleasance of the ambience and how well the needs of visitors are respected, the financial organisation, social responsibility, educational programs, marketing and management.

The Batana House Museum is dedicated to the fishing boat known as the Batana, recognised in Rovinj as a symbol of the entire community as it is an original type of fishing vessel the likes of which have been manufactured in Rovinj for many years, with the construction of these watercraft and the entire story surrounding fishing and the traditional life of Rovinj again experiencing a boom with the launch of this program.

Batanas were once traditional watercraft, but they have in more recent history slowly begun to lose their original function, and it is precisely this project that has brought them back into daily life. Along with the interesting stories about the Batana, the museum presents a series of other details closely related to the heritage of Rovinj, from its specialities, songs, folk customs, and even the unique dialect known now only by the older inhabitants.

The presentation in the museum itself is “reinforced” during the summer peak tourism season with attractive events and, above all, with the actual construction of the Batana. One Batana is slowly built each summer on the Rovinj waterfront so that visitors can enjoy a view of their unique manufacture, and those lucky enough to be on hand at the time can witness its official launch into the sea.