Žagar Zora

Zora Žagar, museum consultant and ethnologist, long-standing employee of the Maritime Museum Piran, (Ljubljana, 6 November 1950 - Ljubljana, 21 May 2007)

In 1977 she graduated in ethnology and history of art at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and a year later joined the Maritime Museum Piran as ethnology curator. She dedicated her museum work particularly to salt-making, sea fishing and olive growing and in turn paved new paths in Slovenian and European museology. She received a number of domestic and foreign awards for her affluent work.

Between 1982 and 1984, Zora carried out ethnological topographic research in the Piran Saltpans (Strunjan, Fazan, Sečovlje) and by 1985 completed, together with Mojca Ravnik, an inventory of the cultural heritage of the Sečovlje saltpans. In 1987, she set up a major periodic exhibition "Sečovlje Saltpans Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow", at which the natural and cultural heritage of the Sečovlje Saltpans was presented. From 1989 on, she coordinated the Setting up of the Museum of Salt-making Project. Owing to the exceptional significance of the area’s natural and cultural heritage, the Sečovlje Saltpans were protected in 1990 as a nature park, in which the district of the Giassi Canal and Cavana 131 was designated an ethnological monument.

On the basis of the work carried out under the direction of Elica Boltin Tome, a decision was made that the Museum of Salt-making, which had originally been conceived by Miroslav Pahor, the former director of the Maritime Museum Piran, was to be set up in the Fontanigge area along the Giassi Canal. The basic guideline of the chosen location was that the museum should be functioning in an original environment, thus significantly contributing to the quality of its presentation and original aspect. In the area, the first saltpans house was renovated, in which the Museum of Salt-making was opened in 1991 under Zora's expert guidance. Concurrently, two salt fields were restored, where museum saltworkers then harvested sea salt in the traditional manner till 2007, when the Maritime Museum Piran was no longer officially allowed to carry out this work. By 2003, two more saltpan houses were renovated and a wooden pier for mooring vessels built. In April 2001, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia proclaimed the Museum of Salt-making a cultural monument of national importance. In 2004, the Maritime Museum Piran was awarded the European Union Medal for its non-residential Museum of Salt-making part of the Europa Nostra 2003 programme in the Cultural Landscape category.

Zora believed that the Museum of Salt-making should be intended primarily for people, i.e. visitors, and not merely professionals. She was convinced that human creativity, even in the age of computers, was still the first point of interest for visitors, particularly when presented to them by a former saltworker, who thus turns into a living exhibit. In her opinion, man has always been associated with the object, with the original object always being, in its environment, the one which from a museological aspect most authentically bears witness to the past.

She again and again confirmed her firm belief that museal knowledge should be disseminated to the widest circle of people by writing articles, publishing and editing publications, as well as setting up permanent and periodical exhibitions on salt-making, fishing and olive growing. The result of her research activity in the field of fisheries are articles on private and industrial sea fishing, a permanent exhibition on fishing in the main building of the Maritime Museum Piran, and several other periodical exhibitions. She participated with several prominent Slovenian ethnologists in various projects, with some of her achievements discernible in greater detail from her bibliography. 

She fervently believed in the preservation of ethnological heritage in the most original form possible. She wished and hoped that many generations would have the opportunity to enjoy the pristine nature and man’s coexistence with it, and preserve the memory of traditional Piran salt-making, olive growing and fishing.

Nadja Terčon, Snježana Karinja