Never before in my career have I had the opportunity to be involved in a transnational project that so clearly expressed such an engaging twofold character: on the one hand the project was a collaborative effort of incredibly varied participants coming from different national and professional backgrounds; and on the other hand it felt so very much like being and working at home. Being a geologist, this should not actually come as a surprise to me. The entire Eastern Adriatic coast, of which the stretch of territory between the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and Dubrovnik County was chosen as the project area, is geologically very similar. The entire region shares a common geological history that goes back roughly 200 million(!) years, when the Dinaric carbonate platform was created. Are these just the statements of but a single scientist who claims that his discipline is the most important of all? They are not. All along the entire carbonate platform (the Eastern Adriatic coast was once covered by shallow sea water and looked much like the Bahamas of today) highly similar sediments have been deposited for some 150 million years in a very similar environment. This means that great stretches of rocks were created between Dubrovnik, Herzegovina, Croatian islands, and Kras/Carso that are nearly indistinguishable.
After the rock succession emerged from the sea and people began populating the area, they all ended up inhabiting largely the same ground. Even back then, at the beginning of history, people were just as smart, in the north as in the south, as they are today. When they needed something they tried to find it close to home – in the neighbourhood so to speak. And when they needed building material they did just that. And what was so easily and widely available between Trieste and Dubrovnik? Limestone – and a lot of it. This limestone also appeared in many varieties, each of which could be used for a particular purpose. For building blocks they would use the massive variety; for filler they looked for tectonically crumbled rock, while for paving and roofing the platy variety was the obvious choice. Today we call this last variety platy limestone. Heritage conservators, architects, geologists, urban planners and more … simply love it. Even investors love it, when they are looking to build or restore buildings according to guidelines connected with cultural heritage conservation. Everyone wants to use it – BUT the material is simply not available. Even if it is available it is legally impossible to quarry. How can this be? Historically platy limestone was excavated in backyards, or in small delves in the near vicinity of the villages. Today, there are a number of reasons why this cannot be done in the same way. Natural preservation and conservation have gained importance, as have safety standards and other regulations related to mining and extraction. Which means that quarrying of natural building stone is limited to larger commercial quarries. As platy limestone is not (yet) particularly commercially interesting it is not quarried. In addition, it was not well known prior to the launch of this project, where exactly to find it – except for just around the corner … where it can’t be quarried legally.
The RoofOfRock project was built around the notion that platy limestone, as basic construction material, gives the Adriatic coastline and its immediate interior region its primary character
The RoofOfRock project was built around the notion that platy limestone, as basic construction material, gives the Adriatic coastline and its immediate interior region its primary character; and the general consensus that this common feature should be properly preserved, by using this material responsibly in the future. The problem today is that stakeholders in spatial planning, urbanization and cultural and natural conservation lack firm guidelines for the sustainable use of natural stone as building material, for conservation of the stone as natural heritage, and finally, for the conservation of objects as cultural heritage.
Therefore, the main aim of the project was to establish a joint platform for the sustainable use of platy limestone, and for the preservation and promotion of such, to create relevant guidelines and to upgrade both individual and joint capacities in preserving this element of common natural and cultural heritage. In short, we wanted to prepare the ground for future sustainable use of this precious material. In order to achieve this we joined forces with 10 partners from 4 countries and assembled the most relevant stakeholders.
The effort included hundreds of days of fieldwork, numerous discussions, workshops, educational and outreach activities, and was divided into 10 work packages that now comprise the following chapters of this exhaustive report:
It is important to note that the key output of the project is not simply a report. Instead, all of the knowledge, findings and documentation are included in complex GIS-based web and mobile applications that are able to share any and all information related to the project to any end-user, in either the office or in the field.
The project achieved or even surpassed all of the initially defined goals, which can be listed briefly as follows:
Through the project we firmly concluded, within the RoofOfRock community and beyond, that platy limestone is a valuable element of our natural and cultural heritage, and that its future sustainable use as a building material should be understood, encouraged and promoted. And the project outputs and results do exactly this. Furthermore, it was concluded that the main obstacle to proper use of natural stone in the future is legislative in nature. While it is well beyond the reach of the project team to actually implement them, we prepared a comprehensive array of professional grounds for legislative changes as an important output-result of the project. Such an effort should be launched by policymakers, those identified and actively involved in the development of the proposed legislative changes.
Based on previous experience – and most particularly on our three years of intense interdisciplinary collaboration – we have come to form the very firm opinion that legislative changes are nearly impossible in cases where no commercial interest is present. Unfortunately, platy limestone could not be expected to ever become a mineral resource of significant commercial value. For this reason, and because the use of other stones (in larger quantities and thus commercially valuable) faces similar issues related to sustainability and more, we propose extending this effort to all natural building stones in the project area. In so doing we would raise the interest of policy makers to return local natural stone to the place it so rightly belongs: to the top shelf for anyone who builds or restores in the uniquely beautiful karstified part of the Eastern Adriatic coast.
Miloš Bavec, Project Manager
Geological Survey of Slovenia
