Jančura, Peter - Bohálová, Iveta: Historical Landscape Structures in the Kysuce Region. Fragments of History

The article is about the specific phenomenon of the landscape-aesthetic assessment of the historical attributes of landscapes. Such a research focus has a tradition of more than 20 years; however, relatively few areas have been considered in detail in this way. At the beginning, there was a task assigned by the Ministry of the Environment of the Slovak Republic following the European Landscape Convention - Determination of Landscape Criteria for the Re-Evaluation of Protected Areas of Slovakia. The aim of the task, started in 2007, was the participation of the Slovak Environment Agency in the process of the re-evaluation of the network of protected areas in cooperation with the State Nature Conservancy of Slovak Republic. The Biele Karpaty Protected Landscape Area was a pilot area from 2008 to 2010. In 2010-2016, the Kysuce Protected Landscape Area was also examined.

Based on observations we can state that each system is composed of various differential elements or components, both within space and time. The diversity of the landscape does not lie only in the transformation of a relief or an arrangement of the landscape surface. The landscape is "homogeneous" both in terms of its shape and "history". It has a diverse "age" structure, and it was formed at different periods of time. How can we see the landscape's history in the landscape? What happened in the past must have inevitably left some trace in the landscape. Transformations of its relief, ruins, traces of routes, monuments... They are part of the landscape's memory. If we examine only the current state of the landscape, we will only draw from "immovable" and relatively unchanging (static) traces. However, if we examine the features of the landscape over the development of time, they become the basis to learn about the changes (transformation, dynamics) of the landscape over time. In this way, we can compare the states of the landscape structures over various time horizons. Older units, different in terms of time and age, are different from the current ones. We call them historical landscape structures. This article is focused on the historical landscape structures in Kysuce.

Historic landscape structures, settling, location of settlements, "plužiny" (agricultural plots near villages), "zárubky" (equal divisions of the plots)