Home » Seminars and Projects » Academy report » Day 3, part four: Let the history flow or how books came out from the fridge

Day 3, part four: Let the history flow or how books came out from the fridge

All the other groups went to certain places, obviously connected in some way to agriculture, but the archive group, what should it expect? You can read some of their expectations and can also watch the documentary they prepared.

“So there we were: Five students, one archivist and a whole lot of books. Really old books- no joking, we got to see documents that were over 600 years old. But one at a time. The five of us, that´s Miloš, Jane, Tatjana, Germán and Katharina, were one of the two of today’s groups that were sent out to do some research around the village of Ftan. Or right in the village, to be exact. That is to say in the archives of Ftan where we got to know  Mr. Grimm, the archivist. Prepared with a whole page of questions, we first got to see the archives’ rooms where all possible documents were stored –  even some really old books in a fridge… We were even allowed to take the oldest document of the archives in our hands – the one mentioned above was over 600 years old. So not only did we get to read –or well, tried to read- documents from all centuries, but also we learned to “read” the landscape- to recognize the agricultural traces left throughout eras and centuries around Ftan- like the “terrace” fields around the region during our final tour through the village. In the end, after several encounters with cows and even buffalos and one rather involuntary encounter with an electric fence, we all made it safe to Scuol, our hometown for the time being.”