“Manna Polonicum”: Between cultural history and phytology

Abstract

Manna Polonica (Glyceria flutans) is referred occasionally — from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century — in early modern herbaria books printed in Polish and mentioned in German language cookbooks, agricultural books and encyclopaedias. The Polish botanist Josef Rostafinski (1850–1928) conducted extensive research about wild plants gathered as food in eastern Poland and in Belarus (also Glyceria flutans) and connected this phenomenon with the survival of early Slavic tribes ecology. A modern ethnobotanist recognised that gathering of Glyceria perished in Poland in the last decade of the nineteenth century, because of the disappearance of wetland areas. But the author of the article suggests that this practice survived as a cultural relict into the 1930s in some places in the Łódź voivodeship. He relies on oral history, from old members of his family, born in the village of Solca Wielka in Central Poland, located near the wetlands of the Bzura river, a tributary of the Vistula.