Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Herbal Medicine journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/hermed Research paper Medical and food ethnobotany among Albanians and Serbs living in the Shtërpcë/Štrpce area, South Kosovo Behxhet Mustafa a , Avni Hajdari a, *, Bledar Pulaj a , Cassandra L. Quave b,c , Andrea Pieroni d a Department of Biology, University of Prishtina “Hasan Prishtina”, Mother Teresa, 1000, Prishtinë, Kosovo b Center for the Study of Human Health, Emory University, 550 Asbury Circle, Candler Library 107, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA c Department of Dermatology, Emory University School of Medicine, 615 Michael St., Whitehead 105L, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA d University of Gastronomic Sciences, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele 9, I-12060 Pollenzo, Italy ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Ethnobotany Kosovo Serbs Medicinal plants Albania ABSTRACT Ethnobotanical research in the Balkans is important for providing concrete insights aimed at developing small- scale markets of local medicinal plants and food products to support rural development. An ethnobotanical feld study was carried out in the spring of 2017 among Muslim Albanians and Christian Orthodox Serbs living in 20 villages located in South Kosovo. The aim of the study was to assess if two diferent ethnic afliations played a role in shaping traditions of local plant uses by ethnic groups living in the same natural environment in South Kosovo over many centuries. The feld survey was conducted via semi-structured interviews with 181 local adults who were chosen for their retention of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) regarding traditional uses of wild and cultivated food and medicinal plants and fungi relevant to either human or animal health. A total of 122 botanical and fungal folk taxa, belonging to 51 families, and 19 other domestic remedies were recorded. The most common plants species cited by the study participants belongs to family Rosaceae, followed by Lamiaceae, and Asteraceae. Approximately 10 % of the total reports have not been previously recorded in the Western Balkans. Comparison of the recorded reports between the Serbian and Albanian demonstrated that only 28.4 % of the recorded remedies are shared between the two ethnic groups, thus confrming the importance of religious and ethnic divides in shaping divergent traditional uses of natural resources. A more “herbophilic” attitude of the Slavic population (pointed out in previous studies) was not evident in this survey. 1. Introduction Over the last few decades, several studies have explored the eth- nobotany of the Western Balkans with the aim of recording folk knowledge and perceptions of wild plants used in the food and med- icinal domains (Hajdari et al., 2018; Jarić et al., 2007, 2015, 2018 and 2019; Pieroni et al., 2005, 2008 and 2010; Menković et al., 2011; Pieroni et al., 2011, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, and 2017; Mustafa et al., 2012a, 2012b, and 2015; Savikin et al., 2013; Pieroni and Quave, 2014 and references therein; Zlatković et al., 2014; Quave and Pieroni, 2014 and 2015; Pieroni and Soukand, 2017; Janaćković et al., 2019; Savić et al., 2019). The rationale for these studies has stems from the assumption that this area in Southeastern Europe still possesses a tre- mendous reservoir of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) related to wild plants. This is based on several key factors: 1) the complex biocultural diversity of this region, which is a hotspot of biodiversity and also hosts a variety of diferent ethnic and religious groups; 2) the socio-economic environment related to the troubled vicissitudes of the last few decades, which has slowed down the economic development of the former Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, fostering the permanence of subsistence economies in rural and mountainous areas, managed mainly by elderly peoples; and 3) the long held “tradition” in the collection of wild plants in the region, including before the end of the disintegration/occupation of the Ottoman Empire, which started at the beginning of the 19 th Century (Kathe et al., 2003). Small-scale agro-pastoral activities, therefore, still represent the pillar of subsistence economies for those local ethnic groups who live in mountainous and rural areas in the Western Balkans, and TEK-centered studies are not only important for understanding local perceptions and uses of plants, but even more so for establishing baseline data for projects intended to foster rural development programs focusing on sustainable valorisation of local herbal and wild food resources. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hermed.2020.100344 Received 2 October 2018; Received in revised form 4 January 2020; Accepted 12 February 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: avni.hajdari@uni-pr.edu (A. Hajdari). Journal of Herbal Medicine 22 (2020) 100344 Available online 13 February 2020 2210-8033/ © 2020 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. T