by Jan Morris
On the lip of the Karst escarpment, gloriously overlooking the city and the sea, there is a monument designed to thank God that it is all over now. The huge concrete temple dedicated to Mary, Mother and Queen, was erected there in 1967 in votive thanksgiving for the end of the second world war, which had killed so many Trieste soldiers, murdered so many Trieste Jews, and thrown so many poor souls down the pot-hole of Basovizza. It is not a delicate structure, but it stands there cleanly and boldly, white against the sky, rather like, on a gigantic scale, one of those bathroom devices that disinfect the atmosphere.
THE KARST will always be a strange place. They may build roads all over it, they may suburbanize it or even industralize it in parts, but it remains an elemental slab above the city. Even now, between the developments, it feels like Slavic peasant country. It is a place of stones—drystone walls, villages of stone, churches of stone, stone houses, boulders and quarries everywhere—but with patches of extreme fertility. There vineyards flourish, and sometimes you may see leafed branches attached to gates. This tells you that the house inside is an os-mizza, where wine and food are available. It is a sign inherited from Austro-Hungarian legalism—osem means “eight” in Slovene, and only for eight days in the year were such establishments licensed for business under K u K. In Grinzing or Siever-ing, outside Vienna, the leafed branch welcomes you nowadays to the decorous hospitality of tourism. Here on the Karst it is likely to be tougher stuff, and the people who serve you will be stocky, straightforward Slovenes with no pretensions. If it is a full-blown restaurant its victuals will be robust: goat, quail, wild boar, stringy prosciutto, sturdy pastas, nourishing soups, rough bread and fresh white wine. Noisy parties celebrate birthdays or graduation days. Landlords stride around the tables like amiable sergeant-majors.
These people have been hardened by history and by climate, but they have been moulded by geology too—it is a population perfectly attuned to its landscape. The Karst is not all forbidding. It can be welcoming too, a place of butterflies, lizards and cats in the shrubbery. In some of its pot-holes pigeons live, and one can see them lurking in the shadows down there, suddenly flying around for a moment or two, or reproachfully flapping their wings. Others have been filled with water down the ages, and are hidden away in glades of oak or ash, perfectly circular and alive with fish and dragon-flies. Sometimes reeds wave languidly at their edges, and small golden carp swim through, or big green newts hang head-down from rush-stalks.
The best known of these water-holes is called the Percedo. It is near the ancient village of Rupingrande, and it lies in the deep middle of a wood, the sort of natural wonder American pioneers stumbled upon far in the forested west (“Here we are my friends, by God’s good grace, here is where we’ll settle, and we’ll call it Gracepool”—a circumstance recorded in The Story of Our Homes and Hearths, published by the Gracepool Weekly Advertiser . . . ). We can stumble upon the pool too, in the dappled half-light, all alone with waterlilies all over it: and if we arrive at the right season of the year, frogs will be constantly jumping in and out of its viscous water—plop, plop, plop, they go, and it is the only sound in the silence of the wood.
There are vast caves and tunnels under the Karst, deeper than any in Mendip, some of them among the deepest on earth. One of them, the Grotta Gigante, has been tamed and floodlit for the tourists. Others still lie deep and dark down there, and through these the river Timavo flows on its passage to the sea. It rises normally enough somewhere in Slovenia, suddenly plunges into a chasm near the hamlet of San Canziano, crosses the frontier underground and reappears twenty-four miles later just as it is about to enter the Adriatic below the plateau. This mysterious sequence has inspired many fancies, and my favourite one is this: that when the Argonauts completed their mission into Asia to find the Golden Fleece, they returned to Europe by sailing up the Danube and its tributaries into Slovenia, where they discovered a stream flowing in the direction of the Adriatic. It turned out to be the Timavo, and when it dived underground they went too, and so arrived on the shores of Trieste. It was Jason and the Argonauts, claimed the nineteenth-century historian Pietro Kandler in all seriousness, who first established a chain of communication between Trieste and the Black Sea.
The Timavo still reaches the daylight near a village called Au-risina, on the coast beneath the escarpment some eight miles north of the city, blinking as it were after its long passage through the Karst. The site of its emergence is close to the coastal highway to Trieste, a road littered with hotels and cafes, and it is all too easy to drive straight by without noticing it. But if you stop, park in a layby and walk down a flight of steps into the woods below, you will find it a magical place. Myth-makers, poets and cultists have thought so down the ages, variously portraying it as the haunt of an Aurisinean nymph (as in Revoltella’s statuary), or a gateway into Hell. There is a small Gothic church down there among the trees, no doubt descended from a sanctuary of the pagans, and into the shadows nearby the river emerges in several channels out of the rock. It is a peculiar blue-green colour, and looks as though it ought to lie there thick and stagnant, but in fact it tumbles swiftly into the open, as though it is relieved to be out of the dark.
ANOTHER kind of arcanum survives at the other end of the Karst, in the village of San Dorligo del Valle on the Slovenian border. This is only two or three miles from Trieste’s industrial zone on Muggia bay, but it is very Balkan. Slovene is generally talked there, road signs are bilingual, and the high ground nearby is slashed by a rocky ravine, the Val Rosandra, running towards the sea—harsh, grey, fox-haunted and raven-flown, with a solitary stone chapel perched hermit-like on its flank.
Here is the wonder of this place: if you go to the parish office there, and ask the priest politely, after apologetically rummaging about in a cupboard, with musty journals and account books falling haphazardly oyt, to be stuffed haphazardly back in again—“Forgive me, forgive me, I’ll find it here somewhere, no, no, that’s not it—forgive me—ah, this is the one, this is it”—eventually he extracts an ancient parish record kept down the generations in the Glagolitic script.
The Glagolitic script? The Glagolitic script. I have its alphabet before me now, in its two historical forms, and its letters are unfamiliar indeed. Some are rounded spindly squiggles, some are angular. All have a numerical value too, and they are strangely transliterated. “AZ’b,” “Buky,” “Vede,” begins the Glagolitic alphabet, and its final letter is “Yzica."The script is said to have been invented by two Byzantine Christian missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, who came to these parts in the ninth century and found the inhabitants without a written language of their own. It was the first of all Slavic scripts, like no other European writing, and for centuries it defied the intrusion of the Latin alphabet. Its presence in the parish office of San Dorligo del Valle, so close to the city centre of Trieste, is like an unsuspected spell or exorcism, left in the attic.
THIRTEEN
The Biplane and the Steamer
It is also like a coded message out of Istria. In Istria the Glagolitic alphabet long ago became a symbol of Slavness, a defiant declaration, defying both political and ecclesiastical disapproval through conquest and conflict, assimilation and oppression. It was still alive at the start of the twentieth century. The peninsula was Triestine territory until the second world war, and just as that one strange document is stored in the parish vestry at San Dorligo, so Istria is always in the city’s consciousness, still there in sight as in mind. The hundreds of refugee Italian families who came to the city when the Communist Yugoslavs took over Istria still form a tightly organized and influential community, resentful of the past and often fervently anti-Slav, and perhaps it is the loss of Istria, almost as much as the loss of purpose, that has given Trieste its sense of deprivation—a country so close, so familiar, yet now foreign territory!
I spent my childhood in Somerset, on the English side of the Bristol Channel, and Wales was my Istria. I could always see its mountains, so close across the wat
er and yet apparently so unattainable. I knew it was my dead father’s country, and so properly mine too. A lumbering old De Havilland biplane used to fly heavily over each morning on its way from Bristol to Cardiff, and its slow passing gave me my very first intimations of hiraeth.
ISTRIA is now almost entirely within Croatia, only a thin corridor running across it, just outside Trieste, to provide Slovenia with its outlet to the sea at Koper. It is a triangular wedge of land, about fifty miles long from north to south, never more than thirty miles wide, and its history has been labyrinthine. Its original inhabitants were apparently Illyrians. Its indigenous people now are all Croats or Slovenes, but it has been ruled in its time, in one part or another, by Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians and Austrians. Bavarian Counts and Aquilean Patriarchs have lorded it there. Napoleon annexed it for his II-lyrian Province. German armies occupied it. Yugoslav partisans fought all over it. It has been threatened in its time by Ostrogoths, Lombards, Genoese, impious Turks and sinister Uskoks from Senj. The Venetians built lovely towns all around its coast to sustain their command of the Adriatic, and one of them, Muggia, is now part of Trieste itself. Tito’s Yugoslavia made most of the other islands into a People’s Paradise, lapped by myriad hotels and camping sites. The eastern flank of the peninsula, the Cicen, was described by Baedeker in 1905 as “a bleak plain inhabited by poor charcoal-burners,” and is now inhabited mainly by Romanians.
In Austro-Hungarian times, when the peninsula was under Trieste’s jurisdiction, there were close sea-connections between the city and the former Venetian towns on the coast.
Capodistria, Pirano, Cittanova, Parenzo, Rovigno, all had, besides their familiar Italian campaniles, an Italian-speaking citizenry which thought of itself as part of a wider Trieste. Its business people came to Trieste to make deals or insurance arrangements, its ladies came to shop or go to the opera—imagine the demand for tickets, and the happy shipboard parties, when Smareglia’s Nozze Istriane had its first performance at the Trieste Municipal Opera on March 28, 1895! Even in my own early days in Trieste, when the empire had long gone and a hostile Communist army occupied those ports, a small black steamboat belching smoke pushed off for Istria every morning. It reminded me of that old D.H. Rapide, on its way to Glamorgan.
The Austrians themselves created two Istrian coastal cities in their own kind, and both were familiar to Triestinis. When rich and loyal entrepreneurs of the Chamber of Commerce wanted a fashionable holiday, they took their families down the peninsula to the resort of Abbazia, which was a favourite of the Viennese aristocracy. It stood in the most beautiful situation imaginable, looking across the Gulf of Quarnero to the celestial isles and coasts of Dalmatia, and like Trieste itself it was more or less an invented town. In the 1840s it had been discovered as a winter health resort, and swiftly developed with hotels, gardens and villas. The most expensive Viennese doctors recommended it; the lordliest Austrian valetudinarians, the swankiest Hungarian socialites, the wealthiest Triestini speculators took their advice; in its late-nineteenth-century prime Abbazia was almost as smart as Nice or Monte Carlo.
It is still delightfully evocative of K und K. Some of the old hotels still thrive, curled and preposterously grand beside the sea; and on the hills behind, many a comfortable villa writhes with putti and dolphins, among gardens sentimentally fragrant with jasmine and magnolia. Franz Joseph himself often came here, and put up his mistress in neighbouring accommodation; a promenade along the seafront is named for him, and she is not forgotten either, for all the guide-books mention her. Abbazia is much modernized now, with the usual noise and concrete, but still Austrians come here by the thousand, together with a few Triestini, and it is easy to imagine flowered hats and epaulettes strolling the Promenade Franz Joseph in the evenings. (Did Franz Lehar conduct for them here, too? Perhaps, because for a time he directed a naval band in Is-tria, and in 1908 he published a piano arrangement of Nozze Istriane . . .) Just occasionally to this day one still meets aged relicts of the old regime, last representatives of the Habsburg patriciate, who incline their heads graciously when one meets them in the Botanical Garden, or bow in a courtly manner from the waist.
The other Austrian city of Istria was Pola, at the southern tip of the peninsula. This was very old, had been a Roman naval base, and was celebrated for its splendidly preserved Roman amphitheatre above the sea. It had a fine protected harbour, and when in 1856 the Austrian naval command decided that Trieste was unsuitable as a war-base, the fleet moved its headquarters here. The developers fell upon the town at once, to make of it a smaller, more martial replica of Trieste itself. Franz Joseph journeyed down to lay the foundation stone of its Arsenal, and all around it arose the familiar streets and buildings of an imperial town. There were the barracks, there the shipyards, the grand hotel for important visitors, the naval church, the offices of the bureaucracy, the club, the railway station for the track to Trieste. It gives me an odd sensation even now, for it is still like a miniature, shabbier version of that greater seaport up the line.
Where the citadel is in Trieste, so the citadel is in Pola. Where the offices of the Maritime Government used to be in Trieste, the Admiralty building still stands in Pola. The Riviera Hotel in Pola is like a poor relative of the Albergo Savoia Excelsior in Trieste, and there is a Caffe degli Specchi here too. And the lingering melancholy of Trieste is more potent still in Pola. The railway station down on the waterfront no longer sends its steam trains up to Trieste, only diesel railcars to Buzet, forty miles up the peninsula, and it is a bleak, forlorn cluster of buildings beside the tracks. Joyce, who lived here for a few weeks, likened Pola to Siberia, but this sad station, on waste ground beside the sea, suggests to me a final depot on some remote South American coast, where the trains make their last stop before returning with relief to civilization.
Like as they were to each other, the two ports had diametrically opposite purposes. Trieste was a great trading port, dependent upon peace for its prosperity. Pola was dedicated to war. The most pompous buildings of the one were banks and insurance offices; the palaces of the other were structures of militarism. Comfortable passenger liners dominated the Trieste quaysides; grim warships were lined up, stern-to-shore, in the harbour of Pola. Trieste had an opera house. Pola had a Navy Band, with 180 musicians.
Still, their fortunes were always linked, to the very end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Trieste the end was to be remembered always by the arrival of the Audace at the waterfront. It was marked in Pola, in the last week of the first world war, by the exploit of two Italian frogmen who penetrated the harbour’s powerful defences and sank the battleship Viribus Unitis. She was the ship that had brought the Archduke Ferdinand’s body home from Sarajevo to Trieste, and she had been built there six years before.
ISTRIA’S heartland, though, high in its karstic hills, remains to this day a purely Croatian territory of recondite fascination. It is the only place in the world where I have seen lightning going upwards from the ground.
This is what you must do when you arrive at the minute village of Draguc, far from the sea in the limestone uplands. Leave your car at the entrance of the village, which only has one narrow street, and walk between its old terraced houses to the small piazza beyond. The whole village is likely to seem utterly deserted, with not a sign of life, but if you cry a shout of assistance into the silence, four or five doors will open and four or five old ladies will simultaneously tell you where to find the key to the church of San Rocco (since they are all old enough to have been educated under an Italian education system, they will tell you in Italian). “Number Twenty-four,” they will say, and sure enough there at its door you will find a sixth old lady already holding out a venerable iron key to you. Up to the very end of the village you must go then, and where it peters out into muddy rutted farm tracks, there all alone is the little church. A bit of a struggle with its antique lock, a loud creak as the door opens, and before you is a glorious Istrian surprise. About twenty feet long and empty of pews, the ch
urch is covered all over, ceiling and all, with wonderfully lively frescoes. They are naive representations of the Christian story, a Bible in bright colour, and they were painted by an Istrian master some time in the sixteenth century. They are a masterpiece of Glagoliticism.
For here, although we are never more than a morning’s drive from Trieste, we are in the heartland of that esoteric abstraction. It is a hard country, like the Karst, and its villages are mostly built on ridges or hilltops, and surrounded by walls to keep out the Turks or the Uskoks—even little Draguc stands there cap-a-pie. They are scattered and often deserted, sometimes abandoned altogether. They feel closely knit, though, perhaps because you can frequently see one from another, on a neighbouring high ridge across a valley, even when no road connects them; or perhaps because from their small taverns, as a mealtime approaches, an identical smell of stew follows the traveller from Roc to Vhr, from Cerovlje to Sovinsko Polje and down to Hum. Among them all, too, is a shared sense of inherited defiance, and this is because they were for so many centuries the inner keep of the Croatian culture, and of its ancient script. One can sense the presence of Glagoliticism always in these hills, a wistful wraith-like substance still drifting across the stony landscape.
The most celebrated of all the villages is a very depository of the tradition. You are led to it by a series of modern monuments, all in honour of Glagoliticism, its values and its heroes, forming an esoteric sacred avenue through the fields: a half-circle of stone chairs beneath an oak tree, to remember the teachings of Liment—a stone circle commemorating the Book of Istrian Law—a column in the shape of the Glagolitic letter “Slovo"—a stone block in memory of Bishop Grgur—the Pillar of the Cakav Parliament—the Resting Place of Zakan Juraj—until, dazed or inspired by these queer mementos, you arrive before the gates of Hum, where a Glagolitic inscription offers you a welcome if you are friendly, a severe injunction if you are not.