by Jan Morris
The track was called the Ladder of Cattaro, and though nowadays it starts in a different place and is a road with only twenty-five rather less disconcerting loops, it is still startling enough. To imagine what the journey must have been like for the Venetian merchants, diplomats and spies who reluctantly climbed their way to Cetinje over the years, it is best to make it at the beginning of winter, when the snows have fallen on the high ground but have not yet blocked the highway. The world shifts then as you climb. At the bottom it is the Mediterranean world –towers and villas the Venetians built, oleanders beside the sea. At the top it is the Balkans, white, stony and uncertain. As you round the last bend in that twisty road, you find all about you a blasted sort of landscape, corrugated here and there with what look like the runnels of ancient avalanches, waterless, apparently soil-less, and stubbled only in sporadic patches with arid and thorny shrubs. This is the Black Mountain. You pass one windswept settlement, crouched in a declivity in the snow plain, and there is nothing more, not a hut, not a barn, until suddenly in the middle of the wasteland you see before you, in its own cold scoop among the hills, the village of Cetinje.
From here the Montenegrins projected their unyielding defiance against all comers, and particularly against the Turks. For generations they were the first line of Christian defence against Islam and alone in the Balkans they never gave in, decorating their streets with the skulls of Turks and inculcating their children with patriotic ferocity. They were ruled in their heyday by prince-bishops, Vladikas, fighting prelates who combined all authority, spiritual and secular, in one mighty office, and unlike the Venetians they believed strongly in the power of individual personality. Bards sang the praises of Montenegrin chieftains, not at all the Venetian practice, and the greatest of their heroes, the Prince-Bishop Petar Njegoš, would not long have survived the cautious safeguards of the Venetian constitution: a learned theologian, a gifted linguist, a scholarly jurist, a crack shot, the first poet of Montenegrin literature, six feet six tall, he was the idol of his people and was buried flamboyantly at his own wish on the very top of Mount Lovćen itself, where his mausoleum remains. Swaggering, boastful and terribly superstitious, the Montenegrins were armed to the teeth always, and their bearing was described by an English writer, as late as 1911, as being ‘soldier-like and manly, though somewhat theatrical’. The Venetians viewed them with predictable ambiguity. They were Christians, after all. They were doughty enemies of the Turks. Also Kotor was their only outlet to the world and they brought business to its bankers, merchants and agents. It was Venetian money that enabled the Montenegrins to raise the ransom for their Prince-Bishop Danilo, when he was condemned to crucifixion by the Turks. It was a Venetian press which, in the year 1493, in the Montenegrin monastery of Obod, printed the first book in the Serbo-Croat language, less than half a century after the invention of printing. Rich Montenegrins, tiring of their perpetual siege-life in the mountains, sometimes retired to Venice, and several Montenegrin chiefs were ennobled by the Republic.
On the other hand they were exceedingly difficult neighbours. Their yearning for a sea-outlet was a running threat to the Venetian position on the coast, and the houses of Kotor and Perast had to be fortified against the more lawless of their guerilla bands. At the same time the Venetians, pursuing their generally ambivalent policy towards the Turks, were chary of allying themselves too closely with such uncompromising enemies of Islam, and they repeatedly rebuffed the Montenegrins, deceived them or left them in the lurch – refusing to help when their armies were on the point of annihilation, letting them down in diplomatic negotiations, and once actually colluding with the Turks in a plot to assassinate their Vladika.
Yet it could be said that only the furious determination of the Montenegrins, during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saved the Adriatic coast, and so possibly Venice itself, from the Turks. To the very end of the Venetian empire the Montenegrins were fighting up there, and you can feel this heroic heritage still in the windy streets of Cetinje. There is a raw challenge in the air. Peter Njegoš’ barracks-like palace, called the Biljarda after the billiard-table laboriously conveyed to it, by order of the Tsar of Russia, up the Ladder of Cattaro, still crouches comfortless beneath the slope of the hill: on the white summit of Lovćen, deep in snow, you can still make out his lonely tomb.
Unfortunately long after the Venetians had left the Gulf of Kotor a later prince of Montenegro, Nicolas, gave the little capital a very different significance, for he aspired to join the egregious company of monarchs who then lorded it all over Europe, and in 1910 proclaimed himself a king. The powers took him seriously. The King of Italy married one of his daughters, the King of Serbia another, two more became the pair of Grand Duchesses who introduced Rasputin to the Russian court. Grandiose legations were erected in the village streets of Cetinje and Nicolas built himself a palace stuffed to every corner with the signed portraits, the chivalric orders, the mementos of Tsars, Empresses and Queen Victorias essential to every royal home. So the capital of the Montenegrins, which had so tantalized the Venetians down the mountain, became in the end the capital of Rumania: until World War I, that mighty scourer of pretension, swept all away to oblivion, leaving only museums behind.
This (by the way) is the manner in which, in the year 1484, the son of the Prince Ivo the Black of Montenegro married the daughter of the Doge Pietro Mocenigo of the Venetian Republic:
The Prince wrote to the Doge thus: ‘Harken to me Doge! As they say that thou hast in thy house the most beautiful of roses, your daughter, so in my house there is the handsomest of pinks, my son. Let us unite the two.’ And the Doge replied, ‘Yea, let us,’ and Ivo the Black went to the palace of the Doge in Venice with handsome gifts of gold, and the wedding was arranged for the following autumn. ‘Friend Doge,’ said Ivo, ‘then thou shalt see me with six hundred choice companions, and if there is among them a single one who is more handsome than my son Stanicha, then give me neither bride nor dowry.’ The Doge was much pleased and Ivo sailed away to Montenegro.
But as autumn approached, Stanicha was stricken with a terrible smallpox, and his face was pitted hideously, and all his beauty destroyed. Ivo the Black told the Doge nothing of this, but when there came a message from Venice saying that all was ready for the nuptials, he assembled his 600 men to go to Venice: and they were the handsomest of all men, with lofty brow and commanding look, from Dulcigno and from Antivari, the eagles of Podgoritza and all the finest young men as far as the green Lim.
‘What say you, brothers,’ asked Ivo of them, ‘shall we put one of you in place of Stanicha for the nuptials, and allow him on our return half the rich presents which will be given to him as the supposed bridegroom of the Doge’s daughter?’ The young men approved, and Obrezovo Djuro was declared the handsomest of them all, and elected to play the part. So they embarked for Venice crowned with flowers.
They arrived in Venice and the Doge Mocenigo was struck with amazement at the beauty of Obrezovo Djuro, whom he took to be the prince’s son. ‘Surely he is the handsomest of them all,’ said he, and so the wedding was celebrated, and there was feasting and festivity for a whole week. ‘Friend Doge,’ said Ivo at the end of the week, ‘we must return to our mountains,’ and the Doge gave to Djuro, whom he took to be Stanicha, a golden apple as a token of wedlock, and two damasced fusils, two tunics of finest linen wrought with gold, and much besides, and so they sailed away with the Doge’s beautiful daughter back to the Black Mountain.
When they reached the Black Mountain, the bride was shown her real husband Stanicha, ugly from the smallpox. ‘Here is your real husband, my son Stanicha,’ said Ivo the Black: but she was very angry at the deception, for half the costly presents that the Doge had given must stay with Djuro, and she had embroidered with her own hands the tunics of gold. ‘If I must be Stanicha’s wife,’ said she, ‘then Stanicha must fight Djuro to recover the last tunic of gold. If not, I will pluck a thorn, I will scratch my face with it, and with the blood I will w
rite a letter which my falcon will carry swiftly to great Venice.’
So Stanicha killed Djuro with a javelin through the head. War followed in the Black Mountain and Ivo could see the whole plain covered afar with horses and riders cut in pieces. The young men rose so furiously on behalf of the murdered Djuro that Stanicha was forced to leave the mountains for a foreign country far away; and his bride went home to Venice a virgin.
A particular aesthetic governs the Dalmatian coast, corroded though it is in many parts by the stain of tourism. It lies partly of course in the splendour of the landscape, that incomparable combination of sea, island and limestone barrier. It is partly the climate too, generally so benign, shifting suddenly to seething seas and scudding clouds when the bora falls upon the Adriatic like the breath of fate. Perhaps it is partly the nature of the inhabitants, almost all Slavs now even in the towns, tough and stocky people, made a little more drab by the exigencies of Communism and given to particular violence in war, who slump themselves opposite you at the dining-table grim and unresponsive, but can be coaxed with patience into true bonhomie.
But what chiefly gives the coast its tang, and makes it like no other shore, is the particular blend of the Latin and the Slav which is the gift of Venice to Dalmatia. History has expunged some of it: hardly a trace of the Italian cuisine is noticeable now and the Italian language has been systematically eradicated even in those places like Zadar, Rijeka and the ports of Istria which became Italian again between the two world wars. But in the long string of towns which graces this shore one can detect a particular sinewy allure which could arise, I think, only from this particular association of temperaments. I accept absolutely the theory that Vittore Carpaccio was from Koper in Istria, for the cool spareness of his vision, so different from the exclamatory style of a Titian or a Tintoretto, or the gentle mysteries of a Giorgione, perfectly reflects the Dalmatian mix of ornate and naive, sea and karst.
There is a similarity but not a sameness to all the towns. Each has its piazza, recognizable still as the centre of Venetian power. Each is likely to have one of those elegant little loggias, pillared, tile-roofed and possibly en-lioned, which were sometimes used as lesser courts of justice and sometimes as lodging-places for travellers. There is probably a handful of patrician houses still standing, distant cousins to the palazzi of the Grand Canal, escutcheoned as often as not though long since divided into flats or handed over to People’s Consultative Syndicates. There is also certain to be, proudly in the middle of town and still an active centre of Christian devotion, a cathedral.
One cannot really call the cathedrals of Dalmatia Venetian buildings. Most of them were built, or rebuilt, under the aegis of Venice, and Venetian architects frequently worked upon them, sometimes modelling them upon Venetian originals. But their particular magic comes, nearly always, from the touch of the Slav upon the Italianate. They are very sensual buildings, almost always, made of glowing marble or soft sandstone, intimate with little side-chapels and dark chancels, curiously embellished with images sacred and profane, instructive or merely frivolous. If spiritually they sometimes seem, like the one at Korčula, miniatures of the Basilica San Marco, physically they are often boldly individualistic or even eccentric, marked by the preferences of some local artist, or conceived by local circumstance.
The cathedral of San Lorenzo at Trogir, for instance, seems at first just a singularly beautiful example of medieval Venetian architecture, from the period when Romanesque dovetailed into Gothic. Set in a neat ensemble of piazza, loggia and patrician house, like a close, it is not too hard to imagine it transferred to some campo of Venice itself. But within its heavily arched narthex, shaded deeply against the sun, an altogether alien marvel reveals itself: an elaborately, almost violently carved great porch, of a style so roughly vigorous that no Venetian artist could ever have made it. It was the work of the thirteenth-century Croatian sculptor Radovan, and it is guarded by two of the burliest-and most truculent lions of the Venetian Empire – Slav lions through and through, on guard like mercenaries.
The cathedral of Šibenik, Sebenico to the Venetians, is another declaration of independence. The principal architect of this famous building was a Dalmatian who had studied at Venice and is known by his Italian name of Giorgio Orsini; he married a Venetian and possessed houses in several Venetian territories. But his cathedral turns out to be, despite a certain initial impact of déjà vu, very un-Venetian after all. Its interior, especially, is like nothing in Venice. It rises in a series of steps from narthex to altar, but not in the graceful manner of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice: the dark nave does not glide upwards to the high altar, but rather stumps there, step by step through the twilight. Outside, too, the posture of the church, when you look at it longer, is strangely bold and muscular, a little piratical perhaps, and around the back seventy sculpted heads, said to be those of citizens too stingy to contribute to the cost of the building, gaze out at the passers-by astonishingly like the decapitated heads of captured enemies, some moustachio’d and unrepentant, some innocent and aghast.
But the most startling expression of this hybrid aesthetic is to be found in the island-town of Rab, Arbe to the Venetians, some fifty miles north of Zadar and reached by ferry from the old Uskok nest of Senj. Rab is a tiny place on a promontory, perhaps half a mile long and three narrow streets wide, but its silhouette was familiar to every Venetian mariner along this coast, and is unmistakable now. Four tall campaniles are its emblems, all in a row along its western shore, and they give the place an oddly eerie effect, even when the tourists crowd its beaches.
Wherever you walk down the spine of the town, pine-scented from the woods that edge it, those four tall towers seem to beckon you on, like markers – down the flagged and wheel-less lanes, under the old stone arches wreathed in creeper, past the dark little loggia in the middle of town, past quaint crested palaces and high-walled gardens, until at the end of your walk, near the tip of the promontory, you discover before you the ribbed Italianate façade of the little cathedral, on its own piazzetta beside the sea.
There is a little belvedere beside it, pleasantly shaded, where you may lean over the water and watch the boats go by; but your eye is not likely to wander for long, because above the main door of the church is the true focus of the whole island, the object to which, you realize now, those four grave towers have been guiding you all along. It is the starkest and saddest, perhaps the truest of Pietas, in which a grief-stricken Virgin cherishes a Christ still writhing from the pain of the cross. Nothing could be further from the ample and confident faith of Venetian Christian art. It is a chunk of the karst that is mounted there, carved with a bitter vision.
Northward through the off-shore islands, as the coast with its indentations unfolds itself to starboard: the treacherous gulf called Boiling Bay, where indeed when the wind gusts from the north the waves do seem to bubble, hiss and steam, as though there is fire beneath them; Rijeka, which used to be Fiume, where the Venetians built themselves, in the church of San Guido, a remarkably inaccurate copy of their beloved Salute; Pula, a naval base all its life, Roman, Hungarian, Austrian, Italian and now Yugoslav; until there stands to the north the bumpy peninsula of Istria. This was the nearest to home of all the possessions of the Stato da Mar, separated from Venice itself only by Trieste and the lagoon-shore of Venezia Giulia.
This is where Dalmatia ends, and now the little seaside towns are more exactly Venetian. They gave to the Doge one of the earliest of his ancillary titles, dux totius istriae, and they remained Italian until the end of World War II. They were confirmed irrevocably as Yugoslav only in 1975, when their future was settled with that of Trieste, and they have powerful sizable Italian populations still. Even today it is hard to remember that Capodistria is Koper now, Parenzo Poreč, Rovigno Rovinj. A powerful sense of nostalgia informs them, dingy as they are with Communism’s patina, and every weekend their inhabitants pour in their thousands over the frontier to Italy, to stock up not just with jeans, confectionery and
spare parts, but also no doubt with the sense of style and colour to which so many centuries of Venetian rule accustomed them.
This rather melancholy peninsula – for centuries it was repeatedly ravaged by plague – was always familiar to Venice. It was only a day and night’s sailing to the lagoon, even in the Middle Ages, and more than any other imperial settlements, the Istrian seaports feel like illusions of Venice herself. Sometimes their appearance now in this still alien setting, with a splash of authentic Venetian red, perhaps, and a pattern of real Venetian machicolation on the skyline, and a perfect little replica of St Mark’s Campanile rising above the rooftops, backed by such sober hills and pine forests, and often hemmed in by modern office blocks, tourist hotels and Corbusian apartments, can be sadly unsettling.
There is an easy cure, though. You must do as the Venetians did. Climb the high ground behind Koper, say, on a fine spring day, when the sea is flecked only with little curls of foam, and the long line of coast is clear as pen-and-ink. Settle up there among the conifers with a picnic and a pair of binoculars and presently, when the sun is just beginning to set, you may make out through the glasses an indistinct grey blur upon the horizon to the west, faintly picked out perhaps, in fancy if not in fact, with a shimmer of gold. There is a stack of buildings on a waterfront, surely. There is a suspicion of a tower. Isn’t that a gilded angel there, that faint spot on the lens, that golden dust-flake?