Eric Newby - On the Shores of the Mediterranean

The room was full of people. Most had come to pay their respects, take a sprig of the box, dip it in the holy water, sprinkle it over the corpse, stay a little while to pray or talk to relatives and friends about the virtues of the deceased, and have a drink, after which they left to get back to their televisions, and be replaced by other mourners. Some of the men, of whom I was one, were, as Wanda had forecast, a bit ‘dronk’.

The remainder, women mostly, old and young, although there were one or two elderly men among them, sat on hard upright chairs round the coffin, dressed in their best clothes, the women reciting the rosary, counting the decades of the Aves, the Ave Marias, on their beads, sometimes at the conclusion of a whole fifteen of them stopping to recount some edifying anecdotes about Nunča Pahorča who had always been very devout, sometimes to the distraction of her husband. They talked about how she had never missed going to mass and benediction and how she used to tick off the acolytes for picking their noses or otherwise misbehaving themselves during the celebration while the priest’s back was turned. And once they sang a Slovene song, which was one of her favourites, and which began:

After which they wept a bit, had another little drink and began reciting the rosary once more. Long after midnight, by which time we had finished dinner, we went back with Marija for a second visit, and found that they were still at it and showed no signs of giving up.

The dinner was memorable, although like a relieving force for a beleaguered garrison it only arrived in the nick of time to save me. The chicken, which had spent its life scratching among the grit in the back yard, was flavoured with rosemary and full of delicious natural juices. With it we had ajdova polenta , like Italian polenta but grey not yellow, made from the seeds of a white flower which grows all over the Kras in summertime, and really meant to be eaten with golaž , goulash, which was also on the menu that evening. Many of the dishes served in this part of the world have Austro-Hungarian origins. With it we ate radič , a bitter, delicious green salad, and fižol , cooked, dried red haricot beans, with olive oil and vinegar. Last of all, as a great treat, we were given cespljevi cmoki , dumplings made with flour, potatoes and egg, like Italian gnocchi , each dumpling stuffed with a plum, sprinkled with sugar and then eaten with a sauce of melted butter and fried breadcrumbs. After all this, and more Teran, and more žganje , we went to bed.

The next morning, after having attended the funeral of Nunča Pahorča, following the coffin to the cemetery on foot, feeling decidedly unwell, in a procession which included almost all those inhabitants of the village able to walk, and seeing the red earth thud down on it as it lay alongside her husband’s in the grave, we went away, crossing the ridge of the Javornik mountains which here formed the pre-1939 frontier between Yugoslavia and Italy, where the now empty casemates of the two not very friendly nations still face one another across vestiges of what had once been fields of barbed wire.

Then we drove along the far shore of the Cerkniško Jezero, which was staging one of its customary disappearing acts – hay was being harvested from the bottom of it – to Planina, a village in the pass between the Nanos and the Javornik which carries the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana.

A rather unusual lake, the Cerkniško Jezero, normally a sheet of water seven miles long and six feet deep, at certain seasons, of which this was one, disappears without warning, together with its inhabitants which include fish with horns and a freshwater jellyfish. Besides these fishy inhabitants, and in winter enormous numbers of waterfowl, it also has a ghostly population of skeleton warriors armed with lances and axes and mounted on skeleton horses. From time to time they rise from beneath the surface and, preceded by flocks of skeletal birds, circuit the lake making the night hideous with the clattering of their bones and weapons.

At Planina, the Pivka, another underground river, emerges in a deep valley, having been joined, also underground, by the Rak, a river which has its origins beneath the Cerkniško Jezero. In the valley at Planina the now-augmented Pivka is joined by a third river which also emerges from underground at this point, the Malenska, after which, still called the Pivka, it flows through watermeadows of extraordinary beauty until, eventually, it sinks for what is the last time in its career beneath the Ljubljanski Mountain near Ljubljana, beyond which it joins the Sava and eventually the Danube, flowing with it into the Black Sea.

Across the river from Planina, standing on the edge of the forest from which the red deer come down into the park from the Javornik, is the Haasberg, a castle, a country house really, of the Princes of Windisch-Graetz, a family reputed to have owned ninety-nine castles in Austria-Hungary before 1914, a figure that makes one suspect that this is legend because anyone having ninety-nine castles could surely not have resisted the temptation to acquire one more and make it a round hundred. Nevertheless, when the Italians annexed a large slice of what had been until 1918 Slovene territory in Austria-Hungary, the Windisch-Graetz still had sufficient influence to have the new frontier moved sufficiently far to the east, a matter of yards, for the house itself to be on Italian soil. The stones marking the boundaries can still be seen in the park behind the house.

The Haasberg was burned by the Yugoslav partisans in 1944 when it was an Italian headquarters. Now it is an empty shell. The watermills that stand one above the other in the valley of the Malenska are ruined; the church in the park unused, occupied by thirteen members of the family lying in stone sarcophagi. (The fourteenth sarcophagus lies empty with its lid drawn to one side, waiting for an occupant who will now, presumably, never come.) Very old retainers, one of whom was pottering about the dilapidated barns and outbuildings in a battered green hat, recall what to them was a happier age before the Second World War.

Whatever the Carso or the Kras may be, this sad and beautiful place has nothing at all to do with the Mediterranean and never has done. Here, if anywhere, you can say that the Mediterranean world ends and that of Middle Europe begins.

South of Rijeka the Adriatic Highway with its sometimes amazing views of offshore islands that appear to be swimming one behind the other, like a shoal of sea monsters, extends almost to the Albanian frontier. Now, in late summer, the roadside and the cliffs below it on what had been until recently one of the most beautiful coasts in the entire Mediterranean were littered with the detritus of snacks and picnics and with the shattered and burnt-out shells of motor cars whose occupants, down here on holiday from the Nordic north, had departed this life for what one hopes is a better world.

Along this road, one of the most perilous in the world in high summer, were the official camp sites, surrounded by high wire fences which effectively separated the campers from the local inhabitants, keeping the former in, the latter out. Some of the larger camps were guarded by armed soldiers and spending the night in one of these places I really felt that once more I was in a concentration camp. As on the shores of most other Mediterranean countries it was forbidden to camp anywhere other than in an organized camp site. Given the state of the roadsides it was difficult to see what else the authorities could do. But for the existence of these camps, some of which after months of continuous occupation were themselves in a repulsive condition, there would probably have been large scale outbreaks of typhoid.