On the Shores of the Mediterranean - Eric Newby

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by someone who dropped fluorescein into it, of which one part can be detected in up to twenty million times its volume in water, that the Timavo then flows into the subterranean Lake of Trebiciano, which is at the bottom of a thousand-foot shaft in what is a sort of no-man’s-land beyond the municipal rubbish tips of Trieste, on its way to enter the Adriatic near Monfalcone twelve miles away, in Italy at San Giovanni Timavo. There it emerges from the base of a cliff in an arcadian place which remains arcadian only because it is the property of the Trieste waterworks, beside a church built on the site of a Roman temple itself built to hallow the spot. After its twenty-mile journey underground, it bubbles up in a series of pools, partly hidden from view by the willows that bend over them, before flowing over a series of weirs into the sea in the Gulf of Panzano, where its mouth is now disfigured by an enormous marina. Here, the Argonauts are supposed to have landed. Here, though strictly forbidden, because it belongs to the waterworks, we had a lovely picnic on the grass.

      Down below in the caverns of the Carso there are strange creatures: Troglocaris Schmidti, a cave crab with a round belly which swims canted over to one side as though its ballast has shifted, and which sometimes, if it takes a wrong turning, gets sucked up into the Yugoslav drinking-water system; and, most remarkable of all, Proteus anguineus, a weird, stick-like member of the salamander family with four legs, that somehow survived the ice age in the temperate cavern air. Amphibious, breathing either through lungs or gills, according to which element it is in, quite blind, although born with embryonic eyes that later disappear, in its native habitat it lives for fifty years, and in captivity enjoys a diet of worms and mince meat. There is also a variety of blind spiders, scorpions and centipedes, all said to be either light brown or to have no colour at all.

      The plateau of the eastern Kras through which the Timavo flows, mostly underground, was and is still the birthplace of some of the finest horses the world has ever seen. The rough ground and the excellent grass which grows on it combine to produce a race of horses of exceptional strength and speed with thick shanks, supple knees and particularly well-formed, strong hoofs.

      Here, the ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, bred their horses for war and the great chariot races. In the oak woods near Škocjan the Thracians erected a temple to Dionysus, protector of horses. At Lipiča, among the same sort of oak woods only a few miles away, there is a mews and stud founded in 1580 by the Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor Maximilian II. He introduced the Spanish horse into Austria and for 339 years, until the end of the Empire in 1919, horses from Lipiča were supplied to the Imperial Spanish Riding School at Vienna, the only great riding school to survive both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars: and for more than 240 years this breed of white horses, sired by Arab-Berbers brought from Andalucia, horses from Polesine in the Po Valley and, in the eighteenth century, from Germany and Denmark, performed the evolutions of the haute école in the great white baroque Winter Riding School in the Josefs-Platz, more like a ballroom than a manège, that is the masterpiece of the architect Fischer von Erlach.

      These are the horses, Lipizzas, or Lippizaners, white as marble when grown, compact, broad-chested, with thick necks, long backs, thick, long manes, and with protuberant and intelligent eyes – fully grown they are between fifteen and sixteen hands – that when you see them moving with a high knee action in a natural, spirited trot, which at Vienna would be later schooled into what is known as the Spanish Walk, remind you of the horses on a Greek urn, or else of Verrocchio’s statue of the horse being ridden by the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, next door to the little restaurant, the Bandierette, where we had our dinner before leaving for London on the Simplon Express.

      The stallions at Lipiča are descended from one of six hereditary branches of the male line: Pluto, descended from the Danish stallion born in 1765; Conversano, from the brown Napolitan born in 1767; Napolitano, from a bay of that name born in 1790; Favory, a dun Lipiča born at Kladrub, another imperial stud between Prague and Brunn, in 1779; Maestoso, a grey born in 1819 at Mezohëgyes in Hungary of a Spanish dam sired by a Lipiča; and Siglavy, a grey Arab born in 1810, also at Mezohëgyes. Originally there were eighteen dynasties of dams at Lipiča. Several are now extinct. At Lipiča a horse takes its name from his forefather, followed by that of its dam – Siglavy-Almerina, Pluto-Theodorasta, and so on.

      Lipiča no longer supplies horses to the Spanish Riding School. The Austrian horses now all come from Piber, near Graz in Styria, and the stud at Lipiča has become a sort of tourist attraction, although it still supplies horses to the state stables and they are exported all over the world as circus and saddle horses. In the Balkans, at least until recently, they were much used for heavy agricultural work.

      Some years ago there were rumours that the stud was to be closed down and that all the horses were to be sold to a sausage factory which has its premises conveniently close by, but nothing came of it.

      

      ‘You have been here before,’ any reader who has got this far may well say. It is true I have been, many times, in this part of the world, in the Carso. This is the country, part of Slovenia, itself one of the republics that make up Yugoslavia, in which my wife was born; its inhabitants proud, prickly people with long memories, some of them endowed with second sight, musical, very fond of singing, passionate lovers of flowers, part of a tiny nation conquered by Charlemagne in the seventh century, which, although it struggled successfully to preserve its language, never attained independence. Many of them are now scattered to the far ends of the earth, principally in Australia and South America.

      This was the place she meant when, tried beyond endurance by some domestic row, she used to cry, majestically, ‘I shall return to my country and my people!’

      Actually, she never did carry out this threat. Instead we returned there together year after year, usually with our children, to stay in her parents’ house.

      Over this disputed territory – about twenty miles deep and altogether about the size of Long Island – which has always been one of the principal ways of access for the people of Middle Europe to the Mediterranean, have flown, among others, the flags of Bonaparte’s Illyria, of Austria-Hungary and, more recently, those of both Italy and Yugoslavia, which now have it divided unequally and uneasily between them.

      To Italians, the Carso is, as it always has been, the frontier between Latin civilization and what they regard as Slavonic barbarism. It is a very old habit for them to think of it as such. This was the region held by the Tenth Legion and called by the Roman Senate ‘The Impassable Confine’. In their brief modern tenure of it, which lasted about twenty-five years, they succeeded in extending their hold over it, but at great cost. Between 1915 and 1917, fighting against the Austro-Hungarians, in the twelve battles of the Isonzo, in the small area between Monte Michele north of Monfalcone and the Adriatic, they lost 175,000 men, a quarter of their losses in the entire war.

      To the Austrians it was Der Karst, or Das Küstenland, now not much more than a nostalgic memory of a time when Trieste was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s principal port on the Mediterranean. To the Yugoslav nation it is the Kras, what they failed by a hair’s-breadth to seize at the end of the Second World War, which would have given them a prestigious outlet on the Mediterranean, and which became a danger point in their relationship with the West. To the Slovenes it is also the Kras, but to them a place where for some 1300 years they have wrested a hard-earned living from its inhospitable terrain.

      After 1918 it was annexed by Italy, and Slovene villages began to have their names printed together with their Italian equivalents on signposts and on Italian maps, as they still do on Italian maps even though many of them are now in Yugoslavia. Under Mussolini, the teaching of Slovene was forbidden and Slovene schoolteachers were replaced by Italians, the Slovene teachers being sent to Italy. There, those who spoke no Italian – most spoke German as a second language (the Slovenes, as members of the Empire, fought in the Austrian army in the First War) – experienced the same difficulty in communicating with their pupils, until they had learned the language, as did monoglot Neapolitans sent to teach Italian to Slovene children, which was what happened to my Slovene father-in-law.

      

      That afternoon we crossed out of Italy at the frontier post at the hamlet near Trieste called Fernetti and into Yugoslavia

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