Letter From Croatia IV: Constantine’s Mother

Watercolor of stone relief by Hallie Cohen

It is rumored that Helena, the mother of Constantine, was born in the town of Skript on the Island of Brac. Constantine was, of course, a very influential personage in the history of early Christianity since he was a Roman Emperor under whom Christianity thrived. He was the Earl Warren of the Roman Empire, a liberal put in power by those who sought to perpetuate conservative values. The Edict of Milan was a liberal doctrine. A little chapel, at the end of a vineyard outside of the town of Stari Grad on the island of Hvar, which is a short boat ride from Brac, is constructed out of stone and wood and like many structures along the small roads of the Dalmatian Coast emanates from Roman times. A cross, a Latin inscription, a bas relief of a bear (possibly symbolizing Constantine himself) and then “ Sainta Elena,” a Croatian variation of Helena testify to Constantine’s legacy. This little stone sanctuary could also have been a storehouse for grapes and fruits. It partakes both of the pagan and the religious and its components are a mixture of the eternal and the changing, the material and the spiritual with seemingly fragile wood beams supporting a slate stone roof. Grapes and blackberries glisten in the light and you can stop and pick warm fresh figs off the trees. The water in the harbor area is crystal clear and on a sunny August afternoon you feel the urgency of nature in a direct way that characterized the early Christian’s relationship to God. 

Letter From Croatia I: Brac

“Croatian Cloud,” watercolor by Hallie Cohen

There is a rumor that stone from Brac was used in the making of the White House pillars. In any case the largest island in Croatia (there are over a thousand of them) noted for its beaches and its rocky beauty, still houses Croatia’s only stonemasonry school, where students can learn an age old trade for free. The quarries of Pucisca, Postira and Selca still produce stone that is sought after for its facility in producing a clean polished surface. Brac is reached by boat from Split (where Diocletian’s Palace still stands as a monument to Bracian stone) and its geography gave it a certain immunity from the turbulence that swept the country during the The Croatian War of Independence which was fought from l991-5. Flying from Rome to Split, you enter a new time zone. In Rome stone is a tourist attraction. On Brac, it’s an industry. Yet the sleepy villages, whose hotels with their spare socialist realist style décor still cater to Russian tourists (along with throngs of Italians, English and Americans) as they did when Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia was allied, albeit ambivalently, with the Soviet bloc, are firmly a part of Marshall McCluhan’s Global Village. Unlike their cousins in Bosnia, the Croats (who historically braved the Ottomans from the northeast and the Habsburgs from the northwest) have emerged as intact from the strife of the past as the tidy red stone roofs visible from an airplane (in July they joined the EU). Even the Croatian clouds seem to prosper outlandishly, being so fluffy as to look like gigantic self-satisfied wads of cotton, or even snow that’s developed an immunity to heat.