Slovenia Journal VI: A Tale of Two Cities

Drawing by Hallie Cohen  of Kranjska Gora Church

Start from Tarcenta in Northern Italy and then ride through the Rezia mountains 20 or so kilometers through the Tanamea Pass to the Slovenian town of Zoga (translation “saw mill”). Krn Mountain on the Slovenian side is where Hemingway worked as an ambulance driver in the First World War. It served as the backdrop for A Farewell to Arms. The terrain is awe inspiring and dramatic. As you approach Slovenia, onion domes emerge out of nowhere in the mountains. But what is even more dramatic besides the beaut, punctuated by the turquoise waters of the Soca River, is how a relatively short distance defines two radically different worlds. Look down from a point in the mountains at night into the Italian and Slovenian sides. One is a mass of connected lights (Italy), the other (Slovenia) is characterized by huge areas of darkness separated by sporadic light. One conveys the feeling of Western Europe, the other is a world made up of Celtic, Slavic, Bavarian and Tyrolian influences resulting from successive waves of invasion. Parts of Slovenia belonged to both Italy and Austria- Hungary and were fought over by both of these powers, among others, throughout varying periods of history (which explains why cemeteries memorializing the dead of many countries are ubiquitous throughout the countryside). Riding through the steep mountain passes and small villages, one can’t help feeling this is the terrain where myths and legends were and perhaps are still being made. As you drive past a town like Zoga, you get the feeling of watching a folk tale spreading out before your eyes.

Slovenia Journal V: Aquileia

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen after fresco of decapitation of St. Hermagoras

The Baths of Caracalla and The Colosseum  are the most famous vestiges of ancient Rome, but they merely epitomize ruins of the past. Amphitheaters in cities such as Trieste and Siracusa pop up out of nowhere and take your breath away. There is Rome and then there is Christianity, which is represented not by ruins, but by masterpieces like The Sistine Chapel. In 313 A.D. the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan which allowed the Christian Church to acquire property. In the mosaic tiles on the floor of the Romaneque basilica built in 343 in the town of Aquileia, the Christian themes of the antelope (devotion) and the stag (action), along with the fisher theme exemplify the synthesis of the two cultures in the early Christian context. One of the frescoes on the wall of the crypts, created hundreds of years later, depicts the beheading of the first bishop of Aquileia, Hermagoras (appointed by Mark), and his deacon, Fortunatus. The crypt also contains a reliquary. As documented by Elaine Pagels and others, early Christianity, perhaps in response to the repressiveness of the Romans, offered a more direct relationship between man and God and one that was not mitigated by the intercession of the church. In fact, early Christianity exemplified Max Weber’s famous distinction between the sect and the church. At the height of its importance in the fourth century, Aquileia had over l00,000 inhabitants. Then it practically disappeared off the map. Today it’s a world heritage site, passed by tourists as they approach the Julian alps on their way to Slovenia.

How To Build An Android

Eric Matthews

David F. Duffy’s How To Build An Android sounds like a book one would want to read, despite a lukewarm review of the writer’s prose in the Lawrence Downes review that appeared in The New York Times Book Review (“Talking Head,” NYT, 6/22/12) “It explains how a team of researchers at the University of Memphis collaborated in 2005 with an artist and robotics expert, David Hanson, to create what was then the most sophisticated android anywhere, a replica of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. They called him Phil." “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep” is, of course the title of a famous Dick short story. But it’s as if Dick actually came back to life and scripted the event itself, if Downes review is an reflection on the story Duffy tells. Apparently, Phil, who was made from a “polymer called Frubber” and was capable both of “making faces” and meeting "a visitor’s gaze,” was “left…in a carry-on bag in the overhead bin” on a flight “from Dallas to San Francisco” when “Hanson changed planes in Las Vegas.” So there are two elements of great interest: the disappearance of the head and its inception. How To Build An Android would definitely be a good title for the fiction, if the author of the non-fiction book doesn’t object. The details would suggest one of Dick’s most advanced stories and a story which has no end. The head which was so over programmed that it couldn’t be shut up, was never found. Could it have engineered it’s own escape and then constructed its own equivalent of a witness protection program, where it furnished itself with a new identity? Remember an android doesn’t require much in the way of TLC and it certainly doesn’t require food, water or sex. Perhaps Phil made himself at home in the fun house of a carnival where he now reenacts Linda Blair’s 360 from The Exorcist, to the screams of terrified teenagers.

Slovenia Journal IV: Risiera Di San Sabba

Who choses the design for a concentration camp camp? Trieste’s Risiera di San Sabba was small by standards of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Birkenau. Only 3000-5000 Slovenes, Croats and Jews perished, but it still had its own on premises crematorium and when you visit today you follow a floor plan with names like Cella dell Morte which leads you to the original chambers which do not provide six degrees of separation. The actual prisoners' cells, holding up to six inmates, were tiny closets with stone floors and simple wood slats; the first two cells which lacked the key holes, that accompanied the others, were used for torture and interrogation. In answer to the question of design the Risiera, which took over the premises of a former rice factory, was the brain child of one Erwin Lambert, a former mason, who had had previous success in building extermination facilities at Sobibor and Treblinka. Here he had made the brilliant decision of taking over a factory and simply changing the function from rice production to what industrious Nazis probably termed waste management, though extermination is the rightful term. The Risiera was officially called a Polizeihaftlager or police internment camp and after the war from l949-65 it was used to as a holding camp for refugees who would not be accepted by other countries. There is a drawing by an artist named Bruno Pengov, an inmate at the Ristera, in the Ristera’s exhibit room. Pengov, who died at Auschwitz, wrote under his drawing of two emaciated corpses in a coffin, “We cannot come with you, do not forget us.”

Slovenia Journal III: Sinagoga

The old Sinagoga di Trieste built at the beginning of the twentieth century is one of the largest in Europe, a monumental structure that that ranks in importance with its counterparts in Budapest, Brussels and Berlin. It attests to the vibrant Jewish population that once thrived in the city, producing the poet Umberto Saba and the novelist Ettore Schmitz who Joyce discovered and who wrote such books as La Conscienza di Zeno (The Confessions of Zeno) and Senilita (As a Man Grows Older) under the nom de plum of Italo Svevo. The Synagogue is located on the Via San Francesco di Assisi, but it sits in the Piazza Virgilio Giotti named after a Poet (1885-1957), and also is bordered by the Via Gaetano Donizetti, a homage to the composer (1797-1848) and the Via Guido Zanetti, named for a soldier whose life was prematurely taken from him during world war I. When you go to the Risiera di San Sabba, another important Trieste  monument, in this case a memorial at the site of a notorious detention center in which Jews and resistance fighters were executed (which contained its own crematorium), there are pictures of the synagogue covered in swastikas. Its grand dome and enormous Rose window set around a Star of David window have survived, though the building is only open on Sunday mornings which is also a testament to the decline of a once vibrant community that went from a height of 6000 to its present 600.

Slovenia Journal II: Francobolli

photo of Filateria postcard

On Trieste’s Viale XX Settembre, a tree lined pedestirian esplanade, lies a shop called the Filatelia San Giusto which advertises “Francobolli E Monette Por Collezione Oggettista.” It’s a store the German writer W. G. Sebald, author of  illustrated books like The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants, would have liked. In fact some of the postcards that are showcased in the window of the store with photos from l901or 1925  could easily have been part of a Sebald text which delights in the sublimity and powerful associations conveyed by photos of past places. One of the current images that appears on the cards is of the Galleria di Montuzza a tunnel off the Trieste’s Piazza Goldoni which leads into the hills on the outskirts of the city. Another is of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele III. Vittorio Emanuele III supported Mussolini and there is no such street named after him anymore. After the war, with Vittorio Emanuele III in exile, it became Corso Italia. And so there is a double entendre in looking at the aging photo of both a world and a street which no longer actually exists.  

Slovenia Journal 1: Trieste

Photo: Zinn

There’s a 12:23 train from Venice Mestre Station which gets into Trieste two hours later. On the platform two young men in their twenties, one with an umbrella, protruding from his backpack, and the other with his head shaved and a tattoo on his leg, smoke thin rolled cigarettes. On the train, an older man begins chatting with two women, one of whom has an acne scarred face and a tank top with Saint- Tropez embroidered in fake rhinestones. The older man is an obvious interloper who’s interrupted their conversation, but they don’t seem to mind. The appearance of barges on the Adriatic is the first sign that Trieste is imminent. Then there’s the statue atop the tower hanging over the old stock exchange which now houses the chamber of commerce. Finally there’s the site of densely populated hills running into sea. Being a port city Trieste, like Bari, is a center of trade. But besides fishmongers, Trieste other natural resource is the James Joyce and Italo Svevo tourism industry. Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school in Trieste (and began working on Ulysses there). At Berlitz one of his students was the Jewish writer Ettore Schmitz aka Italo Svevo, whose work he championed. A site Joyce lived in, is now the Victoria Hotel. 404 is the Joyce suite. Joyce is to Trieste what Warren Buffett is to Omaha. Though he only inhabited the city from 1904-1920, his relatively short stay made him one of the city’s major attractions—culturally that is (and stealing some thunder from Dublin). Joyce is a kind of rock star of Trieste and pictures of him are ubiquitous along with signs for Udine, the gateway to Slovenia and the Friulean alps.