Istria, Hrvatska 29 September 2011

More Towns ... and language

For all its faults (and Germans ... and in this term I generously include Austrians, because with a few personal exceptions I can discern no difference) I am coming to understand Rovinj. Not to like, but to comprehend its problems and its helplessness in overcoming them. (More about that below.)

It's proving a perfect base for explorations into the fascinating countryside of Istria. Today, two relatively little visited towns. If these names contain question marks – Gracišce and Svetvincenat (all those Cs need the little v diacritical like over the S, but it doesn't seem to exist in the 'Net world) – your browser doesn't speak ISO-Latin-2; on the map, I have been able to fabricate their diacriticals, so you can see them correctly spelt. How they are pronounced is still a mystery.

Gracišce is another walled hill town with a Venice-clone steeple. It has already been noted that the Venetians used the threat of pirates as a goad to induce the autochthonous peoples to stop farming and build defensive walls and watch towers. "Autochthonous" is a ten dollar word for "natives" that doesn't sound quite as condescending (because nobody knows what it means.) One may note the uncanny parallel between the Venetian's 15th Century strategy and that of the Bush and successor Administration's Homeland Security hustle.

Nevertheless, five centuries later, with the walls safely integrated into the town's architecture and the tower a beacon to let tourists know they're almost there, the cost is quite forgotten.

Gracišce is in the throes of rebuilding its infrastructure, and so large earth movers are rooting up its streets. Even so, it is a sweet little town high above a verdant valley. A woman herds chickens with a broom. A porch surrounded with flower pots. Four churches for maybe 125 people.

Once the sewers are modernized, I expect the town fathers plan to move forward with development of their tourist resources, Motovun style. The flocks have begun to arrive already; we were one of three couples walking the uneven streets of the town. That transition must be an easy one for the autochthons. They keep their windows shut, but the pattern here has always been to turn a blank wall to the public and confine the living space to within walls.

The town's pedigree is undoubted, but there on the wall of the oldest church it sits in bold Roman numerals: Ann D. MCCCCXXV. 1425. Imagine a town in continuous habitation for such a period, still doing its business within its original rocks!

Svetvincenat is endowed with church (with Venetian steeple)  and castle, but no walls. Not a hill town, its in the gently rolling lowlands that make up the lower left quadrant of Istria – a land of scrub interrupted by vineyards, cornfields, and paddocks. It was also likely provided by the Venetian Doge with a ne'er-do-well son of a nobleman to command the castle. Inside the castle is in a sorry state, burnt beams, broken stairs, but once again, history brings the tourists, and work is in progress.

As the only strangers in town, we decide to sit at a bar and enjoy a cappuccino. We garner a few harsh stares from the other customers and a cool welcome from the bar maid, but nothing hostile. Just uncomprehending. 

I have noted before that many of the males in this region of the world seem to spend an unconscionable amount of time sitting around shooting the shit. In Greece, they nurse a "Nes" (water and Nescafe, the cheapest thing on the menu) but here it appears to be beer. As we arrive, a pair of housewives are finishing their cappuccini and head back to work.

The Damsel I travel with wished to have her picture taken in the highest accessible castle window. The castle, despite its run-down condition, was clearly one of interesting structure. Around the ramparts there was a ledge built into the wall, now eroded and needing much repair. In the corner toward the hills, a defensive round tower may have been the last defensible position. Hard to tell how much of the stonework is original, and how many layers and episodes of renovation have taken place. Over the years, waves of conquerors and tourists have taken turns having their way with Istria. It was with all this in mind that we initiated the adventure of finding lunch.

No easy trick. We had read a review in Italian -- one review -- of a "nearby restaurant with a husband and wife, he serving, she cooking..." that raved about the food. We bumbled about, finally finding a lane barely wide enough for our car leading to a lovely out-of-the-way place with the promised husband and wife. There was no English here, and not much tolerance for foreign ways. We transacted in broken Italian (on both sides) but we ended up eating a hearty meal, rich bean soup, njoki with beef sauce, and strong, harsh, tasty local wine.

Hrvatski jezik

With regard to language: we are not in Kansas any more. The roman alphabet has been adapted to Croatian, so Croatian words bristle with consonants, sparkle with diacritical marks, and are distinctly vowel-challenged. Some words are completely vowel free: the island of Krk, where the Rijeka airport is, or the Croatian word for Trieste: Trst.

What's going on here is that not only did the Croatians originally have their own language, Hrvatski jezik, they were among the first to develop an alphabet, called (phonetically) Hrvatsko pismo, yet called Glagolitic or Croatian Cyrillic by "experts."  The Croats – a race, more on that as we move through the country – are sufficiently proud of their language, alphabet, and literature that Pope Innocent IV granted them a special dispensation (in 1248) to create a vernacular liturgy, the only such dispensation granted for centuries. Catholics being masters of strategic adaptation to secure converts, we deduce that Innocent's failure to do this would have been a deal breaker, and the Croats would have gone with Eastern Orthodoxy. Republika Hrvatska is now 86+% Catholic, so it was a good move.

Those familiar with other cyrillic alphabets, such as Greek and Russian, will note similarities in the characters; the interesting question is, which came first. Guess what the Croats say. 

Having dragged the proud Croatians into the western european world, a decision was taken somewhere along the line to convert the 30 characters of Hrvatsko pismo into the 26 characters of the Roman alphabet by adding diacritical marks.

Pronunciation guidelines are really tough to digest, but here are some clues: r is a vowel, the short e plus a one-roll r (so Hrvatska starts with "her" with a single roll to the r). There are three c sounds, unaccented, like the ts in cats; c with the little v on top is like the ch in cheat; c with the acute (left-sloping) accent is between the ch in cheat and the tu in the British pronunciation of tune. J depends on position: at the start of a syllable, like the y in yes; at the end, like the y in boy. S unaccented is like the s in six; with the hat, it's like the sh in ship. Z unaccented is like zero; with hat, the the zh in Zhivago.

In country, we encounter English speakers everywhere, and it feels wrong, given the Croat pride in their admittedly ancient and honorable tongue. Under constant harassment by neighboring races and nations, most recently the Serbs and Slavs in a war that only ended barely a decade ago, they are now buried under an onslaught of wealthy pleasure seekers from the north and west who feel not the slightest compunction about assuming that theirs is God's language, and only inferior races speak anything else. In the case of the Italians, historically the largest group of vacationers in Hravatska, that's a hard argument to counter. We find ourselves communicating in Italian when English fails. God help us when we need to ask a question and the answer (like "how do you find this hotel?") is complex. In the case of the German-speakers, who are the least generous of tourists, their sense of entitlement is understandable in the context of their being Europe's deep-pocketed economic mainspring.

Communicating in the language of the people involves a fairly small vocabulary – Good morning (Dobro jutro); Good afternoon (Dobro dan); Good evening (Dobro evenong (really)); Thank you (Hvala); Excuse me (Oprostite); My bill, please (Racun, molim Vas); Two of those, please (Dvije od tih, molimo Vas da); One, two, three, four, five ... ten (Jedan, dva, tri, cetiri, pet ... deset).