Photo at Mrzla Vodica

Ancestral Village -- Mrzla Vodica

My final days here have been rewarding in terms of seeking out family ties. On Thursday my landlord called the church in Lokve for me (at my request) to ask if, since I would be there the next day, I could look through the registries of births, etc. to look for our family records. The priest told him that in fact all the records are held in the archives in Rijeka! So here they have been, practically across the street from where I work, all this time. If I had figured this out earlier I could have looked through many more records. As is, I only had time to look through the birth records up to 1902 before the office closed Thursday (at 1 pm). And since the plan was to visit Mrzla Vodica on Friday, which was my last day here when the archives are open, those three hours I spent in the archives on Thursday are the only ones I will have. I did not really know what I was doing, though my cousin Cathy, who works in genealogy, did help me somewhat through email advice. I found many of our ancestors’ births recorded, through the Milosevic and Kosmac lines. The people who work at the archives were very helpful and nice. The director gave me a collection of Croatian short stories in English and told me that one of the writers therein married a woman from Lokve with whom he had a daughter (Dora) who became Pablo Picasso’s lover.

Then yesterday, Friday, I finally made it to Mrzla Vodica, the ancestral village of my paternal grandmother’s parents. My neighbor Jadranka drove me there at my request (I paid her what it would have cost for a rental car). We both enjoyed the outing to the mountains on another very hot day. Mrzla Vodica, which means, little frozen (or very cold) water, is situated in the mountains. The houses all line up along a few very windy, mountain roads. And near the “center” is a lovely lake. Well, it seemed like two lakes actually, though they are connected. It is an extremely pretty place, a very green, resort type town. But it doesn’t have the infrastructure of resort towns, no store, restaurant, post-office, etc. There was a café right at the lake. And this seems to be something of a “center” in the village.

I asked Jadranka (the neighbor who drove me) to ask some men we saw outside the café about whether there were any Kosmac or Milosevic people living here, and they (the men we asked) were really nice. The first man wondered out loud about the names, so another man standing nearby came and offered his input. It was all in Croatian so I did not really understand. But they immediately indicated where the Milosevic household was. But they were puzzled by Kosmac. Finally I kind of spelled it for them, and the one man said “Oh, Kosmac!” (with a different pronunciation of the “o” sound). Then he remembered where that family lived too. So we were told to go first find the Milosevic household, though they said that the last Milosevic, Anna, died 20 years ago. Nonetheless we found the house (everyone we met on the road and asked knew where it was). It was toward one end of the village. We talked to the neighbors, who said the children of Anna live in Rijeka. She gave me their numbers. We then went to see the church in town (on top of a steep hill), but it was closed. Then we met one of the men from the café, who offered to take us around to the Kosmac woman and the cemetery. We found graves of Milosevic and Kosmac, but only recent graves. There were no graves older than about 50 years old in that cemetery, which I later learned is typical. If a grave is ignored for 20 years, it is simply removed and re-used (I’m not sure exactly how but that is how Jadranka translated what a woman near one cemetery told us).

We then went to find the Kosmac relative, but at first the man helping us spoke to her and told us we had to go ask another woman if she had really been a Kosmac. He said she couldn’t remember for sure what her maiden name had been!! I think maybe she was just wary of talking to strangers. Anyway, another neighbor reputed to have a good memory told us that yes, she was definitely a Kosmac. So we went back and this time she spoke to us. Eventually she invited us in for a drink, so we spoke to her for maybe a half hour. But unfortunately she spoke no English, and I was getting very little translation of what they talked about. Also I did not have a chance (or a way) to ask many questions. Later Jadranka told another neighbor, who’s English is better, some of the things she said, and he told me. I had told Jadranka to tell her the story that I’d heard from my grandmother that the Milosevic family were rich and the Kosmach family were poor. So when my great-grandmother wanted to marry a Kosmach, her family disowned her. In fact, I thought that was why they moved to the States. Nada, this apparently distant cousin, confirmed these facts. She said originally the Kosmaches were very poor and had only a little piece of land (which is on the opposite side of town from the Milosevic family, and in fact in a separate village called “Zelin Mrzla Vodica” or Green Little Frozen Water). Nada told us that little by little the Kosmac family bought more adjoining land and prospered a little better. It seems that both the family names have more or less died out because most of the children (in my grandmother’s family too) were women, so their names changed when they married. It was nice to meet Nada and see these places. I can’t say she seemed overly interested in me, but maybe she found it all a bit odd, and she was friendly. At one point she told me I could buy land there if I wanted to, but I did not express much interest (the translation was a little hard to follow), so that's as far as that went. We exchanged phone numbers, and I also gave her my email address. So we’ll see if I ever hear from her or her family again.

We also went to the church in Lokve (the bigger town nearby where everyone goes for any business). We drove around a little and located the church, but it was locked (as Croatian churches often are). We asked a man about finding the cemetery, and he told us to find the priest, which we did in a marked house nearby. He gave us the keys to go inside the church, so I got to see and take pictures of that. We also checked the Lokve cemetery for graves, but as in Mrzla Vodica, they are all fairly recent, and I did not find any of our family names.

Anyway, it was overall a very fun day to see this place where ancestors lived and some relatives still do. I think life is pretty hard there in the village. Nada and the man who was helping us look around both talked about how hard life always was there, and that many people had emigrated to the States as a result. They said most people don't live there year round anymore. In fact a student of mine from Lokve said there are only about ten people who live there (Mrzla Vodica) year round. The rest who own houses there just come now for weekends or vacations in the summer. It is cool up there in the mountains, and it's quite close to a national park (Risnjak). I felt chilly when we got there about 8:30 am. We left here at 8 am, so that tells you how close it is to Rijeka. But as soon as we got near Rijeka it was back to blazing heat.

Now I am packing and discarding all the stuff I have accumulated or brought here, but don’t want to bring back. I dread dragging all my luggage to Zagreb tomorrow and then the airport Monday morning. I have to take public transportation for all this. So I’ll get a taxi to the bus station here, a bus to Zagreb, another taxi to my hotel, then another taxi the next morning to the airport. This is the less pleasant face of travel. But I do look forward to being back.

Names, Language, and Leaving

Things here are still very hot, making it hard to go out and tour and do what I need to (to prepare to leave). But I'm slogging on. Yesterday I mailed a box (mostly books) back to the States. It was about 25 pounds. I lugged it to the bus stop nearest my house, took the bus into town to the stop nearest the only post office you can send heavy packages from (over two kilos). Then I carried it from the bus stop there to the post office, leaving me sore and sweating, and this was before 9 am. It cost $100 to send this package via the "slow" route. And they made me repack everything in a box I bought from them and that I'm doubtful will make it intact. I hope I see those books again!

From there I went to pay the electric bill, always a challenge here. You write down your own number from the meter in your house, go to the electric company, stand in a long line, give your information to one woman who puts it into a computer and prints out a bill for you. Then you go to another line to pay another woman. From there (on the other side of town), I walked to the center to pay the last phone bill (also a long wait). When I finished and walked into work it was after 11 am and I was completely sweaty, drained, dehydrated, and dirty.

This is just to give you an idea of life here this last week in the country. There are lots of people I’d like to see and things I’d like to do. But each outing takes a lot out of me because of the heat. I think I’m actually allergic to the sun, as I broke out in hives almost two weeks ago. After benadryl, cortisone cream, and dosing up on calcium (recommended by the pharmacist here), I am feeling better. I also take more care to always use sunblock. But what a drag to be allergic to sun in this sunny weather. No more trips to beaches.

One of the things I’ve been meaning to write about for a while are names here. I’m not claiming any expertise in the language, but I have enjoyed learning what little I have and hearing it spoken. Croatian is a Slavic language, which makes it similar to Russian and other Eastern European languages (the way Spanish and Italian and French are similar). It strikes me as a fairly melodic, appealing language, with lots of sh, ch, zh, z, nj, lj, and short vowel sounds. The letter “r” is rolled and the only sort of guttural sound is very lightly made for the letter “h” (as in thank you, “hvala”). Some of the phrases you hear most often are “Dobar dan!” (good day) “Bog!” (for hello & goodbye – based on the word for god), “mozhe”( maybe not spelled that way but my computer doesn’t have Croatian letters – a z with a mark over it to make the z a “zh” sound – means something like “you can,” or “it’ll work”), “molim” (please, also used for hello on the phone), “da” (yes), and “ne” (no). Overall Croatian has a soft and rolling sound. A linguist I work with just told me that this is probably because it contains a lot of palatal sounds, which are indicated with marks when written in Croatian. I'm not including marks here because I don't think they'd show up well.

People here are very polite in their speech too, from what I can tell. So you rarely hear people shouting. And people always greet each other coming and going (“Dobar dan” . . . “Doviđenja” – the phonetic spelling would be dovidjenya -- for goodbye). People greet each other politely even if they are relative strangers. For instance, when I’ve been eating lunch in a room with strangers, say three of us sitting at different tables, when one finishes and leaves, she’ll say a quiet “dovijenya” to the other two of us, and we say it back. Also, people are often assuring each other that things are okay – “Mozhe! Mozhe!” And if you say “pardon” or “oprostite” (sorry) if you bump someone, they are likely to respond, “Ne, nishta!” (No, it’s nothing). Also my favorite phrase is "Nema problema," which means as you might expect, "No problem."

Anyway, names are also quite different from English and interesting and appealing. In general it seems many female names end in “a,” so you have Marija (the version of my name, Mary, as “y” is never used in Croatian – instead it’s “j” – so this is pronounced Maria). There’s also Irena, Dasha, Masha, Natasha, Sasha (though none of those are spelled that way – the “sh” is replaced by an “s” with a line over it), Branka, Slavenka, Maja, Monica, Dora, Ivana, Danica (pronounced Danizza, with an ending like pizza), Sintija (like Cynthia), Jelena, Olga, Mojca, Susana, Anita, Laura, Melanija, and probably a hundred more women’s names that end in “a.” There are also some women’s names ending in other ways, like Neli.

Men’s names in contrast seem to often end in “o.” So I’ve met people named Darko, Dubravko, Vinko, Matko, Zlatko, and so on. But there are also names ending in consonants, like Goran, Kristian, Boris, Marin, Josip, Tomislav, Davor, Antun, Zvonimir, Petar, Vid, and Silvestar. And I’ve also met a few men whose names end in “a,” like Sinisha, Borna, Drashka, and Nikola.

These have all been first names. Last names are more of a challenge, since Croatian letters are unfamiliar (to me), and often seem to make names harder to pronounce. So there are many “c,” “s” and “z” letters with accents on them, making them different from how they look at first glance to an American. Croatian names that are written in English tend to be written differently (anglicized), so Jankovic is written Yankovich in English. Or we pronounce Croatian names wrong. So Monica Seles’ last name actually should be pronounced “Selesh.”

Trieste, Italy

I met two Italian friends for the weekend in Trieste. Barbara and Simone and I met a few years ago in Sweden, when I spent a summer teaching there. I lived in a “university guest house” where Simone also lived, and his girlfriend Barbara visited while we were there. It was a great place to live as a visiting faculty member because a variety of visiting scholars from all over the world shared this beautiful mansion. We all had our own rooms and bathrooms and shared common areas (kitchens, living room, garden, etc.). Barbara and Simone became good friends then, so it was great to see them again and to combine it with a visit to Trieste (which Simone also never saw before).

Trieste is in Italy but over the centuries it has belonged to and been influenced by various other cultures, like the Slavs and Austro-Hungarians. But it felt more Italian than Slavic to me, though maybe that’s because I’ve been living in a Slavic country and haven’t been to Italy in 18 years. It’s a large (250,000) industrial port city, somewhat like Rijeka. But it’s much bigger. It also has seafront areas that are not just industrial (unlike Rijeka). We started out our tour at the top, on the originally settled hill where you now get a good overview. There is a beautiful church (cathedral I think) up there and ruins of an old basilica. The church was built on the site of an old Roman temple and has parts dating back to the 3rd century, though most of the current edifice is 1000 to 700 years old I think. There are beautiful mosaics and decorative details in the arches of the nave.

There’s also a castle nearby, but it was closed for renovation. We then wandered down the hill toward the center. Along the way we saw a few more churches and an old Roman amphitheater that was apparently just discovered recently (20 years ago) during construction in that part of town. It’s also being renovated. Eventually we made it to the big town square or piazza, which is huge and surrounded on three sides by impressive 19th century buildings, town hall, cafes, palaces, and businesses, all with decorative facades. There is also a big fountain toward one end of the square. The fourth side of the square is open to the sea. We read that it’s the largest seaside square in Europe.

James Joyce lived in this part of the world for much of his life, first in Pula (in Istria, Croatia), then in Trieste. So we went into one of the cafés on the square, which is quite famous for artists and writers who frequented it, but the waiter told us it was not one of Joyce’s haunts (though he mentioned other writers who patronized them including Hemingway). We later sat down at a café on the canal and saw a plaque proclaiming that Joyce used to frequent it. We then read in our guide books that this café was one of his regular spots, though not the main one. It was fun to be sitting at a “Joyce café,” drinking the local "apperitif" (a mixture of wine, seltzer, and some bitter orange liquor). We had nice views of the canal and heard a concert from some group that set up on square in front of a church nearby. There’s also a statue of Joyce nearby walking along the bridge over the canal (he’s holding a book). We walked all along the canal and visited an orthodox church there. It's the biggest orthodox church I've seen, very decorated and impressive. We had delicious pizza for dinner that night in a nearby restaurant. We stayed in a pensione near the train and bus stations.

On Sunday we visited Miramar, the estate the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef built for himself just outside Trieste on the sea. We took the bus there before 9 am on a Sunday morning and were surprised to find the bus very crowded. Barbara and I remarked about how odd it seemed for a bus to be so crowded early on a Sunday morning. I said maybe they’re all going to church, and she agreed. She noticed that most of the people on the bus were elderly. I do remember thinking they did not look dressed for church. Anyway, eventually the bus goes along the sea for a few miles and the route ends at Miramar. As we got near the sea, Barbara told me all those people were going to the beach (she’d heard them talking). And sure enough each seaside stop for a mile or more saw numbers of people getting off the bus with their bags of towels and so on for a day on the seashore. From the bus we saw hordes of people already packing the “beaches.” Mostly people were lying out in parks and on concrete walkways along the sea. I’m not sure there is a “beach” per se. I think, rather, that the coast is all rocky like in Croatia. But huge numbers of apparently mostly older people enjoyed spending their Sunday lying out on this “beach.” Barbara and I both found it amusing that we assumed all the old people were going to church when in fact they were going to the beach.

Miramar itself is a lovely estate, like a palace on the sea with huge gardens and wilderness areas. In fact the world wildlife fund has owned the place for over 20 years. The house has been restored so that most rooms have original furnishings and décor. It’s not a huge, huge mansion, like, say, Biltmore in North Carolina (which I think is the biggest house in the U.S. and was built around the same time), but it is quite impressive. The best part, I thought, are all the views of the sea. From there, we made our way back to town and said goodbye before too long, as I had an early bus back to Rijeka (they took the train a few hours later). We left early to get back home in time to see the world cup finals. Of course you know that Italy won. So I was in Italy on the day (though not the hour) when they won the world cup. In fact I was in Italy the last time they won the world cup in 1982. I had just finished a year abroad in France and was traveling through Italy with my mom. It was a lot of fun to be there then because the whole country seemed to pour out into the streets to dance, laugh, run around with flags, and celebrate.

Photos (Plitivice Falls & Istria)