down in the underground

The always impressive BLDGBLOG shares a really fascinating condominium spanning the two member states of Belgium and the Netherlands, in the form of an abandoned ancient Roman limestone quarry, which was later put to use as doom’s day bunker for NATO senior leadership. From the accounts of workers, it was truly an underground maze, and I wonder if it was not intended as a sort of Minotaur’s Labyrinth to sequester at least half of those dogmatists who necessitated such a structure be built.

croatia week: fiat panis or etymological spelunking

The unit of currency of Croatia is called the Kuna. While the word may sound a little bit like the Krona, Kroner or Crowns of some other European countries, “kuna” means marten pelt (like a mink's of weasel's coat) and is a historical bow to the barter between the Roman Empire, trading furs much in demand for other goods. The image of this creature appears on the country's coins. In the sculpture garden of the ancient village of Osor on the Isle of Cres, there is a modern bronze monument to this little animal. I figured petting it might bring good fortune, and I did in fact end up with a whole pocket full of lipa, the subdivision and meaning lime tree (with an image of a leaf), by journey's end, which proved a challenge to spend.

What we call Croatia (Kroatien) bears the endonym Hrvatska, and it is always a curious task to guess how exonyms came about (i.e., Deutschland to Germany or l'Allemagne or Njemačka). I am still not certain, but it is interesting to note how the necktie is attributed to military garb of the Croatian and the German (and French, and cognate English) word for the accessory, Krawatte, Cravate, sounds an awful lot like the native word for Croat(s), Hrvat(i).

calligram

Never failing to discover and share—and with a good dose of education and that sparks the curiosity to learn more, brilliant book illustrations, BibliOdyssey presents Le Bestiaire Fabuleux, a mid twentieth century French collaboration among artists and poets, which paired a surreal menagerie with prose—looking almost like a paint-by-number or connect-the-dots, arranged in a calligram (only the idea of a calligram is shown here, not an example from the generous gallery to be found at the link above) that's the wood-cut, as it were, of the creature. It is not just craftily placed letters to complement the painting, but actual blazoning instructions to recreate the image with a little fable to accompany it.

croatia week: outstanding universal value or spaghetti western

We visited some of Croatia's amazing and varied natural landscapes, including the cascading and constantly changing lakes of the Plitvice national parks (Nacionalni park Plitvička jezer) whose unique character is due to the malleable tufa that dams up the rough and eternal karst foundation of the Kvarner Gulf.
This lime- stone funda- ment is reminiscent of County Connemara in Ireland, whose sweeping plains are rivulets of the jagged rock face—with little top-soil but still managing to hold fast an ecosystem that supports everything from mosses up to cows—and people, rising also to form pseudo-fjords in parts.
The pools and lakes here and waterfalls are created by sediment that transforms into basically a chalky, soft substance that is much less permanent than what lies beneath and has given rise to wonderland, which was already duly recognised as one of the world's treasures by UNESCO in 1979 as one of the first natural places on the register.
Tourists can visit the park by sticking to these wooden gangways that look like the walkways from the Ewok village on the Moon of Endor. The wildlife here includes wolves, bears, otters, owls, vultures and lynxes but most shy away from the visiting crowds and the trails close promptly at sundown. A bit further south, past the Velebit mountain range, was the nature reserve of Paklenica canyon, and we hiked the trails there as well. It was easy to conjure up any number of adventures transpiring here.
Not too far away are much more arid climes, baked by the Adriatic sun and unrelenting Bora winds (a gust characteristic of the area that barrels downhill and snowballs once it reaches the lowlands), like these desert hills of the Isle of Pag—whose moonscape made me think of Tatooine. They were filming something there, but we suspect it was a car commercial, to appeal to customers' off-road fantasies even though it's doubtful they'll ever be realised.
It turns out that these natural backdrops were indeed made famous on celluloid in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the cinematic adaptations of German adventure-writer Karl May's novels of the Wild West, whose success spurred on other franchises like the Lone Ranger and Zorro.
May came to claim his cowboy-and-Indian stories with such iconic characters as the wise Winnetou, chief of the Apaches, and Old Shatterhand, his white blood-brother and the author's vicarious alter-ego, but May never saw these exotic places for himself—though compensating well with his imagination. It seems appropriate that the wilds of Yugoslavia (at the time) could be a fitting understudy and perhaps more authentic and awe-inspiring than those locations never visited.

trader vic's

Collectors' Weekly has a fantastic article and gallery of vintage images, including odd advertising and incredible temples to the romancing of the South Seas, of the development of Tiki coutre and kitsch and its impact, resonance on Mid-Century Americana.  Please be sure to peruse the site for show-and-tell sessions and timely and timeless features on collectibles and antiques.

croatia week: founding fathers or the secret of nin

One of the many great and heretofore unknown places that we discovered and explored while a vacation was the town of Nin, close to Zadar. The most ancient part of town, which goes back three thousand years, is situated on a little islet in the bay, connected to the mainland by a bridge and surrounded by salty marshes where salt harvesting from the Adriatic carries one to this day as it had for milennia. At the head of the bridge, there is a bronze sculpture of Duke Branimir of Croatia—the figure credited with first winning independence for the Croatian state by his allegiance to the Pope, who was the authority on sovereignty back then, and converting en masse his people.
Beforehand, the lands of Dalmatia had always been either under Byzantine or Frankish rule. Another influential figure from Nin—also captured in sculpture, subsequently threatened to jeopardise that relationship with Rome. Gregorius, Bishop of Nin was constantly courting displeasure by saying mass in his native tongue, instead of Latin, so his congregation could understand and interpret the message of the sermon for themselves.
Here, as powerfully imagined by artist Ivan Meštrović, Grgur ninski looks like a Disney villian or some fire and brimstone preacher but still invites one to rub his toe for a blessing, and the statue was placed in the courtyard outside the Church of the Holy Cross (Crkva svetog Križa), the former seat of the bisphoric. Gregorius' career was obscured by Church politics and during his tenure the bishop of Nin was dissolved, which enjoys the somewhat misleading distincion of being the tinest cathedral in the world.
Gregorius and the partitioners of Nin were not punished with this diminutive gathering place for their vernacular rebellion (and since there is no longer the office of the bishop in Nin, it cannot really be called a cathedral), as it was rather built probably as a private chapel for the neighbouring ducal residence originally. Research into its design and orientation also suggest that the structure functioned as an ingenious sun-dial and calendar (with the placement of the portals along the roof and wall) to trace the sun's path throughout the day and year.

croatia week

More on what we did for our summer vacation is coming with reflections on travels in Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. Više doći.