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.

tiger beat or the sands of time

A new social networking service hopes to encourage participants to live more in the moment—whatever that means—by pledging to rake over the coals of any status updates, posing, shouts, blurbs and friendships fostered and erase them after twenty-four hours have passed. Users, without the nagging realisation that everything one thinks, does and says was in that pill that one took yesterday and will become an indelible part of one's permanent record—whatever that means—the start-up hopes, can be engineered to interact more spontaneously in this sandbox, this hour-glass and behave more like people do in real life.

Everything is wiped-clean, except those shared moments and impressions that users choose to keep alive by a continuous volley or as either points of departure (successful experiments) re-posted on more enduring servers. I don't know really what know how vanities in danger of slipping away reflected one place relates to living in the present (one read, excusing potentially embarassing behaviour) and not dwelling in some past that haunts one's future, unless one has some really incriminating skeletons—but this venture does pose a really interesting question about what it means to buoy up a moment, a memory, an encounter. Forget nurturing an interest or belabouring a subject in any virtual forum, and just consider one's manifest, artefacts, hearth and home. It does not do just to chronicle them, however they're shared; more over, as we all know—friends, family and even a place to live cease to exist without (and no proclamation is needed, just a private thought) naming them exactly that on a daily basis. What do you think? The internet is not going co-opt kindnesses and gratitude but might make a real mess of things trying to understand how to capitalise on that intelligence.

sretan put!

 

PfRC will be taking another sabbatical soon, so stay tuned to our little travel blog for continuing adventures. Zbogom!

aquatint, mezzotint

Nag-on-the-Lake discovered and invites us to peruse the wonderful collection of Mid-Century Modern linocuts of various tableaux and landmarks of London by artist Edward Bawden. The gallery is really amazing and it was interesting to learn what the linocut technique involves—like a woodcut but etched into the medium of flooring linoleum as relief, intaglio to produce a stamp.
Bawden certainly was not alone in experimenting with this material—the technique having been first employed by the Dresdener avant-garde collective Die Brücke and then tried by others, including Picasso and Matisse.  Linotype, as a process, on the other hand, means “line of type” as a single slug of text that spanned the whole page could be composed at once and then assembled, line by line. The invention of the linotype machine in 1884 revolutionized the newspaper business with quicker type-setting; before its introduction, no daily edition in the world offered readers more than eight pages.

montagsdemo oder wir sind das volk

Though never claiming to be the moral successor to the Montagsdemonstrationen, those peaceful rallies that took place in the late eighties in the public square of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, spreading to other cities, protesting the ruling party in East Germany and instrumental in making imminent the reunification, the German press is drawing parallels to a movement began this Spring in Hamburg called Vigils for Peace (Mahnwachen für den Frieden).

The fact that these assemblies, propagated to cities all over Germany, also take place on Mondays, apparently makes the organisers an easy target and fuels the disdain of journalists, which in turn forms public-opinion or ignorance thereof. The Vigils were originally called together to discuss Russian overtures in the Crimea and enlighten people to other dangerous potential parallels, but the group soon expanded its focus, given that Germany seems at times a humble understudy in foreign affairs—a second to the US and EU (a role particularly convenient when one's economic relations are jeopardised). Also they shifted their focus, because we cycle faster and faster from one crisis to another and often new developments are suffered (publicised loudly) with a pretext of distraction—attention having become the most scarce commodity. Now the discussion includes integrity in reporting, Germany's relationship with the US and above all the monetary authority of reserve banks—especially the Fed—and how they influence governments nonpareil. Though barely mentioned during the escalation of tensions in Ukraine, now that the vigilantes might want to essay the bigger-picture, they are dismissed by the media as a band of conspiracy-theorists, and labeled with the muting attributes of being right-leaning and anti-Semitic. Though tolerated and ultimately effective, I wonder how the state-controlled press regarded the Montagsdemos.