| General Description : |
The city enraptured by moonshine In the former Venetian gulf, the Adriatic Sea of today, there were three cities that always suffered from largeness and grandness, that were complacently turned to them themselves, filled with yearning for life, shackled by the inevitability of sorrowful staggering. Venice was the Queen of the sea, Trieste a Viennese suburb, Rijeka the city of “inexhaustible loyalty” ... Nowadays, at the time with no dreams, Saint Mark’s city can only be a luxuriant scenery for various Deaths, Trieste is tasteless, like a dried up Sacher gâteau, and Rijeka, the glorious city of St.Vitus and the two-headed eagle – whose both heads are turned to the same side which, to say the least, is unusual – this city, then, has been left alone on the stage illuminated by the soft light of the Moon. Though being a 19th century miracle, Rijeka is the city with the greatest number of Baroque marble altars on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, but also the city where the first torpedo was invented and manufactured.... Well, yes, but also the city intently staring into the mirror, indecisive whether to feel closer to Alice or to Dorian Grey. If we take a dive into the past, we will see that what remained after the eradication of the Roman Empire was Trsat, Tarsattica, the mythical fortification of the long-haired Frankopans who called upon the long-haired Merovingian as their predecessors on the road to the combat for Faith. The Roman Frankopans supported Pope Urban II when he instigated the Crusades in 1095, while the Croatian Frankopans wanted to be crowned kings in the 17th century, which cost them their heads as the Hapsburgs where then at the height of their power. The ruins of Trsat, this citadel above Rijeka, was renovated in the 19th century by Field-marshal Laval Nugent, the most powerful Croatian politician of his time, exalted by his dreams about the Frankopans. In the year 1848 the Hungarians accused him of desiring to crown his son Albert as king of all the Southern Slavs. We must keep in mind that it was he who appointed Josip Jelačić to the position of banus, supported by his friend, Archduke Joseph of the House of Hapsburg. ... Not having achieved the old dream of the Frankopans, he buried seven members of his family on Trsat in the vertical position, in this way referring to his own Celtic origin – these were, namely, the only people who buried their dead in this manner, in order to make them ready for Judgement Day. ... In this way the circle was closed, as the Celts were the ones who had given Trsat its name. The Church of Our Lady of Trsat, world-wide known because it was built on the spot where, according to the legend, the Holy House from Nazareth had stood after being transported from the Holy Land - the one where Archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she was going to give birth to Jesus Christ. Nowadays the house is in Loreto near Ancona, but we can also feel the true religiousness on Trsat while we stand above the graves of the Frankopans buried here. In the city of a dowdy past, urbanistically completely unfinished, there exist individual jewels. First, here is the City Tower from which two Hapsburgs are watching us: Leopold II who in 1659 granted the city its coat of arms with the two-headed eagle and jug from which water is pouring, and Charles VI who in 1719 proclaimed Rijeka a free port, which he also did with Trieste. It is exactly this port, the eighth in Europe before the First World War that raised the city to undreamed-of riches. If shipping affairs link Rijeka to Trieste, what connects Rijeka to Venice is eternal intolerance, currently expressed in the clash of the two carnivals that are among the greatest in Europe: the highly refined one in the city on the lagoons and the people’s carnival, elevated only by the little Negroes, the city in the bay of Kvarner... The refinement as the fatigue of an aged aristocrat, and the genuineness as a proof of vitality...? Rather long ago a certain Lončarić gambled under the crucifix on which the wooden Jesus, cramped, suffered his pain. Having lost, he threw a stone on the sculpture and Christ started to bleed. The earth swallowed the ungodly person, and the miraculous Gothic sculpture found protection in the Baroque cathedral of St. Vitus which is a reflection of the Venetian church of Santa Maria della Salute ... The Venetian temple was built on foundations above millions of logs that the Frankopans felled in the hinterland of Rijeka. ... History can sometimes be very complex ... Rijeka is a city that does not charm or enrapture, it is the place for patient observers. They will find here paintings by Gustav Klimt, Titian, Paolo Veronese and Giorgione, as well as sculptures by Antonio Canova – so much present in St. Peter’s Church in Rome – but it will not be an easy task, nor a simple one ... Because they would have to wait for that particular moment when moonshine illuminates the deep shadows of the narrow streets and when, perhaps, some of the images appear of whom we do not know whether they are real or only heroes of the stories all of us used to listen to in our childhood... |
Filip
