It was and it will be

Škalnica is a special barrel maker's tool, a bowl, if this kind of a trough could be called so, in which coopers placed small wooden boards to moisten, already cut lengthways and through, in specific dimensions so that they could, when they were moist, step by step, little by little, gradually bend them to form the perfect circle in which the rainbow of grapes – the wine could be kept. The wood was of different varieties: hard wood – chestnut, oak, mulberry, and soft wood: fir and spruce. Dishware,  buckets of all sizes, kegs and barrels were made and sold in the region from Brseča to Brač. From “ča” to “ča”. And what I have always admired are the subtle senses, measures based on feeling, touch and experience guiding the craftsman to know, without a clock or chemical analysis, for how long to soak the oak and how long to soak the fir, how long to smoke the wood to smother the worm inside. The sound echoing after the craftsman hit the wood would tell him all about the knots, lines and bark beetles. The wood usually came from the depths of the distant forests of Gorski Kotar, and the cooper shop we spoke about, even somewhat in rhyme, is located in Peline, the oldest area of the town nucleus, telling the story of the craftsman’s ways in this world – pagan scenting, soaking, listening, caressing.

Psalm: Who will bring me to the fortified city? (60, 11) Kastav is now a town; however it used to be a place of last resistance – the citadel! Citadel or acropolis is a term denoting the strongest fortified point, usually the central part of the fortification – a stronghold. It was situated inside the settlement, and yet again isolated. In modern history, the term is derived from Italian word cittadella, meaning “small town”. And so it was, the peasant houses scattered around the hillside, stretching out to the cascades, a line of stepped ridges, to the main rock on the top where an altar, a temple and a shelter from attack were situated. And from the pond, Lokvine, where a tank was located, uphill, in two or three rows of tiny and cyclopean walls to the temple. And so it continued in later times. Christians took over the temple, subdued it and the citadel became a church, the walls become a castle - Kaštel in front of Lokvina, the village was surrounded by the additional nine towers, and the foundation of the walls connecting them were on large, and tiny, cyclopean dry stone walls. In the dictionary of symbols the term fortification is presented as a general symbol of human inner shelter, the cave of the heart and a privileged place of communication between the soul and the divine or absolute. Finally, the town’s mill, a windmill placed on Žudika tower, with wings propelled by wind from the sea at this highest point of the city, makes the observer feel as if the town is about to fly away.  

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While other loggias in the Kvarner and Istria are hardly anything more than a good shelter from the sun and rain when a paper needs to be signed without getting wet, or a dispute to be decided without a senior judge falling to the floor from the humidity and heat, this loggia is in fact huge and the construction of its pillars and seven arcades must have cost a fortune. It was spacious enough to host salesmen on Whit Sunday and the folk dancers performing at a local folk festival, as otherwise there would be no other reason to build such a long hall. It seems, though, that more than anything else it was built as a symbol and a warning – so that someone coming on horse back from far away to this both harsh and mild region would be faced with a view of the town surrounded by towers built from roughly trimmed grey stone, with the high town gate, and the wings of the windmills grinding wheat while the whole town breaths like a living creature, like an animal squatting on the piles of Roman limes. In front of this roughness and almost animal presence of the living behind the wall, the open space, as the settlement and its houses did not exist at the time, featured a white, lacy loggia, a pavilion and a gazebo representative of their self-government and limited, yet persisting own democracy. The town placed its white soul, the most beautiful thing it had, outside the protection of the walls and in front of the world. Coming by horse to take over the town administration on behalf of the Jesuits in 1666, captain Fran Morelli saw this kind gesture as their weakness rather than a strength. Kind as they had always been, the citizens did their utmost to convince him he was wrong.

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The coat of arms above the Voltica (the town gate) merges three pictures into one: the year the Jesuits took over the town and reconstructed it, including the town gate; the double-headed Habsburg eagle, a symbol of sovereignty, along with the Jesuit sun and nails tattooed on the eagle’s chest. Three in one, the same as the town's number of gates: the southern town gate with the eagle, the eastern one towards Mišinici, and new playful iron gate at the entrance into Kastav

In the name of the greater glory of God they headed westward, which is a little known fact, through the grey sea to establish farms on the vast lands of the New World, among the bare people who still had old beliefs, on which they worked together. They made a lot of money and everyone thought they were very rich, but they shared everything with the bare people and were therefore bearably poor. For a century and a half they had orchestras, actors and sang anthems while going to work in their fields. Then they were banned, and the gates without doors in the walls of their large churches without roofs are today open to the jungle. They also came east, to this side of our blue sea, among people who, in their old beliefs of banishing winter by singing anthems wore sheepskin, bells around their waist and animal heads with horns. For a century and a half they administered the spacious estates, and began repairs after a series of earthquakes in 1750. In 1769 they brought the old church down and started building a new one. In just four years they built the foundations and walls of the largest church building in our coastal region, measuring 50x20x20 meters. The estate had 7000 people at that time, and 3000 could fit into the church. Then the Pope banned them. They never finished its construction. The thick walls without a roof stand tall even today, with a path to Loza forest passing through. No local knows this, but Crekvina church stands for the greater glory of Kastva.

Romanticism is a picture that contains an ivy-covered ruin of a windmill, a haze in which sails of a ship at sea are fading away, and a girl in the distance. A stage on which, in front of the walled town standing in the background, one lives isolated among the peasants who raise the tall Roman era breed of oxen and converse in their language where one cannot distinguish a girl from a virgin or Our Lady, a dragon from Psoglav, a compliant peasant from the rebels who administer violent justice. Here, folklore meets Oscar Wilde. This is not the Greek or Christian Mediterranean; here the rain and the northern wind block the sun, and there is never a shortage of water, at least when compared to Dalmatia. This is the Slavic north, where one pantheistic man from the island of Brač, who studied physics in Graz, in the prime of life buried his father.