A hill – a defensive position par excellence.
A fierce wind.
A grove of hungry trees.
Who in their right mind would go to fly a kite from a steep hill deep inside a valley, where the winds are blowing from all directions all at once?
Well, we did.
Because there is a church on that hill, and the church is really special.
This church looks more like a castle, enclosed with a rather substantial wall, with forbidding round towers guarding the corners. Numerous embrasures, gunholes, open outwards – and yes, guns were fired from them.
Why would a church need such imposing fortifications?
This is the church of Holy Trinity in Hrastovlje, Slovenia. A small edifice, 12 meters long and 6 meters wide – yet despite its smallness a full three-naved church. It was probably built first in a Romanesque style in the 12th century, and then rebuilt in a rustic Venetian Renaissance style sometime in the 15th century.
A cute little church serving a cute little village in a pretty remote part of Slovenia, in a valley beneath the Podgora Karst plateau, not far from the old route to the centre of Istria.
But with a history almost as tumultuous as the winds above it.
Anwyay, we shall come back to that … The hill on which the church stands is small yet steep, rising some 50 meters from the bottom of the valley. It is sparsely covered with hungry trees and thorny shrubbery. The valley itself is squeezed between the almost 400 m wall of the Karst edge and the similarly high Lačna ridge to the southwest.
The wind is either nonexistent, or a fierce Bora, and the local topography ensures that there is basically no wind to speak of, as in regular, directional flow of air – it’s just turbulence all the way up.
A pretty insane place to fly kites.
Sandro’s Rokker had no chance – Janez managed to pull it up above the walls, but it flew right into a huge swirl of air, and only the really fast reflexes of the kite pilot saved it from the impending doom.
Then it was The Original Blue Rokkaku’s time to shine. The first flight went surprisingly well … until it didn’t.
Yes, this is a kite aerial photo. The kite itself is some 50 meters further on, dancing wildly through the turbulence.
But we are not ones to accept defeat easily. The camera was not damaged, the kite was still kinda up there, so we gave it another try.
Slowly and … far from surely …
… the reliable rokkaku rose through the crazy vortices, gusts and blows coming from all directions at once.
And behold – the Holy Trinity …
… and the village of Hrastovlje behind it.
Today the valley of Hrastovlje is a bit off the beaten path, peaceful and serene, but it was not always so. The fertile lands of Istria, which begin right around here, were a prized possession, and everyone was keen to fight for it – which, of course, annoyed (and depleted) the locals.
The other thing that depleted the locals was Yersinia pestis, the black plague. In the 15th century it hit Hrastovlje hard – a legend tells us only two girls from the village survived the terrible disaster (which is why up until recently the villagers had only two different surnames).
When the plague retreated the villagers decided to built a new – or expand the old – church, and dedicated it to the Holy Trinity, as it is (or are?) good at protecting against the terrible disease. And they made a fortunate choice of commissioning a soon-to-be famous Janez from Kastav to paint its inner walls in buon fresco.
What he did in this little church is nothing short of a Medieval marvel.
The frescoes, luckily preserved by unknown geniuses who simply whitewashed the whole interior over sometime in the 18th century (so they wouldn’t ‘interfere with the feelings of the worshippers’), are covering every inch of the walls, the vaults and the ceiling of the Holy Trinity church. It’s like a Bible in pictures, a comic book of holy, a storyboard presenting the whole tale from the creation of Adam onwards.
And a scathing critique of the powerful who were behaving badly in the times of plague: the Danse Macabre.
Everyone dies, the Pope and the beggar, the King and the child. You can’t bribe Death, you can’t escape it, and you will be judged according to your deeds.
NB: while the Danse Macabre is arguably the central masterpiece of the church, perhaps the most intriguing is a painting of a strange bird. Its story is also fascinating (and long), you can enjoy it here.
Like the wrapper of a candy the huge walls and towers guard the precious inside, the church and its frescoes.
And these walls did well, because the little church is still with us. They were raised in response to yet another danger falling down onto Hrastovlje, one that was perhaps even more terrifying and deadly than the plague.
The Ottoman vanguard troops.
When the incursions of the Ottomans became a real threat to these lands – even Vienna almost fell after the disastrous Battle of Mohács in 1536 – there was a lot of panic. As usual, the rich and the powerful hid in their castles or fled to fortified and well-provisioned towns, leaving the poor to fend for themselves.
The villages couldn’t really be fortified, the houses – the huts – were very … flammable, so the poor peasants did their best with the only serious building they had: the church. There are numerous fortified, walled churches in Slovenia (such a church is called a tabor – we covered one a couple of months back), and the Holy Trinity of Hrastovlje is one of the best preserved.
The Holy Trinity of Hrastovlje was fortified in the late 16th century at the start of the Uskoki war, when the Ottomans became a real pain in the ass and were threatening the coastal region, their destructive and deadly raids going right through here and further on along the Rižana valley.
The grey limestone blocks enveloped the little holy place and hid it from the prying eyes, the grim and foreboding towers looking down menacingly, their embrasures ready to spew brimstone and fire – and lead – onto the intruders.
The walls held, the church withstood all the attacks of time and of people, and the priceless frescoes of Janez from Kastav lay peacefully under a thick layer of white paint, waiting to be rediscovered in 1949.
Stone.
Despite the lush valley, the olive groves, the vineyards and the gardens, this is a land of stone. Deposed, eroded, smoothed by time and water, crushed, uplifted … (this area is geologically very complex, with thrust faults going in parallel from Petrinje in the northeast to Buje in the southwest, and the largest, the Palmanova fault, forming the iconic Karst edge).
Just look at it. Stone, and people.
The deep scars where the Karst plateau drops down, hundreds of meters of limestone, porous, dry. The moist valley which the streams and rivers filled with fine grained sediments, creating marlstone and flysch over millennia upon millennia.
The walled church a flawless combination. Not just of stone – the walls are made of grey limestone and the church itself of yellowish-brown sandstone – it reflects both the land and its people. The people as if carved from stone, moulded by the windswept plateau and the fertile valleys beneath it. The church made by them, for them … from them.
A holy place.
The colours of the frescoes in opposition to the drab angular slabs; the dark, mysterious inside in stark contrast with the overexposed exterior, glowing in the high noon. The inner walls telling the story from the beginning of humanity, the outer walls whispering another, from the beginning of time.
And the wind that blows here since forever before and will forever more … just here and there picking up and carrying into the sky something that can catch the moment, steal it from time, preserve it.
Something like a kite.
Kite aerial photos shot with Nikon P330 on The Original Blue Rokkaku, made by Janez of Dr.Agon kites.
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