Mothers and Goddesses

A young man was in pain. A vertical crack had developed through the enamel of his lower left canine, exposing the dentine tubules.

The tooth hurt really badly and it drove him crazy; every folk cure failed, his fervent prayers (to Mother Goddess?) were unanswered – so his mother (who else?) finally took him to the dentist. The witch doctor (stomatology has always been a dark art) cleaned the crack and filled it.

The pain was gone.

The dental filling was of a completely normal type for the time – though it may seem a bit unusual to us, as the dentist used beeswax. But it did the job: there was no infection, no more searing pain when cold water or hot food touched the tooth.

All this happened somewhere on Podgorje karst plateau, some 6.500 years ago.

The mandible with the beeswax-filled canine was found in a cave just below the edge (the arrow points at it).

Neolithic dentistry, how cool is that, ha… 🙂

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Podgorje karst plateau is now a rather desolate, windswept plain set below the Slavnik mountain, at the very top of Istria. It is very much unlike any other place in Slovenia, resembling a stony savannah; tall grass sways in the fierce Bora wind, downy oaks, junipers, and other thorny shrubbery slowly encroach upon abandoned pastures.

It wasn’t always like this, barren and windswept. Podgorje karst was once covered by thick oak and ash forests, so rich that long after the giant oaks were gone (used as the pillars on which Venice stands), they stood tall in the collective memory of the people.

Even in the late 15th century the forests of Podgorje karst was remembered as the Paradise lost. Literally:

This is a part of the incredible frescoes in the Holy Trinity church of Hrastovlje (we flew above it too!) just below the Karst edge – the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

See how Janez of Kastav depicted Paradise, full of beautiful tall trees? Yes, they are the oaks of Podgorje (perhaps the Snake tempted Eve with … an acorn). And the land East of Eden? The oaks are gone, miserable stumps are all that remains.

This fresco might as well be one of the earliest environmental protests – sweet Mary mother of God look what they are doing! – a cry against greed and destruction, a lament for a treasure forever lost.

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The destruction of Podgorje paradise actually started wayyy before La Serenissima. It began around the time our witch-dentist took care of a young man’s toothache, in the fourth and third millennium BCE and the advent of Neolithisation. Pastoralists and farmers came from the south with their seeds and their flocks, and settled here between the sea and the mountains.

They burned the forest to make fields and pastures, the trees were cut down for timber, and the sheep and the goats ate the rest.

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Time marched on, good tech (metal!) and bad tech (gruel) enabled humans to multiply, and the landscape changed yet again. The Neolithic gave way to the Bronze Age, and on the Karst edge and the hills towards the sea a new type of human settlement appeared.

Hillforts.

Hillforts are not really forts and are not always on a hill. A hillfort is a settlement of farmers and shepherds surrounded by a wall; they were built away from the best agricultural land, often on ridges and hilltops, enabling both protection and visual control of the surroundings.

Bronze Age life was rather peaceful; the land was not yet filled to its logistical maximum, trade was growing on nicely, and Mother Goddess – still around since the Neolithic, still helping with toothache and life in general (ok, we don’t know much about the religion and rituals of the Bronzes, but we can let our imagination fly) – was watching serenely upon the land and her people.

But trouble was brewing. The world was changing fast, and Podgorje karst plateau, if a little backward and infertile compared to the valleys and the Friuli plain, was yet again a target.

Karst sits at the crossroads. Even if the hillforts of Podgorje plateau are a bit off the main roads, they are still very close. Not just regional roads, from the Adriatic coast to the interior of Istria, or from the Friuli plain to the Kvarner gulf – a true long-distance route went through the nearby Ochra pass and Postojna gate (the lowest pass of the southeastern Alps) and connected the heart of Mediterranean with the Pannonian plain and the North: the Ember road.

Such strategic places sooner or later become contested, and it happened with Podgorje karst too.

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Around 1200 BCE new people arrived here from the south. They were speaking an Indo-European language, they were burying their cremated dead in urns, carried swords made of a new, harder metal – and a name that would be forever etched upon this land:

Histri.

The Bronze Age people and their Goddess stood no chance, a new era has begun: the Iron Age.

The Iron Age world was very different from the Bronze almost-idyll. New technologies spurred long-distance trade, agricultural advances enabled more people to live on the same land, the population growth led to mass movements; tribes were travelling, fighting, conquering.

This is also the earliest time that left traces in our collective memory: Jason and the Argonauts fleeing Colchis via Danube, Sava, and Ljubljanica to the Adriatic, the sea of Cronos, carrying the Golden fleece; the pursuing Colchians enchanted by the beauty of Istria deciding to settle here …

Now we are at the dawn of our world.

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One of the largest, best-preserved, and least-explored Iron Age hillforts (here they call them kaštelir, from castrum aereum, a castle on the hill) is Marija Snežna – St Mary of the Snows – on the Gradišca hill between Črnotiče and Praproče, just before Podgorje karst plateau seriously drops down along the Palmanova fault.

It’s the only kaštelir on the plateau, and it was probably the most important of the Podgorje karst group, a territorial municipality of sorts. It commands a series of secondary hillforts on the Karst edge: Mojbrna Zjat, Kovk, Zanigrad, Podpeč, Brgode, Stena and Mozar, perhaps Kastelec and Vahta, and maybe even Socerb in the northwest.

Not much is known about the settlement of Marija Snežna. The only exploration of the site was done by Marchesetti at the beginning of the 20th century. Archaeology has always been and unfortunately still is underfunded …

We don’t – we probably can’t – know if there was an Iron Age sanctuary at the acropolis of Marija Snežna, but people say it is a powerful place, radiating with ‘energy’, so we might as well imagine it. But a sanctuary dedicated to whom?

Mother Goddess of the Neolithic and (probably) of the Bronze Age was replaced by the Iron Age gods of the Histri – and it’s interesting that their gods were almost all … goddesses.

Ica and Iria. Boria, the goddess of the wind. Nebres the nymphs. Sentona, Jutosika and Trita, Seixomnia the White, and Eia.

Magnae Materae. Mother Goddesses.

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Now the wheel of history starts turning faster and faster. In the heart of the Apennine peninsula a city was founded, a city whose destiny was to rule the world.

The Romans came, they saw, they conquered. Aquileia was founded in 181 BCE, in a couple of years Histri were driven out of Karst, and in 177 the ‘capital’ at Vizače, Nesactium, was destroyed. Their king Epulon, king of the drunkards as the victorious Romans mocked him, killed himself, and Histri were subjugated by the Empire.

The goddesses wandered around for a time, acquiring Roman epithets like Eia Augusta, Iria Venus, or Seixomnia Leucitica.

Then the Christianity rose and these maternal (matriarchal?) deities left for good. In the first century CE people too left the hillfort of Marija Snežna for the last time, never to return.

The kaštelir culture came to an end.

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But Mother Goddess is never far away, right – she’s always watching her children and protecting them. She doesn’t really give a damn if people worship her, or even if they know her name. She cares because we are all hers.

In the second half of the 17th century a little church was built on the top of Gradišca hill, smack in the middle of the hillfort, and dedicated to St Mary of the Snows.

Mother Goddess – now as Mary the Mother of God – was back.

The church was built between 1663 and 1665 by a master stonemason Anže Felicijan from nearby Rodik. He proudly inscribed his name – ANSE FELICIAN – above the main portal.

It is a small, simple church, with a cute little belfry and an angel above the entrance, carved somewhat crudely, but lovingly. This angel is people – people from Praproče and Črnotiče, people of Podgorje karst, of the hillforts, and of the caves in the precipitous Karst edge.

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6.500 years passed since the curing of the tooth by the witch-stomatologist. The hillforts were built, the Histri came, the goddesses danced, the Romans conquered, the Slavs arrived, kingdoms rose and fell, countries united and divided and united again.

Twenty centuries after it was abandoned, a kite rises into the sky above the kaštelir of Marija Snežna.

And down on the sunny hill, in a scene as old as time, a child runs joyfully down towards the wall … retracing the steps of thousands of children before her, under a watchful eye of her mother; Mother Goddess, Eia, St Mary of the Snows.

Kite aerial photos shot with Insta360 on The Original Blue Rokkaku, made by Janez of Dr.Agon kites.