Over the Shores of Lougeon

“Then the mountains rise again, in the country of the Iapodes, and are called Albian. In like manner, also, there is a pass which leads over Ocra from Tergeste, a Carnic village, to a marsh called Lougeon. Near Nauportus there is a river, the Corcoras, which receives the cargoes. Now this river empties into the Savus, and the Savus into the Dravus, and the Dravus into the Noarus near Segestica.“

Strabo, Geōgraphiká 7.5.2; 1st century AD

Chapter One: Beware of Greeks bearing … geography books

The quoted passage from Strabo’s monumental Geography concerns the land that is now Slovenia; he is describing a trading route leading from Rome via Aquileia to the east and south, over the Ocra pass (Razdrto) on to Nauportus (Vrhnika; we’ve talked about this road before), Segestica (Sisak) and onwards to the riches of the East.

The passage feels a bit odd to modern travellers, whom the satellites tell where they are, and what directions they should take. The fact-based, scientific, measured Geography is shaking her globate head reading Strabo … In our world the Corcoras river – now Krka – is not near Nauportus, the Savus (Sava) does not flow into the Drava, Drava does not flow near Segestica, and Noarus simply does not exist.

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Was Strabo dreaming the shape of the land, inventing the flow of rivers, imagining valleys, mountains, and lakes – or was he just in a hurry (Geōgraphiká is a description of the whole world, from the Sacred Point to the Ganges, from Aethiopia to the Ultima Thule), and made a couple of mistakes rushing along his meridians and lines of latitude?

Probably – but the main thing is that Strabo was experiencing the world right at the BCE/CE cleavage, the end of the Roman republic, and the first Illyrian wars; the area he’s writing about was not yet completely conquered, tamed, and colonised. Illyria was wild and dangerous, dark and unknown to the Romans.

His sources on Illyria (Strabo never personally travelled here) were actually describing a much older trade route of the world that was slowly but surely disappearing: the Iron Age Illyria. Unlike the later main Roman route to the East (Aquleia – Ocra – Nauportus – Emona – Neviodunum – Segestica – Sirmium – Byzantium, along the Ljubljanica, Sava and Danube rivers), the one described by Strabo connects the major Iron Age centres – “hillforts” – that were just about to be destroyed and forgotten.

This route went from Ocra pass on to Bloke plateau and down to the large settlement of Korinj, to the Krka (Corcoras) valley, down the river through the major Lower Carniola Hallstatt group of settlements, across White Carniola to the Kolpa (Colapis) river, and on to Segestica, the Sava, and the Danube. Apart form some geographical mistakes and inventions – like the Noarus river – Strabo pretty much gets everything right.

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Our focus on Strabo though has less to do with his errors, omissions and inventions, and more with a certain place he mentions: ἕλος Λούγεον καλούμενον, “a marsh (lake) called Lougeon“. This marsh, this lake is relevant to our interests today.

Lugeon is Lake Cerknica. And we flew our kites above it – again.

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It’s a bit of a surprise to find Lake Cerknica in Strabo. Geōgraphiká is a monumental work of 17 (!) books, but the world was enormous even back then, and so many towns, rivers, mountains and wonders have not earned their place in the illustrious compendium. Why is élos Loúgeon included?

Because Lake Cerknica is magical – and even the Ancients knew that.

While Strabo’s Noarus may not exist, Lake Cerknica surely does – but like a blinker: it is there, now it isn’t, now it’s back, now it disappears again. Not only can you not step into the lake twice, sometimes there is nothing to step into at all!

It is a chaotic, liminal lake; we can’t confuse its map with its territory (there can be no accurate map of Lake Cerknica), we can’t describe it in its totality. Lake Cerknica straddles the border between dreams and reality, much like Strabo writing across the temporal border separating the Iron Age and the Empire, or a 17th century polymath separating science from alchemy with trepidation, as he is of both – and neither – worlds.

Chapter Two: How to become a Member of the Royal Society

Again, we know what’s really going on; we’ve observed and measured the lake, we calculated its inner workings, and we gave fancy names to all the phaenomena that guide its unusual behaviour. Lake Cerknica is an intermittent lake – the largest such lake in Europe! – a periodically flooded Karst polje created along the great Idrija fault, its quirks due to the permeable limestones and dolomites beneath it.

But the first attempts to understand the magic behind the seasonal dance of the lake were like Strabo’s … very imaginative:

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“This lake was by the Ancients called Lugea Palus, by the modern Lacus Lugeus, the at preſent its Latine name be Lacus Cirknicensis, in high Dutch Zircknizer-ſee, and in our Carniolan tongue Zjirknisko Jeſero.“

(From An Extract of a Letter written to the Royal Society out of Carniola, by Mr. John Weichard Valvaſor R.Soc.S being a full and accurate deſcription of the wonderfull Lake of Zirkniz in that country; 1688)

This letter that the famous 17th century Carniolan polymath Valvasor sent to the Royal Society in 1687 contains an interesting description of the wonders of the wonderfull Lake Cerknica – and more.

Valvasor’s idea of what hides behind the magic curtain of Lake Cerknica is immensely convoluted. He posited not one, but three lakes, of which one is visible, one is hidden above it in the mountains of Javorniki, and the other beneath the Lake Cerknica. All these lakes are then connected via an elaborate network of siphons, sumps, springs, and caves; the water ebbs and flows through them as the Cartesian mechanics dictates, and Lake Cerknica disappears and reappears accordingly.

It works though. Better, it would work, if Nature in her eternal benevolence would blunt the Ockham’s razor and allow such a preposterous rube-goldbergesque hydraulic machine to exist.

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Edmund Halley himself (of “Halley’s comet” fame), who was the secretary of the Royal Society back then, presented Valvasor’s letter to the Society and even conducted an experiment demonstrating how the lake could periodically form and drain through sumps, reservoirs, and syphons. The letter drew immense praise and the Royal Society unanimously elected Valvasor its Member (Regiae Societatis Socius, R.Soc.S) on November 14th, 1687.

Halley wrote an enthusiastic reply to Valvasor, full of congratulations, good news, and even praising verses intended for publication in Valvasor’s opus magnum, Die Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain (Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, 1698) – but sadly the letter was never delivered.

Valvasor later elaborated on his dreamy and magical description of the dreamy and magical Lake Cerknica. His underground lakes multiply, his siphons twist around themselves in the dark underground. There are caves that release flocks of pigeons when a thunderstorm passes. An abyss that emits strange white steam and which the priest must bless every Whit Monday.

In his slowly dissolving world gushing waters bring blind and featherless ducks from underneath the mountain (Valvasor claims he caught and ate a couple of these ducks himself, and that they were tasty, but very fatty; he attributes this to their subterranean diet). There are cartloads of fish in the sumps, will-o’-wisps in the forests, dragons and fairies and witches – all fighting the incoming Cartesian, logical, orthogonal, cold reality.

Chapter Three: No ducks, no witches

Our world is now devoid of feasting on Hadean blind ducks, there are no dragons in caves, no witches dancing on Mount Slivnica above the lake, and no Noarus receiving the waters of the Sava river.

But it has Lake Cerknica, at least sometimes, and thus it keeps a certain otherworldliness, a whisper of a stitch across the chasm of time, bridging the gap in the universe trying to understand itself. This strange but warm, pleasant feel envelops a kite flyer who is about to launch a kite from the ancient shores of Lugeon.

Puffy white clouds race across the deep blue winter sky, the grass and the reeds are golden brown, the water rises from the ground, embracing the shoes and the socks of a kite flyer. Naughty, playful ripples cover the surface of the lake, the wind is strong and gusty.

The kite soars and soon it faces the deep forests of Javorniki; eyes of bears and wolves, and lynxes are upon it, warily. The island of Gorica is right below, Slivnica bathes in the winter sun, and the remote Zadnji kraj shows itself shyly. We listen to the song of the light, the water and the wind:

It’s a perfect kite flying day.

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But what – if anything – does a kite see up there? The camera is our detached eye, and a kite is, in this cold cartesian reality at least, a simple tool, a flying machine. However, a kite is liminal too: it is an aetheral creature, an echo of a childhood, a thing from a fairytale (we are envious of anything that can fly on its own) – lifting not only a camera, but the good spirits of the past and feelings long forgotten (that’s why we get all soft when we see a kite flying).

We project a lot on that flying thing, and a kite doesn’t just reflect that… it reconfigures our projections, encodes them, and sends them back. Thus we know that it can see, but we can’t know what it sees, because its vistas are orthogonal to our reality; in its reality the underground ducks can see and we are blind.

On the other hand the views that the camera sees from the end of the kite line are immense and seemingly eternal, yet completely unique; these photos are unrepeatable, frozen snapshots of the gentle chaos whose components will never again assemble into that precise setting. Lake Cerknica is a strange attractor.

And a strange divider too. The waters leave the lake through large caves – Velika and Mala Karlovica – leading them beneath the mountains to Rakov Škocjan valley, but those that sink into the sumps along the way (and into the large sinkholes of Rešeto and Vodonos) flow north under Slivnica and spring out at the edge of Ljubljana Marshes.

To several futures (not to all) we shall leave this lake of forking waters.

Chapter Four: Living with Chaos

Within – or despite? – all this liminality of Lake Cerknica, humans are born, live, and die. Since before the times of Strabo, before the Illyrians (much before, an Upper Palaeolithic site covers the island of Gorica) people were leading a dance of life with the lake, creating a deep symbiosis with the chaotic waters.

The cultural landscape of Lake Cerknica is a wonder on its own. The lake breathes almost regularly, with just enough rhythm for people to sway with it, and chaotic enough they can’t let their guard down. The lake keeps its people on their toes, and they are like master gamers doing speedruns through the seasons.

What would one expect from people who own a plough, a fishing rod, a scythe, a boat, a wagon and a pair of ice skates – using them on (or above) the exact same place through the year?

There are the commons which the lake gently covers – gently because the waters of the lake have so much lime in them that the soil never gets acidic and the spring grass is sweet. By the edge of the farthest reach of the lake the meadows are divided into long ribbons, and further to the edge of the polje there are fields, long and narrow, one for each humble homestead.

The old high-stem orchards dot the plain, apple and pear trees tall enough to avoid the high waters. Lindens line the roads, remnants of magnificent tree-lined avenues of the past that were giving shade to the lords driving their horses from one castle to another, From Haasberg to Stegberch, from Nadlišek to Snežnik.

The villages huddle on the edge of the lake, except one that bravely hugs the high ground near the sinkholes, and another that is the only village in Slovenia that’s on a true island – it’s name is Otok, Island, of course.

The cultural landscape of Cerknica is ancient and always new, its constant changes dictated – no, conducted by the lake, performed by the clouds, the springs, the mountains, the sumps … and the people.

Epilogue

“Nice flying apparatus,” says Strabo while he sits down and cracks open a cold one “Could it go so high to see the Euxine sea?”
“No, Strabo, we don’t have that long a line. But it can show you that Corcoras is nowhere near Nauportus!”
“Oh, shut up. What a nice day we have, so pleasant and … uncomplicated – eh, Jo, my man?”
Valvasor, busy drawing a diagram with thousands of lakes and millions of siphons, a monstrosity so complex – and so accurate – he is running out of dimensions, let alone paper, blurts out: “What?”

And we laugh, the lake murmurs, the clouds race across the sky, the trees and the fields and the stands of reed glimmer in the setting sky. The witches are carefully arranging the will-o’-wisps for the dance party later up on the sacred mountain, the water fairies are trying to steal our beers, the army of blind ducks are preparing to gush out of the springs, the deep hum of the Noarus is echoing across the distant lands … and a kite dances high above us all.

Above space and time, over the shores of Lougeon.

Kite aerial photos shot with Insta360 on Cindy delta kite, and with Nikon P330 on The Original blue rokkaku, made by Dr.Agon kites.