Rovinj - repetition and memory

In 1984, I was not an experienced traveler. For me, the Mediterranean areas were limited to summers in Boka, one visit each to Dubrovnik and Split, and to - Makarska. Unexpectedly, that July we decided to go to Rovinj, because we were vacationing nearby. I don't remember the bus, nor the descent into the city. But I remember some scenes very well: the bell tower of the church, around it the roofs in cascades that descend towards the sea. The bright light bothers my girlfriend's camera - the Russian Smena is the first camera I used for serious photography. The girl's yellow jumpsuit, which she sewed from a colored sheet according to the model from Burda. Rovinj, which is very old, older than anything I knew in Bosnia. And the two of us who are almost children - we have only been in this world for two decades. People were much slower than these people are today. Maybe more relaxed. The deep analog era.

Resurrection of Rovinj memorabilia

The photos from that summer were carefully put into an album that was collecting dust somewhere in my mother's apartment in the Bosnian kasaba. I didn't open it often. When a man is young, he rarely looks back. The beginning of the nineties brought a collective psychosis called war. The photos of Rovinj's summer perished along with books and records. Sometimes I imagined them, but memory is unreliable. In the following decades, of all the colors of Rovinj, only regret remained for them.

I was in Belgrade for my fiftieth birthday. A gift was waiting for me on the table. Photo album with photos from Rovinj. With a dedication from the girl I was there with at the time. My heart was pounding like crazy. I flipped through it for hours, photo by photo. Rovinj was no longer a vague idea of ​​a memory, a patchwork of images from the subconscious. One day in 1984, he rose again from nothingness and flaunted himself there, in front of me, as if no one had ever destroyed my memorabilia, the foundations of my personal mythology, with grenades. Then I promised myself that we would go to Rovinj again.

Rovinj again

And here we are in the bus crossing the Lim channel. The second decade of the new millennium is winding down. Almost 1984 years have passed since the summer of 35. How will Rovinj welcome us? Will the past and the present clash in us, or will today's day just gently descend on the one that preceded it so long ago, harmoniously writing new notes according to the old song?

The morning is textbook sunny. The Romanesque octagonal church of the Holy Trinity from the XNUMXth century is located on Trg na Lokva next to the bus station, which today is used as a gallery space. Its living architectural connection with the Eastern Mediterranean is obvious to me. From there we descend towards the coast through alleys, almost every one of which could be a postcard.

We go out to the coast of Aldo Rismond - one will look for that name in vain on the Croatian Wikipedia - it is about an Istrian, Italian communist from Rovinj. From there, the ridge of the Rovinj peninsula can be seen through the boats of countless boats in the harbor. Then we go along the coast named after the national hero Giuseppe Budicino Pino, an Italian anti-fascist who was born in Rovinj and was shot in 1944 in the vicinity of the city at the age of thirty-three. And then we come to Marshal Tito Square. That name of the square seems almost unreal in today's Croatia. But Istria is different. On the square is the City Clock, a red tower built in the 1959th century. The clock we see is from the XNUMXth century, under it is a Venetian lion, which tells us that Venice was the master here until its downfall. The Boy with Fish fountain on the square dates from XNUMX. Rovinj already offers all its historical layers here, from the Renaissance through the Baroque to socialism.

We pass the Veli Jože tavern - Vladimir Nazor comes to mind, of course, and his story about the Istrian giant from 1908, which was based on Motovun folk tales, but the writer, writing it down, created a favorite Istrian figure in which people recognized themselves. From here we climb towards the Church of St. Euphemia, whose tower rises from the city skyline like a rocket.

Efimia with two graves

Efimija of Chalcedon was born at the end of the XNUMXrd century and by the age of sixteen she had become a passionate Christian. The ancient Roman authorities used to throw Christians to the lions. According to the legend, she was also offered to these royal cats, but they did not want her, but rather crushed the executioner who subsequently entered the arena to execute Efimia.

Ten years after her death, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and the young martyr became one of the favorite saints of early Christianity. The almost detective story of the movement of her remains in a zigzag line across the Mediterranean is worthy of Umberto Eco. But what does a woman born in Chalkidon, on the Asia Minor side of the Bosphorus, near today's Istanbul, have to do with Rovinj? The story goes like this: in the year 800, the saint's sarcophagus, which was launched into the sea near Constantinople, arrived on some kind of raft in front of Rovinj. Citizens tried to pull out the sarcophagus, but it didn't work. The saint appeared to a boy who harnessed two heifers and pulled out the sarcophagus and dragged it up the hill. Euphemia's church was built in that place. It is the Rovinj version. There are at least two or three other versions of the story. According to one of them, the relics are kept in the Temple of St. Georgia, in the complex of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

I'm sitting in front of the church in Rovinj, slightly out of breath from the ascent. The bell tower above me, with a height of more than sixty meters, plunged into the blue, and above, on top of it sits an almost five-meter statue of the saint. I was inside, where there is good shade and where baroque flourishes. Now I am leaning against the wall of the church and thinking about the marvelous Mediterranean where it is possible for the relics of a saint to rest at the same time on two of its pearl points, which are 1.500 kilometers apart - here and in Constantinople.

Mateoti square

We go down the streets that remind me of the bright urban handwriting on the faces of cities from the Italian Mediterranean region. I saw similar scenes in Rome, in Palermo, in Cefalù - a stone, an unknown evergreen bush, laundry hung above our heads like a flag celebrating life, open wooden shutters on the floor behind which someone's life begins in the semi-darkness, and my right to peek ends.

We emerge onto Grisija Street, which has been known since 1967 as a very long open-air gallery. Tourists flock here. We go around it and through the surrounding alleys we arrive at Trg Mateoti. There, three streets come together, the one that comes from below, through the Balbi gate, named after the Venetian mayor Daniel Balbi, and at this point it forks into two alleys that lead up the hill.

Giacomo Matteotti was an Italian socialist who on May 30, 1924, in the Italian parliament, openly accused the ruling fascists of stealing the elections. Eleven days after that, their thugs kidnapped him and killed him.

We'll sit down at Cafe Bruno on that square and let afternoon fatigue overcome us, very similar to happiness. We don't have to go anywhere, no one is forcing us, no one is asking us for anything. We'll just drink our cappuccino and chat about Rovinj then and now.

I know that famous Belgraders used to hang out here, from the writer Borislav Mihailović Mihiz, through the painter Mića Popović, to the most famous Serbian emigrant in Croatia, Mirko Kovač. I imagine the sound of ancient bands like Siluete. I welcome in me all those shadows that mean nothing to today's young people sitting around us.

Forward-looking memory

Is this the same Rovinj that enchanted us in 1984? In those years I read the Danish philosopher Serene Kierkegaard. "Repetition and memory are the same movement, only in the opposite direction". Or: "Real repetition is forward-directed memory".

I remember that Kierkegaard in the book Repetition described how he returned to Berlin where he once lived to find that repetition was impossible. Coffee that tasted the same in the same place no longer pleased him.

I couldn't say that about the coffee we drink on Mateoti Square. Our memory was directed forward. Our coffee is better now than it was in the eighties. This square and us in it, with worn out sandals, with feet on the warm stone that touched the feet of many people from an endless series of generations, from the Roman Ruginium until now. We are surrounded by people and houses with "shacks". That moment will remain unique, even though we've been here before. There is no repetition. We will leave the city with a double memory of Rovinj, and we will direct that palimpsest into the future. We will come here for the third time.