 |
| Front Door, Church of St. Mary, Beram |
A day after showing my parents around the Croatian Riviera, we loaded back into our pair of rental cars and headed westward to the Istrian peninsula. Our first stop was Pazin, located in the center of Istria, only about an hour from Rijeka. We've been to Pazin before in the very early spring, but we wanted to go again to see a famous gorge we missed. We also needed to ask at the tourist office about how to get keys to a little church outside a village near Pazin.
 |
| Pazin gorge |
With just a little effort, we found the gorge at the edge of town near the old fortress. It was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Walking along a little farther, we found a bridge that gives you a more complete view of both sides of the gorge, the deep caves and crevasses. The ancient fortress and little houses cling to the edge at the top of the gorge, and I can't help but wonder what living on a precipice would do to a kid's personality growing up. "Now, if you kick your ball over the gorge, don't go chasing it!" In late June, Pazin has "Jules Verne Days." The gorge might have inspired his book Journey to the Center of the World, but it was definitely the basis for his novel Matias Sandorf.
 |
Lucy and the original Dance of Death
|
Next, we drove to Beram, a hilltop village with about 20 residents. Beram's claim to fame is a tiny 15th century frescoed chapel, the Church of St. Mary, in the woods about 1km outside of town. In addition to being completely off the beaten path, the chapel is normally locked, so you have to call a lady in Beram and ask if she'll take you to the chapel. From the center of Beram, having acquired her phone number from the Pazin tourist office, Adam called her. Instantly, a lady appeared on a balcony with a phone to her ear and she came out several minutes later holding a 6" long iron key, and she told us she would drive with us in our cars to the chapel. The most famous painting is the "Dance of Death" or dance macabre, which we've seen replicas of in Brijuni and also in the hallways of the art museum in Rijeka. The dance shows 10 characters -- rich, poor, old, young, nobles, merchants -- each accompanied by a skeleton. The frescoes, including the dance macabre, were painted by Vincent de Kastav who is from a village called Kastav just 5k from Rijeka. As a result, most of the visitors to the chapel are from the Kastav area. Just after we dropped off our chapel-keeper in the village, two giant tour buses pulled up to Beram, and that explained why there was a honey, goat cheese, and brandy vendor set up at a makeshift table outside the chapel in the middle of nowhere.
After the Beram chapel, we reprogrammed the GPS to lead us to Rovinj, on the western side of Istria, which we had visited in the early spring when everything was closed. We drove through rain and thought we might get soaking wet, but we managed to dodge the rain the entire day. We headed up to the church of St. Euphemia, which gets its name from a poor little girl named Euphemia who got fed to the lions by the Romans under Diocletian. She was interred in Constantinople, but one day her marble sarcophagus disappeared, only to wash up on the shores of Rovinj. The miracles don't end there. No one could get her up the hill until a young boy with two small cows managed to haul it up. Who am I to dispute any of the holes in that story, nor do I need to go into the ridiculous thresholds of Catholic sainthood in general (ahemjohnpaulahem), but Euphemie's church courtyard gives you some unparalleled views of the coast and the sea.
Now the kids were starving to death. We found a lunch spot right on the water, complete with a very charming waiter, a cross between Don Juan and Rodney Dangerfield, who was half Croatian and half Albanian, and gave us double the amount of wine we ordered. Clearly, he had not only perfected the skill of how to milk a
slightly tipsy 60 something from the midwest for a preposterously outrageous tip, but he also knew how to make that person feel like the tip went toward a really noble cause, as noble as earthquake relief or cleft lip repair surgery for destitute children. He was good, that waiter.
We loaded back into the cars with a very threatening thundercloud overhead, but we managed to get away from it before the downpour. The plan was to make a final stop in Motovun, a picturesque hilltown in northwest Istria surrounded by olive trees and vineyards, but we decided to head back to Rijeka to get Jonah to soccer practice. The road back to Rijeka wound around Motovun, so we snapped some pictures at a rest stop, and added Motovun to the list of places to visit before we come back to the US. As it turned out, Jonah didn't have practice, he had a game. He was about 1/2 hour late, but my parents got to see Team Locomotiva for a little while.
 |
| Rovinj |
 |
| The storm we avoided |
 |
| Georgie near our restaurant |
 |
| Sue, Rovinj |
 |
| Tom, Rovinj |
 |
| This year's figs, Rovinj |
 |
| Motovun landscape |
 |
| outside Motovun, Istria |
