Where There Is No Illusion There Is No Illyria« – in the Hinterland of Split

JOSˇKO BELAMARIC´ »Where there is no illusion there is no Illyria« – In the Hinterland of Split The youth set off along the dusty road and then up the steep, bare stone desert that rose in the hinterland of Split, getting increasingly distant from the sea, from the last graceful buildings and the last generous plant, while on the other side of the stony spur he descended, as if into a new sea, into this Bosnia, which was for him the fi rst great test on his entry into life [...] Some miles farther on, as he paused on the stony heights above Klis and looked at the bare wilderness yawning ahead and at the blan- ched stony hillsides spattered here and there with thin fl ecks of olive-hued vegetation, there wafted up toward him, from the Bosnian side, the silence of a new world such as he never known. The young man shivered and shook himself, more from the silence and desolation of the view than from the cool breeze that ruffl ed the pass. He drew his cloak around his shoulders, tightened his legs around the horse’s fl anks, and plunged down into that new world of silence and uncertainty. Bosnia, that muffl ed land, was in the air, and the air itself was already impregnated with a chilly anguish that was worldless and not to be explained.1 For centuries, the Dinarid mountain chain divided the rugged wasteland in the hinterland of the Dalmatian cities from the great expanses of the sea that provided a path to the great wide world. If you set off along the steep stony desert above Ko- tor, Dubrovnik, Split, Trogir and Šibenik – cities compact like the models in the hands of their holy medieval patron saints –, when you get further away from their harmonious architecture, their sunny vineyards and olive groves, orange planta- tions and laurel copses, and when the sea is at your back, you will fi nd yourself (like Andrić’s young consul, Amédée des Fossés – for the passage was a quote from the Bosnian Chronicle) on the other side of the spur, faced with the savage silence of a wholly different world. The anxious experience of departure from the narrow line of Dalmatia that stretches below the ridge of the mountains is repeated with a poetic thrill of horror by dozens of travel writers. We often read geographical confi nes as ancient heralds of borders that divide political, religious and even mental spheres. Along with the global demarcations that have crisscrossed these spaces, there are also local ones. Historic Omiš was built at the mouth of the Cetina River, which breaks through the stone mountain curtain in a dramatic manner at the very place where it is the hardest. Even after the construction of a bridge between the two banks, the early- twentieth-century inhabitants of the neighboring village would symbolically confi rm their ancient rights and confi nes by hurling a spear into the mainstream of the 1 Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, New York 1963, p. 78. FF54665466 HHoffmann.inddoffmann.indd 199199 004.03.134.03.13 008:368:36 200 JOŠKO BELAMARIĆ river.2 What would we know of the archipelago of Illyrian tribes (and of their languages, which have survived in just a few rare words, mainly in names) or of the demarcation of the medieval communes and feuds and the long since vanished vil- lages, were it not for so many boundary inscriptions and testimonies of passage left behind in countless signs inscribed in stone? The retinal images of these demarcations include thousands of kilometers of dry stone walls. Given that it is almost impossible for us to believe today that millions of sheep were still grazing in the Dalmatian hinterland between the two wars, these walls now seem an aleatoric ab- stract expression of some vernacular building tic. The uninitiated might be surprised to see that, on a map of urban settlements in the Roman Empire, the eastern shores of the Adriatic were more populous in the fi fth and sixth centuries than many other Mediterranean lands. But we must not forget that this idyllic picture is the result of a number of historical processes. An- cient history informs us in detail, fi rst of all, of the sequence of Roman interven- tions on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Veleus Paterculus tells us that Augustus himself, when disturbed by news of the Pannonian-Dalmatian uprising in 6 CE, warned the Senate that »the enemy might show up hard by Rome in ten days unless measures are taken«. (Earlier, while still known as Octavian, the future emperor had been wounded by the Delmats somewhere around Andetrium, today’s Muć, and in a later case just missed assassination by an Illyrian cook.) This war was, in Suetonius’ words, »gravissimum omnium externorum bellorum post Punica« (Tib. 16), the most serious after the Carthaginian. Both historians and poets cele- brate this event, and the poet Ovid cries that at last Dalmatia has been subdued – »tandem Dalmata supplex (ad Liviam Drusillam Augusti uxorem)«.3 Mommsen, drawing on ancient writers, characterized the Illyrians as a strong tribe with black hair and dark eyes. Many, like Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae L. IX. c. 14), believed that some of them – men and women alike – could, when enraged, turn a man into stone with a mere look (they had two pupils in each eye, a motif that would attract Ovid too: »oculis quoque pupula duplex fulmina« [Amores L. I, 8]). They were to gain fame in the cavalry, and above all in the Roman navy. The I. Cohors Dalmatarum had as its tribune or prefect the satirical poet Juvenal, who warned the dissolute Roman youth to watch out for the Illyrian soldiers. Descrip- tions of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries are not very different: »the Dalma- tian Croat is among the most interesting and attractive of ethnographic phenom- ena; his strength is really to be admired […] particularly in climbing up steep rocks 2 Frano Ivanišević, Poljica. Narodni život i običaji [1906], reprint, Priko 2006. 3 John Wilkes, Dalmatia, London 1969; Id., The Illyrians, Oxford 1992, pp. 207-218; Marta Sordi, »La Pacificazione dell’Illirico e Tiberio«, in Dall’Adriatico al Danubio. l’Illirico nel’età greca e romana, Atti del Convegno internazionale, Cividale del Friuli, 25-27 settembre 2003 (I convegni della Fondazione Niccolò Canussio, 3), ed. Gianpaolo Urso, Pisa 2004, pp. 221- 228. FF54665466 HHoffmann.inddoffmann.indd 200200 004.03.134.03.13 008:368:36.

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