Morning in Medimurje

[This is a continuation from the last post, which I wrote much closer in time to the other one, but life events kept me from posting it....but in case you need a refresher, or are a new read and have no clue, I was writing about our trip to Croatia in late spring.]

From Munich we flew to Zagreb, where a good friend met us at the airport and drove us the circa hour and a half to....home. Because oddly enough, we travel from home to home when we make this trip.

In fact, on our last trip, I took this little sign and left it there just to add a touch of homey to the house there. And you can't see it, but next to the muesli (which I took with me this time) and on the other side of the little boxes of tea there, I had left a box of cereal when we were there in November, and it was still within the expiration date and ready to eat.

So in some ways it just felt like walking into normal.

The house there looks very much like many other houses in Croatia with its light facade and terra cotta roof, its fence along the front of the property. Like many others, it has flowers in front and fruit trees and vegetables further back. It has the ingenious metal blinds ("roleta") that aren't aesthetically lovely as wooden shutters but are amazing for having a dark bedroom at night or letting in just the right amount of light during the day.

Red clover was in bloom, which is also a very normal thing, but not too far from our house, set in the midst of this particular patch of clover, stands a reminder that "normal" varies quite a lot from place to place.

I walk by it just about every morning when we are there, as it's just off the street that leads out into the fields where I like to walk. It's an old chapel, built in the 14th century. You can read a bit more about it here and also here. Before an earthquake hit, a much larger complex stood here, a church and monastery. Now only the chapel remains, and I'm so glad it survived. I would love to go inside one day and see the frescoes. It belongs to the city museum and it always locked, but I think surely you can make an appointment to see it? After almost 30 years of standing an looking at it from the outside, I imagine going inside will feel something like a dream come true for me!

The shorter construction to the right covers an area where excavation has been done in the last 20 years. The local story says that this chapel is connected to the castle in the center of town by a tunnel that served as an escape route in case the castle were ever attacked. No one seems to know if such an escape ever was necessary, and I imagine the time, energy, and money it would take to try to excavate the entire route to prove the tunnel's existence is simply not worth it. But underneath that dwarfish little shelter, you can see what is obviously the end of some kind of tunnel going somewhere. It's really fascinating.

I just found a photograph of the chapel, near the end of this long article, taken in 1921. Someday maybe I'll be capable of reading something like that, but for now it's just amazing to me to see an actual photograph of that chapel taken when my grandmother was a little girl growing up in far-off Tennessee....and to think that when the chapel was built Dante was probably living and writing in not so far away Italy.

I learned on this trip that local legend includes a story about a dragon that is also connected to this tunnel story. Somehow I think the tunnel is more likely to exist than the dragon....

Sometimes I think about these things on my morning walks there. And sometimes I just stare at the red clover and listen to the birds singing.

(About the title: Medimurje is the name of the region. I love the name, as it means "between the rivers," and so makes me think of Mesopotamia and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and so much that comes from that.)