SLOVENIAN FRESCO
By R. S. JENKINSON
THE sermon meandered on jerkily, like a river whose course is broken by rocks and pebbles. I could understand only a word here and there, for the priest was speaking his abrupt, native Slovenian. My eyes roamed about the church, packed with its peasant congregation—old men with their cropped, irregular heads, old women with faces of crinkled parchment, sturdy lads and girls, and pretty children standing in the aisle. Behind the priest small boys were fidgeting in the chancel, and he himself stood preaching at the altar-rail. He was a pale, spectacled young man, but full of patriotic spirit. On weekdays he taught the children in the Slovene school at Trieste, eight miles away. And now in his sermon he was talking of Yugoslavia.
My eyes came to rest on the remarkable frescoes, which, as the priest had told me the evening before, were painted during the war by an artist from Ljubljana, the Slovene capital. In the apse above the altar our Lord sat at supper among His Apostles, just as He has been sitting in churches the world over from the time when first the glittering mosaics were set in the earliest Christian basilica. This church then was a facet of the Rome of two thousand years. And round the walls four of the Gospel parables were well and largely depicted. But the more I looked into these frescoes of the parables, the more of interest I found there. In one of them our Lord, as the good Sower, walked along throwing seed into the furrow, and behind, in dark shadow, came the crouching enemy, and tares sprouted up around his feet. The painter had chosen for his back- ground this very Slovene village. There were the simple houses and the church, set in a countryside of rough, stony fields and rocky hills with their stunted pines and oaks. Under the blossoming fruit- trees a hardy Slovene peasant was ploughing up the soil behind his two dun-coloured oxen. There, too, was the round, medieval tower, built against the Turk. It reminded one that the village had been an outpost before today—today when the British and Yugoslav road-posts face each other where the houses end. Here, then, was a parable enacted in one's own field—an effective idea. But, as I looked, I noticed something else. The Evil One was clothed in three colours —red, white and green. But perhaps it was only a coincidence, I thought, that these were the colours of the Italian flag.
I turned to look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. There was our Lord lifting the robbed and wounded traveller on to His donkey. It seemed conventional enough, until one noticed that the road on which they stood was undoubtedly an Italian main road, with stones alongside striped black and white. And there riding down the road in the distance was the Pharisee who had passed by— a fat, dark man clad in red, white and green, as also were the robbers lurking in a ruin a little away from the road. Unquestion- ably, too, the road ran through the hilly Slovene littoral, beside the Bay of Trieste. And, look—yes—the group of our Lord and the wounded man were clothed in the red, white and blue of Yugoslavia.
Enough only to mention the representation of our Lord as the Good Shepherd rescuing a straying sheep from a barbed-wire en- tanglement, against a background of blazing Slovene villages—I have seen the skeletons of such villages among the uplands of Venezia Giulia—and the Son of Man descending in judgement from the clouds, the swarthy, cringing Italians on His right, and on His left the hollow-cheeked peasantry of Yugoslavia. Here-nhen on Italian territory, in a Roman Catholic church, an oppressed minority had dared to make its scarcely-veiled protest in the very days of Fascist occupation.
I suppose that very few people in Great Britain know anything at all of the Slovenians, a western Slav people, a million in number, who were for the main part incorporated into Yugoslavia after the First World War, all but a minority who were included in Italy—to their disgust. The Fascists tried to Italianise them without success, and now they wish, above all, to be free of the Italians. One could have said a few years ago that they would all have wished to rejoin their fellow-Slovenes in Yugoslavia, but some of them at least—perhaps more than dare to say so—would now prefer to remain within a Venezia Giulia administered by the Allies, rather than to be ruled from a Communist Belgrade. But it is likely, I thought, that this hardy, peasant people will be pawns in the game of the Great Powers, just as they were in 1920.
But the sermon had ended. The voices of men and women in the gallery sang a Slav liturgy, until the bell gave warning of the Elevation of the Host. In that moment of profound silence the con- gregation were as intimately united to Rome as they were violently alienated from Italy. How little relation has theory to reality! From an armchair one may speak of distinct Yugoslav, Catholic or Com- munist points of view, but in fact how mixed up they all are! Hera we were on the Morgan Line—that invisible boundary between the British and American occupying forces and the Yugoslays—and the Slav villagers, Catholics as they are, were attending their Roman Mass, the very church walls teaching hatred of the Italians. And yet how many of the congregation, I wondered, wished to be beyond the " iron curtain " that was drawn across the far end of the village street?
In this complex situation certain facts seemed clear. Roman Catholicism showed itself strikingly supra-national. Slovene patriot- ism and resentment against Italian oppression were equally apparent. But the extent of enthusiasm for the regime of Marshal Tito could not easily be assessed. Perhaps only a minority was really keen ; certainly there was intimidation. I thought of the little girl who was grateful for a lift in my jeep, provided I let her get out before we entered the village, so that she should not be seen in a British vehicle. Probably all that these simple folk feel from their hearts is a love of their religion and festivals that is deeply ingrained, a sense of the wrongs that have been done them, perhaps some hope in the promises from Belgrade, but more certainly a realisation that, come what may, they must still plough the stony uplands that look down upon Trieste and the gleaming Adriatic.
But the service had ended. The people streamed out into the sunlight to gather by the churchyard wall and listen to the secretary of the village Communist committee—who seemed a pleasant young man—making his weekly announcements.
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