Liquid isogloss
We spent both Saturday and Sunday sitting by the river. Our place is a pleasant 15-minute stroll from it, through the ancient village of Solkan. A good place to relax when the weather gets hot, as the water is mostly snow-melt at this time of year, icy cold, and it cools the air around it for a remarkable distance.
The Soča, or Isonzo as it’s known in Italian and in dire ignominious military history, has its source high in the Julian Alps, where it emerges from a mountainside as a dramatic little waterfall. It winds its way southward, gathering volume and speed, providing livelihood nowadays in the form of white-water rafting on the snowmelt, canyoning when it abates a bit, bungee-jumping from its rare bridges, and what is said to be some pretty fine fly fishing for an endemic species of golden trout (which animal is featured on the superfluous 1-tolar coin). You’ve got your occasional Yugoslav-era hydroelectric project, too.
The Soča typically has a startling color which in the (26 glommed-together) photos above is a bit muted by the turgid snowmelt. After heavy rains in the Alps the river looks like most, coffee-colored or gray, but when the weather has been serene and a heavy snowpack is not dragging silt down its course, the river is an unbelievable deep opalescent turquoise color. Quite literally unbelievable, and if you’ve gotten one of our postcards of it you probably thought the photographer had monkeyed with the color saturation. I’ve been told that “nobody knows” exactly why it is that color, but I don’t buy it. I assume it comes from minerals dissolved from its limestone bed, but no one I’ve talked to has been willing to commit to this theory.
The Soča would seem to make a natural border between Slovenia and Italy, following as it does the artificial one on a parallel course for nearly its entire length from Austria to the Adriatic. It did play a large part in the Isonzo front, where the armies of Austria-Hungary and Italy faced off in a stalemate that cost over a million military casualties over the course of two and a half years which saw 11 pointless battles and one calamitous breakthrough, which threw the Italian army back nearly to Venice (which was worth holding despite sinking). The many villages dotted along the river were largely destroyed; no one knows how many civilian casualties were suffered. That Hemingway fellow got his famous wounds near Gorizia, just across from where we sat this weekend, and of course A Farewell to Arms is his description of what came to be known as the Disaster at Caporetto (or the Miracle of Caporetto, depending of course upon your viewpoint). The village of Caporetto, Kobarid in Slovene, was the rally point for the two largely German breakthrough forces that finally pushed the front out of the mountains, where it had been locked for three hot summers and two snowy winters, and on to the Friulian plain.
If you look at the hill in the picture above, you are looking at both Italy and Slovenia. The border runs right across it but does not descend to the river until a few kilometers further south, to the left. The hill is called Mount Sabotin, and on its summit are the ruins of a stone church destroyed in the war. Limestone letters 20 meters high read Naš Tito (Our Tito) below its peak on the southwest face. It’s possible that Adam was conceived there.
Greetings from Brantford, Ontario Canada,
Enjoyed browsing your site and particularly your photo work of Sabotin/Soca. I travel often to NGorica and vicinity. Have been thinking about re-locating.
Yours truly,
John Ferfolja
Comment by John Ferfolja — Thursday 8 September 05 @ 09.11 MDT+2.00
Thanks for taking the time to say so. Please immigrate — we need more Canadians around here. And be sure to look us up if you do end up in the area. (By “look us up” I mean walk past the Splendid Bar on any given afternoon and look for the people with baby vomit on their shoulders.)
Comment by sgazzetti — Thursday 8 September 05 @ 14.08 MDT+2.00