In all the years I’ve lived here, I never quite figured out the topography of the ridge north of town until I walked up it on Saturday. I’m surprised and a bit embarrassed that it took us that long to make what turned out to be a very modest hike. Magda pointed out as we approached the top that the last hike she took was our Easter Sunday climb of Mount Sabotin (the prominent peak just right of center in the picture) on what was almost surely the day Adam was conceived. My last hike was a little more recent, but not much. So it wasn’t surprising to me that my shins and knees were feeling the walk a day later.
One reason that this particular hilltop’s form eluded me as much as it did is that it’s not visible from our windows, though a false summit, Sveta Katerina, dominates our view while obscuring the real peak, Škabrijel, by the smallest sliver of tree cover. Walk a block southwest of our house and the peak, with its distinctive treeline notch with observation tower silhouetted in it, jumps into view. It amazes me that I lived here for over six years, looking north at the hills for most of that time, and I never even registered the tower’s existence until a few weeks ago. And of course, once I saw it, I had to stand on top of it.
So Saturday Magda and I left the boys to play with Auntie Rada and drove to the subsidiary peak of Sveta Katerina, about halfway up. There we left the car and trusted in the familiar red-ringed white circle trail blazes to guide us to the top of Škabrijel.
The hike was shorter than we expected, but it had its steep bits and it was a relief to move into the gentling slope near the summit, cooled by conifers. Just below the top we encountered an army mess kit devoured by rust. It’s impossible to walk in the mountains of western Slovenia without the shadows of wars being evoked, and I rarely go out without learning enough to make me want to know more. I knew that the moving lines of the notorious Isonzo/Soča Front had passed right through this area, but my post-hike Google session this time surprised me by revealing that this hill outside our window, our daily view, was such an important part of that front during the Italian attacks on Austrian positions on the Banjška Planota, or Bainsizza Plateau, which sits just beyond. Perceval Gibbon, writing for the New York Times of August 20, 1917:
“Still further south…lies the terrible Austrian buttress of Monte San Gabriele, which is now threatened by Cadorna’s new strategy of movement. San Gabriele, with its southwestern spur, San Caterina, was a kind of sister to Monte Santo. It has been attacked scores of times. There is hardly an inch of its burned and churned slope that has not received its bursting shell. Yet so far it has proved impregnable…the Bainsizza Plateau is the key to Trieste.”
The summit of Sveta gora, also visible from our apartment and seen below capped by a monastery, was no less important an objective. Gibbon again, describing the battle for ‘Monte Santo’ a week later:
“[T]he tricolor of Italy, carried up the slopes by the battalion which assaulted it frontally on its steepest side, floats from a long stone heap that crowns the hill where once a beautifully old monastery stood.The foundations of the monastery, its garden, and the slopes about it were an antheap of passages, tunels [sic], and underground chambers, gruesomely equipped with the everlasting machine guns. The Italian artillery and trench mortars put an intense fire upon them…”
Not surprisingly, the monastery you see today is not so ‘beautifully old’.
The final battle on this front came to be known as Caporetto, for the small town up the river where the Austro-Hungarian army, amply reinforced by Germans (including a young lieutenant Rommel), broke the back of the Italian army. This would give a teenager floating about the area named Ernest Hemingway material for a novel he would write a dozen years later in Arkansas. Hemingway described Caporetto as “a little white town with a campanile in a valley”. It still is. The placename, though, is now happily obsolete — Caporetto ended up on the Yugoslav side of the border’s most recent iteration, and is now Slovenian Kobarid. Caporetto lived on for a time as a term for a humiliating, catastrophic military defeat.
While researching this I was amazed at the richness of the archives at the New York Times. They go back to 1851, and reading colorful, breathless, first-person descriptions of historical events happening within the view from our windows has been nothing short of astonishing. And may turn out to be addictive. Highly recommended.
