We hopped across the river the fifth or sixth time when it occurred to me that we were in the middle of Nature. But surely, I was wrong. Either about my definition of Nature, or that this, indeed, was Nature at all. Evidence of human labour was all around us, and mounting. With a facetious battlecry of “The Anthropocene!!”, we tossed rocks into the shallow river to help us hop over it and keep our feet dry.
The landscape of the overgrown upper valleys that the Dragonja1I’ve decided to be loose with grammar and drop the definite article when it pleases me. It’s good to pack light when walking. carves out on its short tumble to the sea resisted easy categorisation. For us (and the many migrants who cross it), the river was sometimes an obstacle. At other times, it was a landmark that conjured the borderline between Slovenia and Croatia into a physical reality. It embodied movements measured both on daily and geological scales. Its colour, flow and seasonality all spoke of the underlying flysch rock which, saturated by its primaeval submarine origins, refuses to soak up any of the river’s water.
Unlike the Rižana, which appears suddenly – the progeny of an underground world – Dragonja’s momentum builds up slowly. Quietly. It almost creeps up on you. Small streams emerge from puddles silently at first. Before you know it, it is strong enough to power mills, important enough to divide countries, and pernicious enough to carry away human lives.
For those who drowned in it, the river was terror. For those divided by it, a metonymy for “border”. But the river’s movement, to circle back to the seminar’s question, meant most to the people who built the mills. For them, the river was a source of kinetic energy harnessed once at 49 different mills – a number that’s hard to imagine as we walk along it. Where were all these mills? Could you hear your neighbour’s mill? Was there competition between them? Different prices offered, word of mouth reviews exchanged? I surprisingly found an answer to one of these questions in a messy Wikipedia entry called “Milling in Slovenian Istria”. The average distance between mills on the Dragonja and its tributaries was between 955m and 1180m. A ten to fifteen min walk, so you probably wouldn’t hear your competition milling. The noise, now so completely missing from the valley, was not a minor inconvenience. At Rižana’s Bordon mill for example, a visiting official from Koper notes on 2 April 1840 that the proposed mill would be “in the middle of the Bordons’ forest” and would therefore not bother any neighbours2R. Starec, 1996: I mulini ad acqua dell’Istria settentrionale, Atti, vol. XXVI, 1996, p. 504. The permit was granted after minor modifications.
The milling economy of Istria ground corn and wheat into the flour that made bread and polenta. The river’s movement was consumed as calories that in turn sustained humans as they went about making terraced farms, harvesting grapes, pruning olives and shrinking Nature. Paths had to be maintained, donkeys fed, and bridges built to sustain this lost bio-technological world.
Now, Nature is back in the dark valleys. It harrasses the farmers of hilltop villages. Stags munch on olive trees in the winter (they’re pickier than the deer!), boars gorge on harvests. The hunters would help, if they weren’t drunk all the time. A small beetle – the black borer – threatens figs and olives. The borer came from Italy (where else!), infected a fig tree in Piran. The owner (from Ljubljana of course!) refused to cut it down. Now the borers spread deep in the forest, hopping from one forgotten fig tree to another. This is a dawning, unstable nature. A post-industrial rewilding. It reminds me of the dense bands of weeds and bushes that accompany railway lines in London, that sprout from inaccessible patches of land bordered by fences, roads and rail. A messy, dense rewilding where the hierarchy of an old forest (ancients > trees > saplings > ferns > moss) has not yet been imposed. A democratic rewilding full of possibilities. The animals seem to like it, based solely on their increasing numbers. With this rewilding come doubts about what the movement of the river is. Is it “for” anything anymore?
Walking along yet another ruin, perhaps a farm with a small stable (judging by the width of its doors), I realise we aren’t so much “strolling through history” on a guided tourist route: it’s more like tripping over layers of forgotten human labour. A fold in the green carpet. When the millers left, the terraced grooves of the hills softened. Humanity retreated uphill. Descending from the village of Trebeše to a small waterfall, you sense that you’re leaving behind tidy gardens and olive groves. It’s an uncanny feeling.
This is perhaps what Irena and Drago wanted to leave behind. Living in a mill that no longer milled, next to a bridge that no longer bridged (blown up by the Germans, who else!), their relation to the river was different. For the crew of artists and hangers-on, the river was not a source of kinetic energy anymore. They sourced their energy from wood and from invisible female labour (no drugs though!), while the river and the encroaching forest provided the setting for their artistic exploits and dramatic experiments. They were activists, too. The river owes its present existence to their eco-theatrical movement that stopped plans to build a dam and flood the valleys back in the 1980s. Listening to Irena, I realise that it was during their time at the mill that the purpose of the river changed.
Purpose, almost inherently, is what humans bestow on objects, animals or phenomena, most often not consensually. The mechanics of this are interesting: they can be illustrated by understanding the river as part of a technological assemblage. The affective capacity of the miller was to pull the river into an assemblage of the dietary society of industrial-era Istria. Feeding the port of Trieste (T), we can map the two rivers alongside the Šavrinke route (Š), the Südbahn (JŽ) and the sea. In Irena’s time, the affective capacity of the artist was to pull the Dragonja into a recreational society of post-industrial Istria. The river’s purpose is to appear wild. It exists to give us pause. To inspire. To give content to the info boards about life as it used to be.
Unlike the Rižana, which dutifully provides water for the whole region, Dragonja just flows. No settlements bank its path. It remains torrential and tempestuous, remarkably well hidden in its higher reaches. In its lower part, it was pulled into an altogether different assemblage: Fortress Europe. Of all its purposes, this was the newest and bleakest. Creating neither flour nor flourish, it frustrates movement where it finally swells to the size of an adult. But it’s a brief life. Leaving the migrant paths behind, at its estuary, it sneaks past the salt pans having perhaps learned from the migrants the value of not being seen. Hidden again behind a levee, it disappears into the sea.
What of its movement now? What of mine? Where is this river now?
