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  EUROPE

  An Intimate Journey

  JAN MORRIS

  For

  ELIZABETH

  From Reykjavik to Ljubljana,

  Cheerful Cork to weird Tirana,

  No exotic route avails

  To clear my homesick mind of Wales.

  Where my Love is at,

  And also Jenks the cat.

  *

  Except for sporadic quotations all the responses in

  this book are my own, ranging from the adolescent

  to the all too mature. It is a purely personal and

  entirely subjective album of Europe

  Trefan Morys, 1997

  *

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Disclaimer

  AN INTRODUCTION:

  Setting the scene for contemplation, on a bollard in Trieste

  1 HOLY SYMPTOMS:

  Sacred complexities of Europe, starting with paganism, ending with art

  2 THE MISHMASH:

  Europe’s ethnic and geographical confusion, embracing frontiers, minorities, enclaves, islands, anomalies and miscellaneous surprises

  3 NATIONS, STATES AND BLOODY POWERS:

  The mess the Europeans have made of their continent, country by country

  4 THE INTERNET:

  Despite itself, Europe is bound together by habit and technique

  5 SPASMS OF UNITY:

  Six attempts to make a whole of Europe, from the Holy Roman Empire to the European Union

  AN EPILOGUE:

  Wry smiles and brave hopes, back on the Trieste waterfront

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AN INTRODUCTION

  *

  1 On the Audace Jetty

  On a fine warm day in my twentieth year, in the summer of 1946, I started to write an essay about nostalgia, sitting on a bollard beside the sea on the Molo Audace in Trieste.

  There are curious connotations to the name of this jetty, which protrudes into the harbour from the piazza at the formal centre of the city. It commemorates the day in 1918 when the Italian destroyer Audace, 1,017 tons, tied up there to disembark a company of soldiers and claim Trieste on behalf of the Kingdom of Italy – for the previous century it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although the place was no more than half Italian-speaking, and was debatably part of the Italian peninsula, this was in effect a last coup of the Risorgimento. The Audace was ecstatically welcomed with bands and rhetoric, at least by the local Italians, and the pier was at once renamed for her.

  She was not, however, originally an Italian warship at all. She was laid down in Scotland in 1912 to a Japanese commission, but was transferred to the Italian Navy when Italy entered the war against Germany in 1915. After her moment of glory at Trieste she continued to serve with the Regia Marina until 1943, when the Italians surrendered to the Allies in the Second World War: she was then seized by the Germans and went to sea with the Reichsmarine. In the end she was sunk in a battle off the Dalmatian coast by her creators the British – both Britons and Germans, I have no doubt, if not Italians too by then, altogether unaware of her place in history. When I sat there that afternoon I did not know the story of the Audace either: but in retrospect her career seems to offer, with its mingled allusions of pride and pathos, absurdity, irony and oddity, not a bad beginning for a book about Europe.

  2 A transient

  It was nostalgia I was writing about then, though, Trieste having brought on a vicarious spasm of it. The second German war had ended, and I was in the city as a member of an occupying army, during a hiatus before our transference to British imperial duties in Palestine. This was my introduction to Europe. Anglo-Welsh though I am, I thought of myself then as firmly British, and I looked at everything around me, I fear, slightly de haut en bas. As Alan Moorehead once wrote, in those days the British travelled all the world like the children of rich parents. Not for a moment did I think of myself as European. I was a privileged transient from another kind of country, an oceanic country whose frontiers extended from Tasmania to Newfoundland.

  I was billeted in a tall old apartment block up on the cathedral hill, with a violent shimmering view over the bay – its blues hotly blue, its evening sunshine blinding; and having time on my hands, especially in the afternoons, I would often walk down the hill, past the Roman amphitheatre, down the ceremonial staircase built by the vanquished Fascists, over the Piazza dell’ Unità d’Italia where the British and American flags flew side by side above the former Governor’s Palace, to find a convenient spot for composition at the harbour’s edge.

  I had come to Trieste across a shattered, bewildered and despondent continent, which looked as though it could never recover. We knew only the half of it then, the full horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath having not yet been revealed, but it was quite enough to make me feel that I could never experience Europe in any state of grace or glory. The continual civil wars which had wracked the continent throughout the century – French against Germans, British against Italians, Czechs against Poles, Spaniards against Spaniards, Gentiles against Jews – had reached a devastating climax, and I saw all its nations as in a fearful dream, blurred and disjointed. Millions of homeless people swarmed here and there across its frontiers, or lay despondent in refugee camps, bureaucratically categorized as ‘displaced persons’. Great cities lay in ruin. Bridges were broken, roads and railways were in chaos. In the eastern forests savage partisans were still at each other’s throats. Homesick armies were dispersing in triumph or in ignominy. Conquerors from East and West flew their ensigns above the seats of old authority, and proud populations would do almost anything for a pack of cigarettes or some nylon stockings. Europe was in shock, powerless, discredited and degraded. ‘When the waters recede,’ wrote Thomas Mann from his exile in the United States, ‘Europe will have changed beyond recognition, so that one will hardly be able to speak of going home …’

  Although I had never been on the continent before, I had been brought up to a vision of it. My English mother had been a student in Leipzig before the First World War, and had brought home a taste for the easy charm of the Leipzigers that she consummated, I like to think, by marrying a Welshman. Her memories had coloured my childhood ideas of Europe. It was a roseate, Old German Europe that I chiefly had in mind, and I thought of it as a romantic whole. Great writers and musicians walking the streets – lovely parks with lakes and gazebos –architecture of ancient splendour – merry student life in sunlit cafés – grand old cities of culture and history – all these, and a muddle of other Mendelssohnian notions, added up to my European ideal. It was no wonder, when I compared the actual present with the fanciful past, that nostalgia was the subject of my afternoon essay; and to make it all the more poignant it happened that the particular city I saw around me, my first European city of residence, was not shattered at all. It is true that the Western Allies, with the apostate Italians, were squabbling with Marshal Tito the Yugoslav over the future of Trieste, while in Moscow Stalin schemed to get control of it as a Mediterranean outlet for the Soviet Union. But the city had been spared the worst of war’s destructions, and stood there a little forlorn perhaps, but virtually intact – one of the fortunate moiety of European cities to look almost as they did before the war began.

  In its prime it had been the principal seaport of the Habsburg Empire, a free port linked by railway direct with Vienna. Its hinterland had been the whole of central Europe, and it had acquired the ample and assured physique of nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa. Around its medieval core a grand city of commerce and finance had arisen, lining the shores with quays and warehouses, stretching inland with ornate parades of banks and exchanges and agencies and shipping offices. There were coffee-shops
where littérateurs and heroes of the Risorgimento had written and plotted. There was an opera house Verdi had composed operas for. There were memories of Stendhal, Svevo, Winckelmann, James Joyce. Schooners and elderly steamers still came and went from its harbour, as in old postcards, and across the bay there stood the sweet Victorian pleasure-castle of Miramare, once the home of a Habsburg archduke, by then the headquarters of an American general.

  So I was able to summon an all but genuine sense of nostalgia (nostalgia comes rarely, after all, when you are nineteen years old). Trieste made me homesick for a Europe that was gone, that I had never known except in fancy, and when I looked over the city roofs to the harsh limestone Karst above, I could imagine all the famous European capitals that lay beyond, some ruined, some bemused, one triumphant: from Belgrade and Bucharest, not so far to the east, over the Alps to Vienna, and Prague, and Geneva – to Berlin still in nightmare, and an ambivalent Rome, and Paris humiliated, and Lisbon and Madrid untouched, and away to Stockholm and Oslo and Copenhagen (and over to London, too, the city victorious, except that I did not think of London as being in Europe at all …). In 1946 one no longer often saw the bill of lading ‘Via Trieste’, which had once directed so much of the world’s trade towards the heart of Europe: but it certainly applied to me.

  I was sitting, there on my bollard, at one of the continent’s fulcra, where Slavs, Teutons and Latins met, or turned their backs on one another, where the Balkans began and the Mediterranean reached its northernmost tide-reach up the wide fjord of the Adriatic. Trieste, however, had lost the advantages of its situation. Thirty-odd years earlier it had become a historical backwater, when the Habsburg Empire came to an end and the seaport forfeited its true raison d’être. No longer was this the proud gateway through which the traffic of an empire passed to and from the world outside. A hush of limbo lay over the city, especially on such a hot summer afternoon, when only an occasional schooner loitered in from Istria, and a few men fished with their lines from the quayside, now and then wandering over to see how the fellow along the quay was doing. Around the bay Miramare stood hazy on its promontory. In my memory the light was dazzling that afternoon, and the limestone ridges running away into Italy looked bleached with heat and drought.

  3 What became of Waring

  I never did finish my maudlin essay (though I still have a draft of it, in a dog-eared notebook under the stairs): but the sensations it tried to record were to mark me for life, and I was always to associate the city of Trieste with my conception of Europe. To this day I love its feel of mordant separateness, as though time is always passing it by. It suggests to me a watcher on the shore, looking back over the ridge to the places where history is on the go, and recognizing faintly within itself, as in echo from long before, all the grand movements of peoples, moneys, dynasties, armies, beliefs and aspirations that have formed the tumultuous continent beyond.

  Now, half a century on, I have returned to Trieste to sort out my own lifetime’s experience of Europe, to write this introduction in a room above the harbour, and to use the city as a point of reference for my impressions and reflections – just as I tried, so long ago, to give form there to my nostalgia. Thomas Mann was wrong, I think. If he could come back to the continent now he would know he was home after all, and my fifty years of Europe have turned out to be fifty complex years of a return to glory, if not to grace. Decade by decade I have watched Europe recover from its wounds of war, endure and escape the traumas of Communism, regain its assurance, and try to make something altogether new of itself. Some countries have risen to fresh distinction, some have been abased, some have gone on fighting that incessant civil war, but after centuries of violent rivalry, and successive attempts to make a comity of it by fair means or foul, at the end of the twentieth century Europe really is tentatively shuffling towards some kind of unity – the only adult objective for a mature community of neighbours. I myself long ago grew out of my British imperialism, found myself in Welshness, and came to realize that I had also been a European all the time; and although I have always been a solitary traveller, an onlooker, in Trieste now I no longer feel an outsider (still less, unfortunately, a child of rich parents).

  It is a great place for contemplative escape anyway, a great place for sitting on quaysides in the sunshine, thinking about history and toying with the idea of writing essays. I feed upon the city’s pungent blend of the pompous, the creative, the raffish, the significant and the melancholy, and see in it always the shade of Browning’s elusive Waring – ‘What’s become of Waring/ Since he gave us all the slip?’ For Waring showed up, as you may remember, wearing a wide straw hat in the stern-sheets of a boat in the Bay of Trieste: somewhere beyond the Molo Audace, I like to suppose, out there towards Miramare, bounding beneath a lateen sail ‘Into the rosy and golden half/O’ the sky’.

  1

  HOLY SYMPTOMS

  *

  High above the Molo Audace, at the summit of Trieste, the cathedral of San Giusto stands beside a castle on the top of a hill. It is dedicated to St Justin, but is equally devoted to the well-known Roman martyr Sergius, because at the very moment when he was decapitated for the faith in Syria, in the fourth century A D, a halberd fell out of the skies into Trieste, and has been preserved in the city ever since, besides appearing on the civic coat of arms. The view from San Giusto’s campanile is magnificent – a grand panorama of sea and mountain, city, port and suburb, looking south and east to Croatia and Slovenia, north towards Austria, westward across the gulf to Venice. Such a noble prospect sets one thinking about a definition of Europe.

  I did not think much about definitions when I first came here. I thought of Europe simply as ‘abroad’. The rest of the world seemed on the whole rather less foreign, and huge swathes of it were actually British. Fifty years later, defining the continent is much less simple for me. I take it to end at the frontiers of Turkey and the old Soviet Union, but that is a matter of prejudice or convenience. It is an invented place anyway. Geographically it is no more than a peninsula protruding from the land mass of Asia, with attendant islands and archipelagos. Culturally it has always been a shifting confusion of languages, peoples and traditions. Politically it is a movable feast: of the thirty-five sovereign States in my idea of Europe, nine have been created or resurrected during my half-century. Sweden was not considered a proper European country until the seventeenth century. Greece, for all its classical pedigree, was hardly a part of Europe until it gained its independence from the Turks. Spain often feels, as Auden once said, as though it is ‘tacked on to the bottom of Europe’. Within living memory people in northern Bulgaria called going to Vienna ‘going to Europe’, and British people to this day say they are visiting Europe when they cross the English Channel. It seems to me that down the centuries only religion has given the continent any lasting common identity.

  Judaism has sometimes been powerful in Europe; the threat and presence of Islam has crucially affected its history; but paganism and Christianity have been the continent’s universal defining factors, and the one long ago mastered the other. ‘Populus et christianitas una est,’ declared the Emperor Charles the Bald in the ninth century; nine centuries later the Treaty of Utrecht was still talking about a ‘Republica Christiana’; Gladstone thought the Concert of Europe symbolical of Christian unity. Europe and Christendom were synonymous, and even now, if you happened to fall from outer space anywhere in Europe, somewhere in sight there would probably be a steeple, a dome, a belfry-tower or the silhouetted mass of a monastery. But God knows the Christian temples raise their crosses to heaven in very different styles and tones of voice, and looking down at Trieste from its cathedral tower we can see for ourselves the bewildering variety of the faith. The domed neoclassical church down there, presiding over a canal full of boats, is the Roman Catholic church of Sant Antonio Taumaturgo – St Antony the Wonder-Worker. The one with the two towers is the Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolò. With a street map in our hands we may be able to place the prett
y little Anglican Christ Church classically pedimented, and the Evangelical church with its tall neo-Gothic steeple, and the seventeenth-century Jesuit church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the eleventh-century church of San Silvestro where the Waldensians worship, and the big Serbian Orthodox church with a Byzantine dome; and there is a Benedictine church down there, and a Franciscan church, and the former church of the Armenian fathers, where they now have Catholic services in German, and a Methodist chapel somewhere, and the neat little private church that the crooked millionaire Pasquale Revoltella built as a mausoleum for his mother and himself. In the autumn of 1995 I came up here to the cathedral with a television crew, in search of material. It turned out to be the festival day of St Sergius, and there on an altar was displayed the miraculous halberd, with policemen guarding it, and a mighty choir singing, and priests in golden vestments processing all around.

  And that’s just the Christians! There were religions in Europe long before Christ, pagan beliefs of many kinds, cults of the Greeks and Romans which have entered all our myths – and even before them, and far more compelling for me, the misty megalithic religion, which seems to have been as widespread as European Christianity would ever be, and probably longer lasting. Looking back upon my half-century of Europe, then, trying to give shape to my responses from my vantage point in space and time, I recall first a few random and decidedly mixed symptoms of its sanctity.