Ibis redibisnunquam peribis

A Story of Caves, Latin Grammar Tricks, an Egyptian God, Frescoes, and a Bird.

Slovenia is a country of many holes. More than 60 % of its area (that is just over 20.000 square kilometers) is limestone karst — even the word karst comes from slovene word Kras. Naturally, there are a lot of caves in Slovenia.

One of those more-than-8.000 registered caves there is the so-called Najdena jama (“New-found cave”), an important cave in the watershed of one of Europe’s most bizarre river of seven names — Ljubljanica.

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Najdena is a rather nice, epiphreatic maze of fossil tunnels and galeries, full of mud and dripstone and lakes and stalactites. Inside the cave there are some pitches where an aspiring spelunker needs a rope (a couple of meters deep and totally not like the deepest, world-record holding 603 meters drop in the cave Vrtiglavica, also in Slovenia).

On the dripstone-covered wall on the top of the second drop, just beside the anchor point, there is an inscription written in acetylene black of a carbide lamp:

IBIS REDIBIS NON MORIERIS IN BELLO

Thus spake the Oracle of Dodona, second only to the one in Delphi (nevermind it should be in greek, that the oracle probably never said it and that the correct latin is Ibis redibis nunquam per bella peribis.)

The cryptic sentence is a short reminder of the importance of commas (the Oracle of Dodona obviously stands at the beginning of the long line of grammar nazis), as you can put the commas in optimistically (Ibis, redibis, nunquam per bella peribis — you go, you come back, you don’t perish in the war) or realistically (Ibis, redibis nunquam, per bella peribis: you go, you don’t come back, you perish in the war).

However, we ar not to dwell in latin grammar games — or caves for that matter. The main topic of this article is a bird. The one that the Ancients called hîb and scribbled it hieroglyphically like this:

This bird is a symbol of God — Scribe of Ma’at in the Company of the Gods, Lord of Divine Words, Judge of the Two Combatant Gods, Judge of the Rekhekhui, the pacifier of the Gods, who Dwelleth in Unnu, the Great God in the Temple of Abtiti, Twice Great, Thrice Great, and Three Times Great, Great.

Of Thoth.

Thoth, the bird-headed guy on the right.

Bird of Thoth — hîb — is the sacred Ibis. And there are interesting footprints of this bird-of-god that one can follow back to the 15th century and to the very place the word karst was born: to Slovenia — specifically, to Podgorski kras.

Podgorski kras (lit. Under-the-mountain karst, for it is situated just below the 1.028 m high peak of Slavnik) is a peculiar, savannah-like plain save for an occasional planted forest of black pine (Pinus nigra). On the southern border the plain drops almost two hundred meters into the valley of Rizana river. These cliffs — part of the Karst ridge — once formed a border between the Republic of Venice and the Austrian empire. They are guarded by crumbling stone turrets and fortified churches that stood in the path of plundering and pillaging Ottomans, blocking the way to the Adriatic coast. Today it is a hiking, rock-climbing and mountain-biking area, extremely pleasant and rather forgotten.

In times past Podgorski karst did not resemble this barren, windswept landscape: it was covered in plush, moist and dark oak forests, home to many wild animals, including bears, wolfs, and large birds. In hidden valleys far from the troddened paths one can stumble upon a solitary giant oak or two, majestic remnants of a different era, each woody witness many centuries old.

However, most of the trees are long gone; we can only contemplate today as Marvin did, laying beneath the familiar green sky: “Did not the giant oak trees still migrate each year to the south?” — to conclude that the fabulous oaks of Podgorski kras obviously have migrated, but never came back.

Many of those oaks still have a job today, as pillars on which the spectacular ciy of Venice rests, and even more of them fell victim to the venetian navy’s insatiable need for timber. Greed of La Serenissima remains written in the collective memory of Karst as the culprit, responsible for the destruction of their oak paradise.

(However, eyes are now turning to another culprit, even more numerous — if more gentle — than the greedy subjects of the Lion of St Mark: flocks of sheep that devoured everything and turned forests into grasslands, until Austrian authorities outlawed free grazing in the 19th century.)

There is a nice little village in a valley under the cliffs, beneath the plains of ex-oak-forests. A black plague visited this village in the 15th century and killed everyone save two girls — the reason behind the fact that until a couple of decades back only two surnames were present there. When Yersinia pestis finally left, the villagers defiantly built a church, dedicated it to The Holy Trinity (who is — are? — good against plague), painted its inner walls buon fresco — and enclosed it with a large stone wall when the hordes of Turks invaded.

Walled church of the Holy Trinity
beneath the cliffs of Karst ridge

The village is called Hrastovlje. Even the name evokes long-gone oak forests (oak is hrast in slovene).

The church is actually quite famous for its frescoes. Somehow the medieval paintings ended up plastered, and they were rediscovered in nearly pristine condition almost 500 years later, in 1949. The frescoes were commisioned by Tomo Vrhovic of Kubed and painted by Janez (John) of Kastav, as the inscription on the wall attests: Hoc opus fierit fecit Tomic Vrchovich de [Cubitum], magister Johannes de Castua pinxit.

The top spot goes to fascinately executed Danse Macabre — Dance of Death, a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one’s station in life, death unites us all. The Danse Macabre consists of the Death herself summoning people from all walks of life to dance along, starting with a pope and followed by a king and a queen, a cardinal, a bishop and a monk, a medic (trying to get away with his medicine), a banker (bribing the skeleton in vain), a soldier, a beggar, and a child. All accompanied — helped — by skeletons on their inevitable path from the cradle to the grave. An aptly chosen motif for a village ravaged by plague.

Incidentally, John of Kastav had a brother, Vincent of Kastav, a painter himself — and also a lover of totentanz: he painted one in the church of St Mary of Skriline, near Beram, Istria; seems that the dancing Death runs in the family.

(The merry skeletons of Danse Macabre of Hrastovlje feature prominently in this Laibach video)

The rest of the frescoes are equally impressive. Composed as a true comic book for illiterate medieval folk, they show the story of Creation, the passion of Christ, the life of Saints, the whole calendar and various professions.

John of Kastav was a keen observer of the local landscape: the simple village with its houses of stone, a nice little church, the wild cliffs above, the dark, lush oak forests with abundant wildlife … so he used all that in his paintings.

These are three panels from the Adam and Eve story. On the left, Eve accepts the Forbidden Fruit from the Snake; in the middle, God reacts swiftly and banishes the sweet-toothed couple from the Garden of Eden; on the left, Adam performs hard work and Eve breastfeeds Cain and Abel.

But look at the flora in the Paradise: the giant oak trees of Podgorski kras. Johannes painted them so intricately that one can imagine the Forbidden Fruit actually being an acorn (and, to carry this further, the Snake being a wild sow). There is even a Greenpeace touch (in 1490!): the trees in the Garden of Eden are standing tall and green, yet the ones around the humble dwelling of Adam’s family (east of Eden?) are cut down. Only stumps of sorrow remain in John’s pictorial lamentation of overlogging.

John of Kastav was equally fascinated by some faunal specimens. Specifically, by a strange and rather large bird nesting in the cliffs above Hrastovlje; a black-and-blue feathered bird with a long, curved red beak, standing on strong stumpy legs with fearsome claws. A truly ugly beast.

As the oak forests were slowly but surely disappearing under the venetian axe, this creature was disappearing too. Habitat destruction. And just before it went extinct, John painted it on the church wall:

Somehow everyone managed to forget that this is the bird the ancient Egyptians held sacred, for it is actually hîb, ibis, splendid and brilliant bird of Thoth. Northern bald ibis, to be exact — or, as Linné named it, Geronticus eremita (in slovene, the bird’s name is klavzar). People cluelessly kept stealing its eggs, destroying its habitat and hunting it mercilessly. Even the decree of archbishop Leonhard of Salzburg (who, by the way, had one of the funniest coat-of-arms) that forbode hunting ibises, issued in 1504 and making ibis one of the first protected species in the world, did not help.

Not more than a couple of decades after John painted it, the ibis sadly and completely dissapeared from Karst ridge (and from (almost) everywhere). It became the Slovenian Dodo — this painting was all that was left from it, and even the painting was covered with whitewash.

For centuries, the Ibis was gone.

Then the things changed. Fifteen years ago the attention of naturalists turned to this critically endangered bird, Geronticus eremita. Some fledgeling flocks were found in Anatolia, Syria, Egypt — of course! — and Morocco. Elaborate preservation and reintroduction schemes were put in motion in Italy, Switzerland and Austria (even using ultralight aircraft to guide the birds to their migration paths). The sacred companion of Thoth was slowly but surely making a comeback.

And then one day … on the fields near Postojna, less than 30 kilometers as the bird flies from Hrastovlje … this creature landed:

Took it almost 500 years, but it is back. Ibis, the favourite bird of Thoth — and of John of Kastav — is back.

Now we can write down the latin grammar trick again — IBIS REDIBIS NUNQUAM PERIBIS — and finally place the commas correctly:

IBIS, REDIBIS, NUNQUAM PERIBIS!

Ibis, it came back, and is extinct no more.

p. s.

It seems ibis can also be found painted on the walls of the church of St.Helen in Gradišče near Divača; again by Janez of Kastav (he must’ve been a true fan of the bird!), a couple of years before he did the frescoes in Hrastovlje.