At long last, I found an old and much used edition of Vladimir Nazor’s Veli Jože, which was published together with four more of his stories.[1] The book is on the small side, but the only literary piece that features Motovun quite prominently nonetheless takes only seventy pages, or about a half of the entire volume. I was in for a big surprise, though, when I started reading the book about the Slavic giant and the Venetian masters of the medieval town on top of an Istrian hill. Two haughty Venetians come across Big Joe right in the middle of the Motovun Forest. One of them is stupefied at the sight: “Homo speluncae!”[2] The other, who knows the giant, replies most tersely in the Venetian dialect: “Schiavone.”[3] That is, a Slav, which is indistinguishable from a slave. But the felicitous association of Slavs and cavemen delighted me at once. My vision of posthistory fits Nazor’s story pretty well. Cavemen will inherit Motovun sooner or later, no doubt, and many of them will be of Slavic origin, to be sure. Ah, the future is bright!

Footnotes

1. Beograd: Rad, 1964.

2. Op. cit., p. 5.

3. Loc. cit.