”Maybe one day they will institute how the impulses of remembering and forgetting rhythmically equate history. In this game of antithesis and thesis the nineteenth century is a realistic victim of the twentieth century. Because the only thing that the 20th century worked on with its full effort and all its willpower was to forget. The forgetting of former systems of sacraments, former meanings, former values.”
THE PICTORIAL TRAVELOGUES OF TONI FRANONVIĆ- THE REFLEXTION OF MEXICO ON THE ADRIATIC
GARDENS OF BLUE AGAVE
IL CASTELLO DI MIRAMARE NEXT TO TRIESTE, THE LOKRUM SUMMER RESIDENCE IN FRONT OF DUBROVNIK, CASTILLO DE CHAPULTEPEC, LA CASA BORDA AND THE MISTERIOUS LA CASA DEL OLVIDO IN CUERNAVACA AS WELL AS THE «PALMIŽANA CASTLE« ON SAINT CLEMENT, ARE PLACES OF PILGRIMAGE FOR TONI FRANOVIĆ FROM ZAGREB
These gardens of palaces, today world-known botanical parks, have been sacred places for Franović for a decade that he regularly goes about and lives in them for months. He studies them, paints.
He conveys their sheen coloring onto hundreds of canvases always anew and never complete... Somewhere they are summer études in the most rapturous sunny colors: yellow, orange, red, tender or ardent pink. And then some are also melancholic dawns or purple evenings, turquoise dark blue-black planes of sundown and the upcoming night, like a yearning nocturne, always in mole.
The abovementioned gardens are very near and close to us and at the same time very far, but they are also prominent exotic habitats of vegetation of the most marvelous forms, colors and blossom, which we visited or read about.
What we might have not known is- all these gardens were created by credit and by influence of the most charismatic figure of the world’s global historic scene, the archduke Maximilian of Habsburg. He was born in 1832 in the majestic castle of Schoenbrunn in Vienna. Unfortunately, he was born as the second son, as the younger brother of the future Emperor, Franz Joseph. Fate has destined him to a lead a life in shadow, though he was taller, handsomer, more attractive, and more fun than his kingly brother. Through the courts of the Austro-Hungarians they were whispering that in Maximilian there was French blood, perilous blood of Napoleon Bonaparte, that he in fact was the fruit of a forbidden love of the archduchess Sophia with the prince of Reichstadt- Napoleon II., the son of Napoleon Bonaparte and his second, Austrian wife Maria Louise, a cowardly egg in the great Habsburg monarchy. His supposed father, the male heir of Napoleon Bonaparte, was in exile in Vienna, born in 1811 and dead already in 1832. Hence, not even 21 years old. They said that he was ill, but who knows... Maybe he was poisoned, maybe killed, because Europe has still not recuperated from the bloody conquering of the French corporal, later a Tsar, his father. But castles keep their secrets.
LA PALOMA BLANCA
The possibility that a rival French blood was flowing through the veins of his younger brother disturbed Franz Joseph, who was not really an adored emperor, so he kept Maximilian as far as he could from the court in Vienna. He gave him titles and assignments and took them away without notice. He appointed him as governor in Italy and Admiral of the Habsburg fleet so he could, on July 27th 1857, marry the single daughter of the Belgian king Leopold, Charlotte, who has not yet turned 17 years and was one of the wealthiest and prettiest princesses in Europe. With her dowry, the groom, who was 25 years old, built the castle of his dreams from white stone on a cliff surrounded by the sea.
Beautiful, young, wealthy... the world was at their feet, though without a crown on their heads, which the archduchess missed most. Maximilian was left without many choices. With an ambitious wife, who wanted power, it was no surprise that this dreamer, romantic and adventurer, as he was, had to engage into his Mexican adventure, which quickly ended up fatal for him. The coloring of wonders, a vexed past, a wild and exotic beauty of this far country enchanted him so much that he could not see the obvious facts clearly- a poor country in bloody civil war, where numerous armies fought for profit, and the people rebelled following their hero, Juarez, because they could not exist in such misery and squalor anymore. Where did this gullibility, unreality end, where did this greed of the spoiled and the, by their own perception, untouchable begin?
Without Charlotte’s persuasion Maximilian might have lived in his castles and made them even more splendid, toured the globe, built an enviable scientific career, constructed palaces around the world, created astonishing botanical gardens, lived wealthy and calmly until a long peaceful old age. Along with preludes and operas he would also listen to his favorite song La Paloma, which thanks to his tragic destiny has become one of the most performed songs in the world and has been playing over 140 years on all the continents. Accepting hastily this exotic kingdom and as he tried to convince himself, ”at the wish of the Mexican people”, he also accepted the war which he was not mature for and in which the interests of the French, the Americans, the wealthy Mexicans and poor rebels collided. All the European monarchies were equally involved in his inauguration, which was not favored by the people of Mexico, as they were involved with his tragic death. As was his closest family, who, for the most diverse incentives- easily sacrificed him.
His spouse Charlotte sought help in vain across the royal courts of Europe. ”Let her Majesty rid herself of all the illusions”, commissioned Napoleon III to her, and the Pope Pious IX promised her- a prayer for their soul. This turned her to madness, so she outlived her murdered husband for 60 years, believing he was still the ruler of Mexico.
Maximilian was shot only three years after his pompous and majestic entrance into Mexico City, in May of 1864.
Standing on the balcony of the immense palace at the Zóccalo plaza of the Mexican capital the young couple- probably captivated by the endless firework- rebuffed all their doubts and threw themselves lustily into their new life, into their new kingdom... A kingly life of short duration. They ran into a conglomerate of all possible impossibilities. When he grasped the absurdity of his fate they ordered him to stay- in the name of honor. To sacrifice himself in the name of tradition. In his splendid uniform he handed out florins to the men that were going to kill him. It is said that he asked that they play La Paloma.
“Longing takes me into the blue beyond, below me the sea, above me the night and the stars, in front of me life. So the wind of life carries me, do not cry my child, tears are in vain, once the end will come....”
Theatrical. As if the curtain would drop, the bullets were phony, and the hero would rise and go out onto the stage accompanied by the applause of the audience. There was no applause. Only a flash of salvo fired with such fury that his uniform caught fire.
He died overlooking the contours of the gardens of blue agave. He fell face down towards the ground. One officer turned the deformed body that was still squirming, hoisted his sword and pierced his heart. It was the 17th of June 1867, on the mound Queretaro’s Cello de la Campanas, the Hill of the Bells, overgrown with dry cactus trunks. Long ago he wrote in his verses: ”I will die on a mound, auf einem Berge will Ich sterben”...
He loved – “nightingales, hummingbirds, parrots, nature in its wildest forms, the low, wild boar inhabited coast of Albania, sunny Spain and, above all, Mato, the last vestal region of Brasil. No- above all he loved the sea, that endless surface with its magic dawns and nights dressed with stars. Miramar, the view of the sea, he named his, as wonderful as a dream, castle on the cliffs of the bay of Trieste. (C.M. Mayo)
“Ein Wind weht von Süd und zieht mich hinaus auf die See. /Mein Kind sei nicht traurig, tut auch der Abschied weh. Mein Herz geht an Bord und fort muß die Reise gehen /Dein Schmerz wird vergehen und schön wird das Wiedersehen
Mich trägt die Sehnsucht fort in die blaue Ferne.
Unter mir Meer und über mir Nacht und Sterne./Vor mir die Welt.
So treibt mich der Wind des Lebens./Weine nicht, mein Kind, die Tränen sind vergebens./
La Paloma - ohe!
Einmal muß es vorbei sein./Nur Erinn'rung an Stunden der Liebe bleibt noch an Land zurück./Meine Braut ist die See,/ und ihr kann ich nur treu sein.
Wenn der Sturmwind sein Lied singt, /dann winkt mir der großen Freiheit Glück.
La Paloma - ohe.......”
La Paloma – The dove, sweetened music, heart ripping, habanera... a tall young man in a splendid uniform, in blood... It was strictly forbidden to play that song on Austrian ships. Out of piety for the dead emperor.
Maximilian’s peril shocked the whole world. It meant the end of the colonial era in Latin America that was begun by Carl V of Habsburg.
COLLECTOR OF CONTINENTS
“The world today is not afflicted by the sensational and tragic death of Maximilian but by the vast scale of his scientific interests and merit.
Maximilian’ politics and Maximilian’s fate have only been the work of a collector who gathered continents as one would butterflies or other scientific samples and who conquered empires so he could ”deepen history for a few centuries”.
Lokrum was for him a piece of territory that challenged him with its beauty of nature and depth of time: and besides that every island has the girth of an empire.
In any case, since 1850 when he started cruising along the Adriatic, the Austrian archduke would note many of our places and became an important segment of their history. The unforgettable trip of the Novarov frigate, that under Maximilian’s spur united the globe with its scientific mission for two years, landed in fact in Gruž.
The tugboat Lucia brought the frigate into Gruž on August 21st 1859 from the Messina Channel, and there, on August 22nd they met with the corvette Dandolo and the steam yacht Fantasia on which Maximilian waited with Charlotte. The big banquet that was being held on Dandolo that evening certainly also belongs in the history books on Dubrovnik”, writes in her work ”Of Lokrum in Central Europe” dr. Željka Čorak
Once Maximilian arrived on Lokrum he immediately fell in love with the island in front of Dubrovnik. He inserted all his enthusiasm in its decoration and the construction of the palace as well as the creation of the botanical garden. Similar to his love for the Miramare.
The Miramare is a work ”of a cultivated and decisive client, who was not just satisfied by foggy denotations, but entered into the details of the organization of ground plans, into the shaping of volumes, into the minutia of the equipment of interiors, and especially, who entered into the details of those architectural elements that had to suggest the character, ”status” of the object, his desired historical reminiscence”. (dr. Željka Čorak)
The Miramar library is enormous, overfilled with rare books, travelogues, scientific papers, it was there that Maximilian spent most of his time. His spouse would paint and play music. There he would write his travelogues, his scientific annotations, his poetry and prose.
His connection to the sea was most important above all. Maximilian took good care that the sea was visible from all the windows. The rooms in the castle were characterized by the sea: The Hall of the Roses of Wind, The Hall of Seagulls. His ”naval” working room, his bedroom, were all shaped like cabins on a frigate.
“Such a transposal of space from a ‘floating’ into a ‘static’ context stems from an exceeding faith in the power of metaphor. It is sufficient to say ‘like’ so that something is ‘indeed’. Maximilian’s whim can be compared to, in harmless continuity, Marie Antoinette’s village, but he still pushes the limit of play and comes to the verge where the convention of reality starts to sway.
The other fact that needs to be noted is that no authentic glass in the castle Miramare is white, it does not let natural light through. All of them have a slight breath of yellow or even purple color- the color of dawn or dusk. That again is a deviation of the realistic convention of time passing. Not only that one can choose and stop space but one can also choose and stop time
Dawn and dusk, however, are moments of that dubious relationship between lightness and darkness, when one does not know in which direction it will go. These favored moments of fantasy, they are in a symbolic resistance to the natural laws at the castle Miramare, enjoying their whole-day reign.”
Isn’t that the role of an artist- to take up space- stop time?
A SWAN DIVE INTO THE ABYSS OF THE FUTURE- MAGICAL OASIS
CASTILLO DE CHAPULTEPEC, LA CASA BORDA, LA CASA DE LA INDIA BONITA
The Mexican residences of Maximilian, where the interiors he adorned with exquisite articles of artistic tradition from European artists and craftsmen, and its gardens in which he precisely planted exotics from the whole world, are today the most visited tourist destinations in Mexico, the country that proclaimed him a traitor of the Mexican people, sentenced to death and executed him. But amidst his happiness because of a new hatch of gorgeous butterflies, hummingbirds, the new blossom of a rare flower, he would sign orders for executions, murders of every imprisoned rebel without a trial or the possibility for a pardon. He had solely his own frame of reality that he accepted, the rest was or was not happening somewhere outside of his time and space.
Castillo de Chapultepec on the Hill of Locusts is situated at 2323 meters above sea level, amidst a forest, and Maximilian would invite the best architects from Europe and Mexico to refurbish the structure into a lavish castle. They planted a garden on the roof. Plants were coming from the most exotic and the furthest parts of the Earth under the watchful eye of the most influential botanists and the emperor himself. On the way to the center of town the emperor ordered a majestic boulevard to be built, Paseo de la Emperatriz which serves its purpose until today. Of course, under another name.
“From the terraces of the castle, even when the day is overcast with smog, the view is majestic. In Maximilian’s time the sky was blue and the slopes of the volcano Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl were covered with snow and agleam with sun.”
When he would walk the terraces of the palace, an enormous breadth of green would spread in front of him... Like an emerald billow of the sea. Touched by such beauty he used to say that his Mexican castle should be renamed- it should be called, like his beloved palace Miramare- into Mirevalle.
But still, often he would depart the castle Chapultepec and leave for his other residence in La Casa Borda in Cuernevaca. Today it is an hour and a half drive from Mexico City, back then it took the emperor two whole days of travel in his picturesque train.
“The train was made up of a dozen snow-white mules, all of them perfectly identical in stature and dressed with blue decorations. The coachman, footmen and lackeys were all outfitted as charros in suits of suede with silver buttons, and wearing very wide gray sombreros. This train pleased Maximilian very much and whenever we went to Cuernavaca or returned, it was something to see the way the Indians would stop and admire that train of white mules that passed by like an exhalation”, reported the empress Charlotte to the French empress Eugenie.
The picturesque white ”train” was escorted by troops of soldiers. Blood was spilled all around.
Cuernevaca is called the end of eternal spring because the temperature there is always around 22 C. It is also called the area with trees because the pleasant climate soothes vegetation that is very torrential. Maximilian’s residence, which at that time was already a botanical garden La Casa Borda, gained a more intense gleam from day to day. It is there that the emperor and his wife held grand, lavish celebrations and kept cultivating their residential interiors and exteriors.
He constructs, adorns, from around the World he imports furniture, decorations, plants, and brings botanists, gardeners, architects, artists... All around there is a bloody combat. ”The emperor, who has joined me here, enjoys Cuernavaca very much because here he can work in peace. For him it is Plombières or Biarritz..."
In the cool shade of palms, bougainvilleas and giant fern, as well as an enormous number of other trees and plants, it is truly pleasant here. One can be convinced of that if they take a walk through the garden... I did- and I still remember. Birds always singing, the local and inhabited ones. Hummingbirds, nightingales, peacocks, pheasants... numerous fountains, ponds, groves...
In such an overfilled garden of the most rare orchids, Maximilian built one more house, just for himself, and ”forgot” the chambers of his wife. That is why people call it the house of oblivion- La Casa el Olvido.
Maximilian, however, did not forget to build another summerhouse for his Indian companion, his prettiest flower... He spent more time there than in his official residence. The house has been called La Casa de la India Bonita. There is a museum there right now. On the wall there is a painting of the tall emperor and his mistress.
What did the empress have to say about that romance? It was said that the spouses slept in separate beds already in the romantic palace of dreams- Miramare. The young Belgian princess wanted a crown and power while the young archduke saw himself more of a Indiana Jones character: to live in intervals of silence and studying in his enormous library with a view of the sea and walking through gorgeous aromatic alleys, and then in turn living a life filled with risky and life-threatening expeditions through unexplored and mysterious regions of the World, finding something new and important to improve Western civilization. Like his exploration of the rainforests in Brasil.
It is said that the young empress went to get help in Europe, pregnant, and that she bore him a son, though the father was supposedly Baron Van der Smissen, but what is real and what not... who knows. Numerous secrets have been buried forever in the ”basements” of all European monarchies. It is known for sure that this refusal of help for her and her husband completely mentally crushed her. A curious couple like curious plants- she who’s alive, but with a dead spirit, him dead, but with a live spirit which for a long time inhabited European courts, changed deals, broke relations, interrupted diplomatic connections.
ACROSS THE LAKE OF OBLIVION
He himself remained a big mystery. Smart, virtuous in estimates, subtle- and then- the decision to leave for Mexico. Was he that desperate- a pompous ostrich with its head in the sand over which there was the thudding of guns?
When he saw that his Mexican adventure was turning into a fatal farce, he could have abdicated, he could have run away or sail away on his frigate Novara alive and well. Live luxuriously as an ex-emperor, of which there were quite a few at that time ”but he decided just when he was arriving to Vera Cruz, to return. In his mind, in his own heart Maximilian of Habsburg was a brave knight, the Emperor of Mexico,” wrote the novelist Sara Yorke Stevenson who at that time lived in Mexico.
Was he just listening to his wife and mother’s stories of honor and duty? Or did he himself create history, that one thing that would remain long after he is gone, the same way as when he painstakingly built the Miramare for future visitors, who would based on what they see judge the one who left it for them.
“Yo soy Mexicano” – I am Mexican. "Mexicans, may my blood be the last to be spilled for the welfare of the country; and if it should be necessary that its sons should still shed theirs, may it flow for its good, but never by treason. Long live independence! Long live Mexico!" - "Que me sangre sea la ultima que se derrame en sacrificio a la patria;y si fuese necessario algunos de sus hijos, sea para el bien de la nacion, y nunca en traicion de ella." There are also other versions of his last words before the shooting, but these have been said immediately after that tragic event by the Mexican dr. Reyes, who witnessed the execution so they seem most plausible.
In that morning, so long, long ago, on the day of his death, in front of 3000 soldiers, a young emperor uttered his last proud words of love for the country he never understood and which rejected him.
“When we saw how well he could die, we forgot that he was no leader.”
“ Before the figure of Maximilian of Austria, from the time when he took command of his little army and resolved to stand for better or worse by those who had remained faithful to his fallen fortunes, all true-hearted men must bow with respect. From this time forth his words and acts were noble; and in his attitude at this supreme moment, his incapacity as a chief executive, his moral and intellectual limitations as a man, are overlooked. We forget that he was no leader when we see how well he could die “, another quote of Sara Yorke Stevenson.
Instead of a live, packed with energy and completely ready for new world explorations and exciting adventures, captain Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, the great winner of the Battle of Vis (1866), after numerous diplomatic negotiations, carried the deformed body of the emperor to be buried in the family tomb.
“ A swan dive into the abyss of the future.”, that is how the historic novel about the Mexican emperor ends in the “ From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion.” The trip over the Lake of Oblivion was undertaken also by an other writer C.M. Mayo, for which she won numerous prestigious awards.
People take pilgrimages from all over the world to see Maximilian’s Mexican gardens for their sheer natural beauty and because of the tragic death of its young emperor. Today he becomes an important economic factor for Mexico with his charismatic personality.
THE CURSE OF THE BENEDICTINES
On the island of Lokrum many things also ended up in the ”lake of oblivion”.
“One of the monuments of culture that places Dubrovnik on the new map of Europe is Maximilian’s summer residence on the island of Lokrum. Maximilian’s summerhouse, together with the pertaining sentry box and surrounding cultivated scenery, is a first class monument of historic architecture not only for the region of Dubrovnik but for Croatia as well, and according to its ”valence” it belongs among the top monuments of culture of the XIX century in Europe”, writes dr. Željka Čorak.
Not even in his far outside-of-Europe empire, in which he had to perform other duties, bloody wars and executions, Maximilian did not forget his summer residence in front of Dubrovnik, and sought for it new, more cunning and more attractive constructional solutions. And he sought that from the most acclaimed names in the architectural world, which were not available to us at that time.
“There is a water-color from 1867- a birds’ eye point of view of the complex with the signature of the architect Segenschmidt. Today’s summerhouse almost perfectly matches one (small) part of that enormous planned complex, which covered and overgrew the whole area of the former monastery. It is possible to presume that Segenschmidt, in the whole of the project, adapted himself to the already built part on which the investor obviously participated personally. ” (dr. Ž. Čorak)
After World War II the Lokrum garden was in a state of vegetation, better said it was dying. It survived partially due to the love and effort of the botanist dr. sci. Lav Rajevski, born in 1910 in Izmail, Besarabia. His work and life has yet to be studied more proper... The Lokrum garden was attained to also by the eminent Dubrovnik landscape architect dr. sci. Bruno Sišić but all of that is too little as such an international complex deserves.
And then again war, fire, burnt handwritings and documents. Less and less pictures of the past. Nobody can really tell the story of the voyage.
Lokrum has all the ingredients to become a world Mecca. A charismatic figure like the Mexican emperor, a beautiful castle, an overgrown park and- its curse.
The legend of the curse of the Benedictines enunciated by the monks when they were displaced from their island for all the future owners and pleasure seekers of this divine scenery, the arrival of the ones with good or bad karma, real gifts or the Danaos’ ones, was terrible.
“Let anyone be cursed whosoever disembarks on Lokrum for his own pleasure.”
Because of an order of a French general, the members of the aristocratic family Gozza, Pozza and Sorgo had to close down the Benedictine monastery on Lokrum, which was there since 1023 and chased away the Benedictines and forbid them to ever return. The monks heard the order, served their last mass at the church of Saint Mary, began a night procession with burning candles that they turned toward the ground. The wax dripped onto the ground whilst they repeated their horrible curse walking around the interior of the island.
Legend has it that their curse soon came to fruition. One of the three Dubrovnik aristocrats jumped out of the window, the other disappeared in the sea while the third was murdered at the hand of his servant. Captain Tomašević became the owner of Lokrum but soon he went bankrupt and sold the island to an enthusiast and dreamer, the archduke Maximilian, who saw his second home there...
The ship Triton exploded of the shores of Lokrum. Befitting his duty as the chief of the Habsburg monarchy’s fleet, Maximilian came in 1859 to bless the souls of the deceased sailors
So he set foot on that cursed ground. He saw the beauty of its nature, the remains of the monastery from the 11th century he was impressed with the silence and the thick aromatic forest. The scents. After only one night spent in a small cell of the monastery- he decided to buy Lokrum.
As the owner of this new Eden he began planting palm trees, cypress, aloe, oleander, orange and lemon, lilies and roses, eucalyptus- and agave. He immigrated colonies of canaries, parrots, peacocks, imported vanilla and Indian fig. He would read Heine, played the piano together with his young wife long into the night. They would write to their friends that they were the happiest couple on earth. Their fate is known to us.
Lokrum was offered on the market but for a long time there were no interested buyers. The new buyer, the count of Polis, Dujmović from Poljica, quickly succumbed to a complete financial ruin. And so it went until the unfortunate Rudolph, the only son of king Franz Joseph, who spent romantic evenings with his wife Stephanie, enjoying its beauty but his heart was drawn towards the gorgeous Maria Večera.
Soon the world was shocked by the sensational news of the suicide of the two lovers in Mayerling, a tragedy that has never been completely unveiled.
It is said that the Queen Elizabeth, the popular Sissi, hearing of the curse, was intent on returning the island back to the Benedictines. She came to Lokrum when she was returning from Corfu. The Benedictines rejected her offer. As she was keen not to lose any more family members, she lost two already, she gave it to the city of Dubrovnik under the condition that anyone of the Austrian royal family could get it returned once they desired it.
Elizabeth, the princess of Windischgratz, wanted it. Both the Elizabeth had the same unfortunate fate. Queen Elizabeth was killed accidentally by the Italian anarchist Luigi Luccheni while the princess shot at a dancer, the lover of her husband in a nightclub in Prague.
The Habsburgs lost their throne after 700 years.
And so on, we could account numerous stories that happened on and around Lokrum. Tragic love stories, fatal events among the servants, unexplained disappearances- it all completed the mystery of this island, which always anew kept attracting with its specificity and beauty. A curse even stronger than the- Pharaon’s.
Dr. Marko Margaritoni wrote of the Lokrum and Dubrovnik secrets in his interesting book ”Dubrovnik- between history and legend”.
Vengeful Benedictines, shipwreck of Richard the Lionheart, gorgeous Sissi, the romantic and suicidal murderer Rudolph and the beautiful Marija Večera are just names that fill our world history and take us to the scene of events on the fates of the most famous and the wealthiest. And always anew the charismatic emperor Maximilian with his Lokrum palace and garden, which were created by the greatest architectural and building wizards of the XIX century.
The beautiful and ambitious Charlotte, princess of Belgium, archduchess of Habsburg, Mexican empress, was punished with insanity for 60 years after her pleasure on the island... It is said that at night, during a summer wind, one can hear her play...
“That the constructional value and meaning of Maximilian’s summerhouse in the history of our art and European art are not or should not be arguable- proves a whole new emersion in the study and valorization of European 19th century. What interests us in this case is to note the new attention Italy is dedicating to the Miramare Castle and the surrounding...
Why not grab what all of Europe is grabbing, what it is rediscovering, what is important again.
Why not expose the place where, in such a characteristic way, scientific history intertwines with the history of dreams and insanity?
Maximilian died at least two times.
Once from the bullets in Mexico, the second time when his and Charlotte’s bust experienced the Lokrum defenestration during our time. Somewhere in the sea, corroded by salt and overgrown with algae, from Historicism they became already history and that is why they are different from the figure of those ancient, authentic middle ages that the people of Maximilian’s time were so inspired by
Why don’t we, based on the exemplar of our closest and a little more distant neighbors- where the castles of Ludwid from Bavaria are visited by more than 3 million people annually- in a more precise way serve this legend that would feed the location, island and town.” (Željka Čorak)
Half a century of communist terror and a totalitarian state has destroyed historical values, cheapened work, killed work, killed people. Maximilian’s Lokrum refuge was pauperized, deprived of value. In the beautiful Hvar gallery people sit on wooden chairs surrounded by walls covered with Lesonit. Cheap plastic, all around. Where are those lavish grand chandeliers with thousands of crystal glassware? Where are the gilded mirrors that encompassed the space and multiplied it infinitely?
Where are the paintings, carpets, candlesticks, dishes, furniture, sculptures of all the castles, palaces, residencies...
“E QUINDI USCIMMO A RIVEDER LE STELLE” (Dante)
Maximilian brought another park to Croatia, that- although scientifically disorderly, uncultivated and non-symmetrical- because of its particularity, grandeur and beauty became a big Mecca for global nomads: the Palmižana garden of the Meneghello family on Saint Clement, the largest islet of the Hvar archipelago. Foreigners dub it among the prettiest of the World.
The idea of its creation was born on Lokrum in Maximilian’s park, its planting began over more than a hundred years ago. The old owners, the family Meneghello, began to green the rocky ground of their property with plantations of rosemary, olives, grapes and aromatics around 1800. But it was not until their heir, botanist Eugen Meneghello, born in 1876, who served in Dubrovnik, skillfully designed a park on the large property of more than three million square meters. Those were expert drawings, as it is suitable for a professor of project design and a professor of natural science, a lover of botany.
The site around the ”Palmižana castle”, in fact a simple one-story, elegant, stone-clad with purple mortar family summerhouse, built somewhere before 1820, was meant to be an exotic garden with flowers, cactuses, succulents, palms. On the more fertile parts it was intended to serve for the cultivation of grapevine, olives while the fields, meadows and sunnier parts served for lavender and aromatics.
The professor started to plant Mediterranean trees on these gargantuan areas of rocky terrain- jasmine, cypress, bearberry, laurel. And pine trees, for the shade. These exotics have been brought to him by his students, captains who came from far voyages from all over the world. He himself gathered them from Dubrovnik and Padova, probably also from Lokrum. In 1906 the professor started to plant one new, in these parts an unknown plant, tourism. He had an enormous wish for many other people to enjoy these spectacular gardens.
“From the foundation of his guesthouse he kept a Book of Guests from which it is clear that from the beginning Palmižana enjoyed the visit of very demanding travelers, mostly well-educated globetrotters, for whom it was not difficult to recognize that the countryside on Palmižana was not a fight against nature but a balance with it, that long walks with the professor were not calisthenics but real botanical actions, that fishing was the return to a lost civilization of ancient Greece and that hunting grey partridges and pheasants was conducted by Meneghello in the exact fashion as the chivalry from the middle ages...” (Slobodan Properov Novak)
A rifle enclosed in silver, like the sword, the family inherited from their ancestor Pierre Jerome Gaugiran, a pharmacist of Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to Hvar in 1807 and stayed there, and who passed upon the Meneghelllo family the until then unkown art of fractional distillation, so they soon opened a factory refining aromatic plants...
In 1859 the Habsburg archduke probably sailed along the Adriatic and used the calm bays of the Paklinski archipelago and dropped anchor there. Although the edifice Palmižana Castle was charted on the maps of the Austrian Lloyd, which were inscribed by Guiseppe Rieger in 1851, Maximilian probably did not know that at the same time on that island one Hvar-Venetian family produced more than half of the needs for aromatic plans and herbal essences for the Habsburg Empire.
On August 20th 1838 a ship connection was established between Trieste and Kotor. The largest shipping company, founded in 1838, employed an artist from Trieste to chart all ports and harbours, islands and the coast for the needs of the passengers- so the ” Panorama della costa e delle isole di Dalmazia nei viaggi dei piroscafi del Lloyd Austriaco Trieste 1850.” was created, which, although it was a small folded over booklet, when opened was ten meters long.
At that time the Meneghello family was wealthy, owners of a factory of aromatic plants that was the oldest and largest in south Europe on Saint Clement, ”Quintessenza”, the first pharmacy on Hvar, olive groves and numerous possessions all over the island of Hvar- they were the sole heirs of the Bervaldi family and two thirds of the Saint Clement island. They raised their children in Dubrovnik and Hvar, educated them in Vienna and Padova as professors, notaries and pharmacists...
Imbued by all the good ideas of the XIX century and strong cultural centers from around, professor Eugen wanted to repeat Maximilian’s garden on his estate on Palmižana. From Lokrum, from Padova and the whole world from the ships of his students, attendants of the Naval Academy, rare examples of exotic plants came to Palmižana and began to grow and multiply over the rocky Dalmatian ground.
His dreams were bluntly interrupted.
In 1947 the Communist rule seized most of his estate, petty, communist, new local power-lords destroyed the arduously raised garden on an islet without water. As a member of a family who worked and inherited this estate for centuries, as a follower of tradition, he was considered an enemy of the totalitarian regime, he was chased into death, hung...
His and his family’s cultural and scientific work, with which they indebted their community, were thrown into oblivion- everything remained solely in the hearts of his successors. They, although depleted, with continuous efforts try to regain their property, rescue the little that was left, enrich and preserve this high-grade garden. In constant fear, under constant siege.
Charisma, tragedy, the Palmižana garden of memories and the garden of oblivion.
Magical gardens of buried hopes and always newly awoken aspirations, garden of love, garden of death. Gardens of blue agave.
PALMIŽANA MERMAIDS- CREATURES FROM THE DEPTH IN SEARCH OF LIGHT
Wonderous mermaids, keepers of the amazing scenery of more amazing plants. Set up on pillars at the gates of nothing- not at the entrance nor at the exit of the estate, not at the beginning nor at the end of the garden, somewhere in the forest.
Heavy metal mermaids with tails made up of multicolored glass, each scale one glass painting which changes with the coming and going of the light, the walk of the sun, rays that pierce hundred year old pine trees. A confusing, an astounding experiment of Toni Franović: burning, painting, blowing, ripping glass surfaces, gluing, shaping in fire and heat, the point of melting and point of cooling, the transition into a hard state- with repeated shaping into a different form, color, thickness, into something completely other, which lives with the light and dies with darkness. Between the colors of dusk and dawn.
An entry into a completely new artistic domain.
The entrance into new domiciles and destinations that suddenly becomes seen and real. That feeling of unreal reality- or the feeling of real unreality. Like walking through the forest in the dark. The entrance into the garden of blue agave, into Maximilian’s charismatic thoughts, into the professor’s project and dream.
Intoxicating scents, intoxicating potions, aphrodisiacs, mild, powerful Opiates, deadly poisons. Gorgeous flowers. Rampant plants of spherical, cylindrical, deltoid, round, sharp, sabre-like forms. Individual flowers, clusters of flowers of all the colors of the sun’s spectrum.
Purple, red, orange bouganvilles, royal blue agapanthus, light violet lavender, light blue plumbago, white scented jasmine of various origins, white bells of the thin leafed yucca with juices that boil in the scorching sun. White daturas, yellow and pink brugmansia- the most important plant of the shamans, kings and gods. With their help one can fly underneath the stars at night. They say that some have stayed among the stars forever and never returned.
Oleanders, the innocent white or dark red, pink, yellow, single or double, they persist and bloom without fear from the heat of the sun’s rays. In every garden, on every road, on every ground around the sea. They are poisonous in their leaves, their berries, their root. Terribly and immaculately lethal.
Passiflora, of sapid berries. Passion.
The summer mimosa karoo, acacia horida, a fierce acacia of big yellow flakes, soft and tender scented blooms with huge thorns. They are used by the Berbers and other similar desert fold to saw up little girls after they have been mangled, the so-called pharaoh circumcision, infubulation. Yellow flowers fade into brown berries, young girls mostly die. If they stay alive, the endure a life of suffering...
The large tails of agave, as a mast or like a twisted rainbow in the species Atenautt. Agave sisilana has a different blossom. And color. Agave abloom over many years and then disappear. Around them ten thousand young, just sprung up thorny new plants.
New Opiates for the body and soul. The blue agave is being watched over carefully and grows only in Mexico, better said, only in the region of the state Jalisco. Mexico’s branded drink, tequila, is made in a quite complicated way out of agave. The real aroma in it is being maintained by el gusano, a worm. Long before the Spanish conquered, robbed and pillaged Mexico (1521), the locals would prepare their traditional drinks pulque and mezcal, out of the hearts of the plant and other types of agave (there are over 400 species), and the centre of the best distilling was in Oaxaca. Besides agave, save the unique blue agave, which is slowly disappearing due to the continuous human interference with its natural biological flow, the Mexicans acquire opiates from other types of cactus, for which their landscapes are famous. The intoxicating drink of the green giants, dangerous thorns that survive in the poorest soil and the largest amplitudes in temperature from below zero to the heat of the solstice...
Opuncias are prickly plates of all the colors and shapes. Small crawling bushes as well as five-meter tall trees. Real forests. With its juice the ancient Mexican people would stupefy their sacral sacrifices. Before they would skin them alive.
For rain. For other requests of the gods, for the benefit of the community.
Blood would flow in streams, its sweet scent mixed with the sweet scent of the cactus...
Not even such bloody sacrifices or such cruel customs could safe them, nor could they save us...
People disappear, cactuses stay and spread around the World.
WELTSCHMERZ IN THE SCENT OF EXOTICA
We encounter them everywhere. In miniature pots, on shelves of large shopping malls, for a few kunas. So abstract from nature that you never know even when you buy them or throw them away if they were fake or real, you only know in the state of absolute inaction. They exist in the warm habitats of Dalmatian gardens, under glass domes of private or state arboretums characteristic for their winter habitat, that protect even the most astonishing large examples, real herbal rarities...
The Indian fig is noted by Petar Hektorović in a description of his garden in the Starigrad Tvrdlja in his most famous work of Croatian renaissance literature- Fishing and the reproach of fishermen, 1568. The poet received an opuncia from a friend from Dubrovnik, where it came after the return from a distant naval straying of Dubrovnik’s sailors, merchants and adventurers. Or from Padova, the oldest botanical garden in the World. Its emergence in 1545 is tied to the cultivation of medicinal herbs. The famous conquering campaigns of the Venetian Republic enriched it with astounding vegetation from the most distant, barely recognizable parts of the globe. The first director, a scientist, was Luigi Squalemo, called Anguillar.
For us the botanist Roberto de Visianni, by family from Šibenik (born April 9th 1800- Died in Padova May 7th 1878) is of greater importance, a Croatian botanist of Italian descent, who for many years was the director of the botanical garden in Padova, from 1837 until his death. He wrote a study called Flora Dalmatica in three large volumes. In it he elaborated 2250 types of plants and smaller units of taxonomy, for the first time he described 60 species and 5 new families of plants, he also noted all the Croatian and Latin names and was prominent in horticulture. Some plants have been named after him: Visianni’s Scream (lat. Saturei visianni) and Visianni’s Modričica (lat. Asperula visianni). He found the endemic plant Dalmatian Bell in 1847 nearby Klis. He was buried in our country, where he was born, in Šibenik. He visited Lokrum, studied Maximilian’s garden where he spotted over 90 different exotic species.
The botanical garden in Padova plays a key role in the scientific research of vegetation, exotic, rare and endangered plants of the World. It is of big importance for us because under its influence the love of studying nature developed in our region. Alongside the farming of plants, following their growth, many libraries were created, full with herbariums, drawings of plants for their specificities, many were classified and sorted.
Across the whole World numerous people dedicated their free time and wealth to plants, creating majestic gardens, an artificial return to nature. The big romanticists of the 19th century drowned their sorrow, Weltschmerz, in the scent of exotic flowers.
Bushes, shrubbery, trees on rocky slopes and bays of the Palmižana compound. The shriveled Dubrovnik lemon tree, brown dumplings of bitter oranges. Summer, summer days and summer nights, moonlight. Ascending, full, descending moon that lays out heavy silver over the calm surface of the sea.
And the splutter of cicadas on the black spruce, on the Dalmatian, black, large (pinus pinea) pine tree, a pine tree heavy from the pinecones. On the Aleppo pine, the weeds and the noble olive... On some thirty sorts always green and tall palms, on the slow-growing cycads, the water retaining fitolacas...
Aloe everywhere, like trees, with multiple blooms. Orange and yellow blossom, fat juicy leaves, with containers of water that can survive without water for over six months.
Cleopatra’s needle can handle drought, but blue and pink hydrangea are thirsty every day. Each night the mirabilis blooms, only to sleep like the dead during the day.
In the middle of summer in the southern habitats the queens of the night open with their intense scents, large flowers bigger than 30cm, and white-yellow enormous pestles. In the evening they are buds, at midnight a rich lavish pleasure for the eyes, in the morning just faded, often thrown about completely indistinguishable remains...
At night when the white queen blossoms, all the other flowers disappear in the blueness, melt with the night- only strong, piercing aromas flow through the air.
Gardens of blue agave. Gardens of love and oblivion, gardens of lovers with the green that they created with passion, planted, cultivated, protected, enjoyed them. As long (or short) as time, fate would allow them that privilege. Some gardens survived, some did not.
Our story of two big enthusiasts of Mediterranean and exotic vegetation, both passionate botanists, both followers of a tradition and both of a tragic end- chased into death, murdered- is a longing gasp to revitalize their work in our region.
”Maybe one day they will institute how the impulses of remembering and forgetting rhythmically equate history. In this game of antithesis and thesis the nineteenth century is a realistic victim of the twentieth century. Because the only thing that the 20th century worked on with its full effort and all its willpower was to forget. The forgetting of former systems of sacraments, former meanings, former values.”
Many names of founding gardeners have been imprinted into the wind as they disappeared as their gardens. Sometimes their souls blink at night like a silent whirr of a bat’s wing. But that happens less and less. Today, in the XXI century we turn our sight only forward. And those bats, since they can only survive in an unpolluted environment, are less and less.
The soul of the deceased professor Eugen Meneghello wanders around the Palmižana garden.
Does the professor’s soul wander calm and at peace because the garden has survived, blossomed, grew bigger under the care of his descendants. Or is it unhappy and in panic what will happen to his closest that followed him in love and what life they will lead and what end will they have.
“A PAINTING IN BLOOM, A PAINTER IN HEAVEN “
We do not know if we described the Palmižana garden before, that exotic scenery of Saint Clement or did we just describe in detail the paintings created by Toni Franović.
Franović paints large canvases with bright or night colors, paints oils in thick layers, yellow, orange, red, turquoise, blue, purple, almost black. Sometimes it seems as if he drowns in the richness of the coloring, sinking, and then he reappears, self-convinced he throws the last layer- ”a painting in bloom, a painter in heaven”- as Nikola Albaneze said.
On the painting palms, cycads, aloe- agave. And almost everywhere black, almost symbolic to a child’s painting- contours of a human being. The indication of an earthly heavenly garden, created by man’s passion.
Passion as fervor, fury, longing, anger, love, a lover’s flame, burst of emotion.
If it is not a human character, then it is a barely recognizable part of a roof. Or an empty chair that awaits its owner, as the focal point of a lavish painting of rich vegetation.
Or the loom of a piece of a house engulfed by opuncias during the day, sappily green colors, in the middle of the night blue and purple. He painted hundreds of version of this same sight, always completely different. ”It is still not mine”, says the painter. And turns to the sea.
He paints the island white, pink, turquoise, black- Saint Helena’s refuge or the campaign on Kitera. With the island he closes the painting from the infinity of the sea’s billow and so adopts it to be accessible to human possibilities. As a ratification of that which is attainable, he paints, also symbolically like a child’s drawing, a fragile little ship on the sea’s surface, always anew.
“Toni’s pictorial Ithaca is on the Mediterranean, the origin of cultures (Europe). This is where the painter feels best, here the vegetation even reacts to his presence. Metaphorically an imaginative osmosis is being created which results as a painting of coloristic harmony. Color is the carrier of the content and the mood, expression and motif of the painting. It is the plot and the symbol. At last, color in Franovic’s paintings is a mean of an archetypical and mythical exposure of civilized values”, writes Marina Baričević
„In step with this superficial time he referred himself into the unconventional. He is running ahead of his time, examining the sensibility of Europe, America, Israel.”
Nevertheless, his pictorial conquering of Lokrum, the gardens of Dubrovnik, the Palmižana landscape in which the forests became impenetrable and became, remained vestal in each point of their being, undoubtedly and unavoidably led him- without the Novare and captain Tegetthoff- to the charismatic destinations of Maximilian, to the magical gardens in hot Mexico. He found his gardens of blue agave.
Tonko Maroević writes that he ”during this one occasion had the need to tell him that he is a- man... more similar to a plant and a tree than a migrating bird...” ”That would be ideal for me”, continued Franović, ”if one place could hold me completely for once”.
The painter has found this one place- only in different states on different continents.
He raised his head toward the star-filled sky- he entered the night. His newest canvases started to show flying, crowing, winged creatures resembling birds and fishes and archangels. The sun is a dirty ring. Tumbling surfaces clash between the sky and earth, they unite a gloomy Hades with a bright shiny Olympus. A red color burns and swallows. Smugness has withdrawn giving priority to fury.
On one canvas everything is vexed under the giant wings of a mighty monster, a wave is rising with a man in a boat, most probably in the next moment that man, conqueror of earth and the sea, will no longer be.
An island, the girth of human empires, on another canvas, is completely black, around him the sky is blackening and everything will disappear in a deep darkness. Above it the still spread wings of a three-headed monster, in the lower corner of the painting large plantations of opuncia.
On the third canvas a black thorny giant cactus conquers the center of the painting throwing everything else out of focus. Powerful, majestic, fierce.
The Mediterranean and its Greek cradle were mild compared to the experience of the rest of the World.
But all the experiences of the world cannot stop us in this accelerating velocity of our own collapse in which we include everything around us.
Long before people conquered nature to survive. Today mankind survives destroying the nature that they conquered.
For a long time now it has stopped to be ”the most natural thing to wander the world and gather sensations”, (Maroević) for artists to do because there is no more time left to note the beauty that is disappearing forever.
Barring all the catastrophes, there is little left for them once they lock themselves in their own four walls to ”work upon the accumulated, assimilated, the aqueous” (Maroević).
x x x
The tails of multicolored melted glass, reflecting scales of the deep sea that sway in the gentle breeze of a calm, lazy day. When the Jugo blows they rattle loudly and spark- a storm is on the way, that long awaited rain for the dry, fissured land. During a Maestral they are like little bells, the Bora produces a sharp hiss.
Mermaids on Palmižana. Creatures of darkness in search of light. Not at the beginning nor at the end of the path and space.
Franović paints, also sizzles glass, pours peculiar forms. Those are his ”paintings” in constant change. He gives them to sunlight, the shadows of large pine trees, milky silhouettes of the night.
Franović bends iron, cuts pomegranates and other Mediterranean fruit from metals.
Pomegranate, that divine fruit of fertility and opulence, in a silvery glare. Here and there a shrewd peacock’s caw rips through the night. An unpleasant sad rasping sound that breaks the harmony.
A reason for fear.
This text was formulated for the occasion of the exhibit- ”Garden of blue agave”, in September of 2009 on Palmižana, which follows the already held exhibit- ”Hidden Eden” in Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Istanbul. In the spring of 2010 this exhibit will be arranged in Mexico City.
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