Jewish cemetery of Rožna Dolina

The first time was by chance, and the encounter immediately took on the features of a vision: it was spring, it was sunset, and the golden light falling obliquely on the grass and meadows enhanced the contrast of the blackish-grey memorial stones corroded by moss with bright green in the background. I remember that I arrived with the red Cinelli bike I had in my twenties, that I left it leaning against the surrounding wall and that I entered the cemetery with the foolish walk of a cyclist who has just dismounted. I remember I couldn't read Hebrew yet and that when I found myself in front of Carlo Michelstaedter's tomb I wanted to say something important but no particular idea came to me and I ended up not saying anything.

The Jewish community of Gorizia has been documented since the 16th century, but the presence of Jews in the city certainly dates back at least since medieval times. In 1698 Emperor Leopold I forced the Jews of Gorizia to live in a ghetto in the peripheral district of San Giovanni, where they already owned a cemetery. For this reason the Jewish community decided to move the holy field a first time at the end of the 17th century from the ghetto area to the lands beyond the Corno stream, along the road to Carinthia. It was moved a second time at the end of the 19th century, to the banks of the stream Vrtojbica along the road to Vienna, where it’s currently located.

In 1947 (the same year in which Cino Cinelli founded the bicycle company that brings his name) the new national border was drawn on the ground with white paint, and while the ghetto with the synagogue remained in Italian territory, the cemetery found itself in Yugoslavia. At the time this didn’t cause any stir because in the meanwhile the Jewish community of Gorizia had been completely annihilated in Auschwitz, but today, thinking about the centuries of Jewish, Semitic and Afroasiatic presence in Europe wiped out in just a few years, about the national solution given to a shoah, a catastrophe, caused precisely by the cult of the nation, being here at the Rožna Dolina cemetery in this bustle of roundabouts, overpasses, petrol pumps and Casino Royal is truly impressive... and suddenly another memory comes to me, that of an enormous black crow perched on a rusty metal sheet, croaking like a demon between the tombs of the Muslim cemetery overlooking the cliffs just south of Jaffa.