Rut

I arrive in Rut early in the morning, it’s still dark. When dawn hits the snow- capped ridges above me, the light reflected down into the darkness of the valley reminds me of other light and other ridges seen a few years ago in al-Karak in Jordan, the biblical Kir-Ḥareshet or Kir of Moab. 

Rut, Moab... incredible: just like Tamar, Rut is also a foreigner, a Moabite precisely. Along with Tamar and Rahab, she is one of the three foreign women present in the genealogy of Jesus as reported in the Gospel according to Matthew. The village of Rut itself, moreover, is foreign: founded at the request of the patriarch of Aquileia, Berthold of Andechs-Merania, in the 14th century by groups of immigrants coming from Innichen in Val Pusteria with the name of Teutsch Gereuth, Canton of the Germans, the surnames of its inhabitants continue to bear witness to their origins, despite the fact that Slovenian has long since replaced German as the main language.

After the First World War, Italians arrived here as well. They built huge fortifications on the ridges (once more the Alpine Wall of Littorio) and killed Simon Kos, one of the leading members of the T.I.G.R. (acronym for Trst-Istra-Gorica-Reka), a clandestine irredentist organization that fought against the fascist policy of the italianization of Slovenians and Croatians, found guilty of having smuggled people, weapons, ammunition and pamphlets on both sides of the border.  

Now here in Rut everything is quiet, and even the centuries-old lime tree which certainly would have a lot to tell stays silent. The biblical Rut is a symbol of kindness, and everything up here in the early morning seems generous: the old houses stacked on top of each other, the piles of wood put away in orderly fashion, the meadows opening like a sunburst onto the woods above, as if they were the steps of an ancient theater. 

Nikolaj Maver, former president of the Tolmin Agricultural Cooperative, now retired, guides me through the cemetery around the church, the grass still full of dew: "That's an Italian, a carabiniere... he died up on the crest, but not because of the war, because of an accident, I think." Once inside the temple, I am struck by the frescoed apse: "When I was a child, when I was an altar boy, you couldn’t move around here during mass because there were so many people."

As I approach the apse, I notice a strange female figure, loose hair, bare breasts and a double mermaid's tail, a fish’s tail. “This is the Riba Faronika. Around here they say that she is the cause of earthquakes. When she gets angry she thrusts her double tail and all hell breaks loose." Riba I understand, it means fish, but... “Nikolaj, why faronika?” “I don't know, maybe for the pharaohs... after all, we know, Africa is always pushing north.”