The People Have Gone. The Wild Remains
A meditation on Croatia's population loss, the ongoing depopulation of my village, solstice, and jackals
My favorite season in Istra is winter (from an aesthetic standpoint, I’m not a fan of the frozen toes and the unheated bedrooms and the fact that it is completely pitch-black outside my grandmother’s door by five P.M.). When the midwinter sun shines, even Pazin, a town I lovingly refer to as “the armpit of Istra,”glows. The light turns the bare branches of the trees golden as the sun hangs low in the sky. In the distance, Učka’s highest peaks are dusted with snow, contrasting with the warm golds spilling over the hillside.
It feels like a secret. The wandering hordes thunder through in the summer, most bypassing my hometown altogether in search of the paved-over coast. Lately, ever since the castle next door got turned into a wine tasting cellar, we’ve had a few winding through the backroads and gawking as I tend to my grandmother’s chickens or try to learn how to maintain the grapevines. But in the winter? It’s just ours.
I was at my grandmother’s for Christmas and for the Winter Solstice. Although I was technically working on the solstice, I closed up shop early and took a walk. My grandmother’s little white dog followed me (the German shepherd was in heat and confined to the barn. She protested her exclusion by crying loudly). We walked up the road, past the 16th century castle (now owned by a Russian millionaire), to the ruins of an older medieval castle, then back.
They lie when they say that nature is quiet. Peaceful, relaxing, but never quiet. I stopped walking to hear it better as the rustle of my jacket was preventing me from hearing everything else. The birds. The wind whispering through the trees. My grandma’s dog noisily chasing after something in the undergrowth. The distant echo of the cars on the road slicing through the other side of the valley. A neighbor on the other hill firing up his tractor.
I used to hate the way the hills amplify noise. When I was younger, after every fight with my brother, the neighbor who lives several kilometers away would ask me about it because the weird way the acoustics bounce through these hills carried the sound to her backyard. I hated the thought that every sound I made in my own yard would carry over the hills to people I didn’t even know, because my diaspora brain couldn’t remember all the families with homes nestling into the crooks of the hills. But now I like it, or at least I don’t mind it as much. It makes me feel less alone.
The wild has been tamed here. The road was paved about a decade ago, when I was a preteen (before that it was a gravel path that my aunt petitioned for years to get paved as she was sick of ruining her car and living in the 19th century). The telephone wires cut through the trees. The dawn is sometimes purple from the smoke from the Rockwool factory a few kilometers away.
Even the sounds of nature are inseparable from the ambient noise of the people that still criss-cross the hills here, so close to the Učka massif. The soft rumble of cars that are kilometers away form as much a part of the background noise as the chirp of winter’s remaining birds.
But the wild is also winning. One evening over the summer, I woke up to a bone-chilling howl. I tried to comfort myself by thinking it was probably some wild animal my city slicker ears couldn’t recognize, but that illusion was broken when my grandmother burst into the room I share with my aunt, wild with panic. We later figured out that it was probably a jackal. After 80 years in the countryside, my grandmother was shocked by the jackal howl. She’d never heard it so close before.
It’s not just the jackals.Wild boars trample our crops. In September, my aunt called me to tell me that she’d spotted a bear on the drive home, probably one that had lumbered down from Učka in search of food. The wild animals come close to the houses now, no longer afraid of the lonely old women and unmarried adult children beating back the creep of the trees. For decades, humans had pushed them out of their forests, but now the forest is creeping out of its confines, and the few people that cling to the rocky soil in Istra’s hill country are outnumbered.
The place where I stopped to listen to nature on my solstice walk was one of the local ponds. I can’t remember if this was one my grandma used to draw water from. She told me once about the network of ponds where women would go to get water and catch up with their neighbors. We have running water now, but there also isn’t a community left to get water together.
I stood facing the manor house, now a restaurant and wine tasting gallery that mostly sits empty. From the fall of Austria-Hungary up to just before I was born, it was divided into housing for local workers and their families. My mother still tells stories of the community of lonely old women that eventually formed the castle community, eventually becoming enough of a curiosity to earn a cover story in a local magazine in the 1990s. After they died, one by one, the castle passed from one millionaire to another and was closed to the community, ironically saved from ruin by the new Russian owner whose gestures of grace, employing local people, opening the castle to local couples who want to take wedding photos, and working closely with the family that’s worked the vineyards for decades, made him a welcome relief.
The Russian is not the only foreign landowner in the area. The abandoned houses are getting bought up by middle-aged and elderly Swiss, Germans, Austrians, and Italians looking for a nice place to retire, leading at least one of my neighbors to grumble that it feels as if we’re living in 1942 again. At least one woman bought a home then blocked off the public road that runs through the property, a favorite of local hunters, truffle hunters, and motorcyclists. With the return of the wild comes the return of Germanic feudalism, apparently.
The castle is not the only abandoned place. Had I turned to face the other way, I would have seen clusters of abandoned houses dotting the hilltops. On a previous visit, I’d taken the German shepherd with me to explore one abandoned village, Šimuni. Although I knew the stories of the people that had left, many of them my distant relatives who had gone to America and Australia in search of an easier life in the middle of the last century, the village still feels eerie. It looks like some natural disaster or a war rolled through. Tubs, buckets, and the ephemera of daily life are piled up in the half-boarded up houses. Semi-wild grape vines and trees twine through the caved-in roofs. After I came back from my tour, my grandmother asked me about the different houses, which ones were still standing. She can’t walk well enough to go see the place where her relatives lived to see for herself. I think she hasn’t been there in years, but she still wants to know how much it’s changed since she was a girl.
This house cluster used to be a proper village. When my grandmother was younger, it had a school, a village shop, a butcher, and even a bar. Now it’s completely empty.
Paz, the village that acts as a focal point for my grandmother and the other disparate houses that God in all his wisdom decided to fling about the rocky soil here lost its school when my mother was a child, its store with Communism’s fall. Now the church is the only thing that draws people there besides the houses (and three AirBnbs, which is a lot of AirBnbs for a village with one street).
For the past century, people have been siphoning out of the corner of the country my family calls home as fast as water siphons through the thirsty gray soil that covers the north of Istria, so much harder to work with than the red clay in the South. But we’re not alone, misery loves company. The rest of the country has also siphoned off almost 10% of the population since the last census.
Istria didn’t fare as badly as the rest of the country in terms of population loss on the last census, but some of the signs of population loss are still visible in Pazin. It’s not that easy for young people to find jobs or affordable housing, even though it’s better in Istria than in the rest of the country. The main drag looks emptier every time I go. The small stores that characterized my childhood, which hadn't been privatized yet, are now empty or replaced by chain stores that will soon shutter, because corporate headquarters could not manage them worse if they were actively trying to sabotage its own operations. There’s rumors of a new mall opening on the outskirts of town within a few years, which will cement the death of the town that was once a gathering place for people coming from the villages surrounding it.
The big contrast between the Pazin my mother seems to remember and the one that I see is that there is nothing to do. I’m hesitant to wax about the nightlife for young people in Pazin, a town I don’t see that often, but it’s taken a hit based on what my cousins say.
I’ve done my part to reverse the trend, but I only got as far as moving to Zagreb. I will never return to the village, for all of the panic that I have about my ancestral home closing up shop once my grandmother and my childless aunt pass away. I am not willing to make that kind of sacrifice.
My grandmother does not want me to either. While I was there, we spent an afternoon looking out at the now-empty hills from our balcony while she named the people who used to live there. Pokojna Teta Ilda, Barba Gašpo. But then she shrugged. “Who would choose to live here?” she said. “Life is hard.”
I have no coherent way to end this. If I did, maybe I wouldn’t wake up in a panic about losing my home and whether I have it in me to sacrifice my comfortable capital life to go farm and if I ever plan on doing that I should probably learn to drive stick first. I’m just thinking about the solstice, even over a month later, when the days are already noticeably longer. Winter Solstice is when days get shorter, we get sleepier, the night creeps out. Winter Solstice reminds us that no matter how hard we try with our sun lamps and all that, the night will creep in.
The same with the wild. Because no matter how hard we tried with the phone wires and the paved roads and the 4G data connection even in my village, the jackals still come to howl under my window.