di Luciana Percovich and Aldina De Stefano
The Natisone valleys are located in the easternmost part of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. They are formed by the valley of the Natisone river and by those crossed by its tributaries, the Alberone, the Cosizza and the Erbezzo, following a fan system, which converges towards the south.
Mount Matajur (1641 m high and also called Mount Re or Velika Baba, i.e. Great Grandmother in the local Slovenian dialect) with its conical shape is the highest mountain and from its grassy peak it is possible to see the Adriatic with the Karst on one side and Istria and on the other the mountains Canin, Mangart, and the Dolomites. Formed from sedimentary material between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, it is rich in silver, mercury and gold. Along its sides there are caves and deep fissures, such as the Velika Jama and the Sesna Jama (jama = cave) and numerous springs gush out. Covered with poplars, chestnuts and green alders, it opens to meadows of daffodils, crocuses, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.
No wonder, therefore, that such a harmony of elements made it a sacred place for those who lived or frequented it since ancient times, when the mountains expressed the numinosity and strength of the Mother's manifestations, such as Cybele the Mountainous in Anatolia and the mighty Baba Yagas of Slavic folklore; here, still today, there is one of the most popular sanctuaries perched on the mountains, that of the Black Madonna of Castelmonte.
And despite the position on that eastern border through which the violent waves of various peoples from the north-east have descended into Italy over the millennia, due to their slightly set back and raised position with respect to the plain below, the valleys have remained on the margins of passages, raids and settlements, keeping themselves isolated and protected from what was happening at their feet and conserving their own ecological and cultural biodiversity.
The Slavs, the most recent wave of Indo-European peoples, settled in these areas in the Longobard age (XNUMXth-XNUMXth century), when the Longobard power decided to welcome the first settlers and to impose the border almost coinciding with the natural limit between the plain (Romance) and the mountainous territory of the Pre-Alps (Slavic). The Slavic presence strengthened after the Hungarian invasions in the XNUMXth century, when the Patriarchate of Aquileia made use of groups of Slavic peasants of various origins (mostly Slovenians from Carinthia and Carniola) to repopulate some areas of the Friuli plain devastated and almost desertified by the Magyar incursions . So Slavia friulana (also known as Italian Slavia or Venetian Slavia, Sclavanie in Friulian, Beneška Slovenija in Slovenian) is still today the name of the hilly and mountainous region of the Julian Prealps of eastern Friuli, which extends between Cividale del Friuli (which houses theCeltic Hypogeum) and the mountains above Caporetto (now in Slovenia).
"Their homes are mainly small caves near streams or springs ... but also protected clearings, small mountains, steep, rocky, inaccessible, solitary valleys, however 'different'", writes Aldina De Stefano in The Krivapete of the Natisone Valleys. Another story. The book, published by Kappa Vu, Udine, in 2003, also provides a rich bibliography, maps of the caves, etymologies, and reports the news of four witch trials in the valleys.
And he further notes: “They are real, mythical and symbolic female figures, present in popular tradition, written and oral. The name has several variations and etymological translations. There are many, and almost uncontaminated, legends about them in the Isonzo valley (Slovenia) and in the nearby valleys of Torre and in Valresia, and then disappears giving way to agane, torke, babe. Especially with the Agane, the Krivapete have many similarities.”
Their name is a compound word that lends itself to many interpretations: with regard to physicality, it is translated as "crooked foot"; in a broader sense it refers to an exclusively female identity, as a "witch ... who goes against social rules".
Multiform and ambiguous like the Baba Yagas, like the Melusines, like the Belle Dame sans Merci and long before Lilith, in distant Korea the powerful creator goddess Mago in her degraded popular forms is described in analogous terms: "naughty with men, wise in pregnancies and births, capable of assuming the appearance of a fox or a cat, a bleary old woman and immediately afterwards a beautiful woman, 'with tousled hair, a beaked nose and the clawed heels of a bird'” (Luciana Percovich, She who gives Life, She who gives Form, p.61). In short, witches with upturned feet, wild or wild women, because first women were sacred, wise and knowledgeable, free and "infidels".
“In space and time, they are associated with other mythical figures such as torke, babe, russelke, vile, bradoviceduje zene, duje babe, anguane, bregostane, nymphs, sirens, ondine, melusine, erinyes, witches.” (Aldina De Stefano, p. 29)
Aldina De Stefano began visiting the valleys in 1997, a difficult approach with the communities, she says. From the long and patient listening to her, first her degree thesis in philosophy was born, then her book. Invited in 2005 to Pescara, in the series of conferences In the footsteps of the Great Mother, organized by the Margaret Fuller Association, said the Krivapete.
We should go alone, in the valleys. Live them inside.
Being seized by the darkness, by the night, jolting in the wind which, among the branches, seems like the cry of a child, feeling chased by the eyes of the wood, freezing when disturbing presences touch us, losing orientation in the fog or at a crossroads, collapsing of tiredness when you are still too far from the enlightened country.
Feeling fear, because when you are alone in rarefied places like the valleys, the trees take on monstrous shapes, the gorges emit chilling crunches, the streams attract you in their impetuous vortexes, the unknown rustlings are intimate unheard voices.
Secret, mysterious, secluded, wooded valleys. An ideal place for the conservation and transmission of ancient forms of worship, of non-approved or standardized beliefs, cleverly hidden even in the mother tongue, Slovenian. Language of the nurse, Slovenian. Confidential, rich in nuances, cross-references, ambiguities, intimately linked to memory. Community, land and language live in symbiosis. Inseparable for understanding the cultural substrate of the Krivapete.
I "met" the Krivapete for the first time by studying the arid texts of official culture, from which emerges, in a dull, monotonous, monocultural language, a single identity for krivapete: grotesque witches fruit of the superstitious and ignorant imagination of the lower class . The legends, and every single word, are translated with hasty superficiality from Slovenian into Italian, the language of the dominant one, who for centuries wrote in place of and in substitution of popular culture. Masculine writing, which for centuries has written in place of and in place of the feminine.
The version given by this monoperspective thought, which is not exposed to the contagion of the relationship, of the possibility, crystallizes the Krivapete. It debases, ridicule, devitalizes them.
Alienated, exiled, dissociated, they appear to be weak, fragile, lonely figures. Inconsistent. Of the same accentuates the negative characters, "forgets" the positive ones. He distances them from their constitutive essence.
Misrepresenting the symbolic meaning of the Krivapete to legitimize an androcentric ideology is a cultural scam, a dark and obscuring, mediocre and hypocritical mechanism from which I distanced myself, moving my research to the Valleys. For several years I have lived in close contact and relationship with the landscape, the language, the community, in an attitude of listening and taking care of their deepest feelings.
Popular tradition, written and oral, gives the Krivapete a much more complex, fascinating, contradictory version, but for this very reason vital, in continuous renewal and transformation. I took a different look at their stories, without prejudices or stereotypes, without censorship or manipulation. Hence the need to rewrite another truth, and a possible other destiny - historical, mythical, symbolic - for them, who are anything but marginal figures. Reinterpreting the data, symbols, actions and functions was almost a work of archeology, which brings out the buried years. Surprising signs, ranging from the sacredness of the divine feminine in the culture of the Mother Goddess of the Neolithic, to the devaluation of being a "different" woman (crooked feet are the hallmark) in the post-pagan culture of the following centuries.
On the Krivapete-women, in the flesh, guilty of following the ways of the Goddess, or of having put to use the skills of connoisseurs and transmitters of healers, the inquisitors of Aquileia unleash a real persecution - but this is another story again!
Goddesses, sacred women, priestesses, shamans, wild women, women of herbs, sorceresses, witches, benandanti, heretics?
However, and always, authoritative female figures. Uncomfortable and embarrassing, for the symbolic patristic order, which has always been afraid of the exclusive generative power of women.
One day, guided by instinct, I arrived in a small cave, called sacred women, or sacred to women. The entrance is shaped like a uterus (like all Krivapete caves). Nearby, a spring.
Silence is sacred. The Valleys envelop everything in natural sacredness, life and ancient presences in a circular time that returns inside. They exude a wild strength and an evocative primal energy, the energy of childhood perhaps. I enter, holding my breath.
I was fine in there. Protected. As if it were my old childhood home, rather pre-Christmas. I was fine as I assume it is fine in the womb, in the mythical womb of the Mother Goddess.
When I came out (after a moment an hour a hundred years?) I was full of energy, as in a rite of passage.
Sitting on a concave stone that looked like a small throne, I thought back smiling at the deep traces left by the divine feminine, inherent in the Krivapete despite the frantic cancellation of gynophobic thought.
Christianity has taken possession of all the places, representations, attributes, ceremonies, rites, festivities, temples of the previous female deities by remodeling the archetypes into a single female entity. The Virgin Mary. But something has nevertheless passed through the sieve of forced conversion, which has not come to terms with the fidelity of popular culture to archaic pre-Christian beliefs.
To make them survive, popular culture changes the names of female deities, who become a myriad of small domestic goddesses, moves them from myth to legend, hides them in the woods, in the most inscrutable places, far from forced assimilation. Agane, fairies, bregostane, russelke, bradovice, anguane, melusine, erinyes, witches, sirens. Krivapete, in the Natisone Valleys.
In the legends that tell of them persist myths and rituals of an older and more solid religious system in which the Goddess was worshiped and female sexual power was sacred. The seeds of ancient forms of worship are still evident in the deep layers of popular culture. There was therefore no total uprooting.
The newborn perceives the universe in the mother. Later, she transforms into the conception of the universe as a mother.
The Krivapeta is an epiphany of the Mother. Like a Mother, she protects, nourishes, teaches, but also scolds, admonishes, punishes. Like Mother Earth she is both good and bad, creative and destructive, generous and vengeful. We turn to her for the fertility of the fields, of the wild animals, of the herds, of the fields, and of the human group.
In her life, as nourishment, is the central goal of societies based on the recognition and celebration of the role of the Mother. In their maternal function, the Krivapete are authoritative transmitters of knowledge and ancestral powers, and values. Revered and feared. Negative and positive together, in a holistic worldview. Keepers of the wild, I am Lord of herbs, healing, fertility, rain, weaving, destiny. I am the genius loci that assists and protects the community. Those who know, and make their magical and practical knowledge available. The Krivapeta is the one who advises, teaches and punishes those who break the laws of nature. Which disappears if we call it by name because it hides its intimate essence in the name. If she is mocked, outraged, she defends her dignity with energy and fury. She guards the mysteries and sacredness of life. She weaves the cycle of life in the wisdom of what must be born grow die be reborn. Cries out if nature is hurt. She dances and dances on full moon nights in regenerating rituals. She does magic to restore order and harmony to the group. In the Krivapete the vision of the world of those who preceded us is revealed, in a rediscovered time, in a past that heals the present and indicates in the archaic future, in the future behind us, says Hanna Arendt, a possible cultural transformation.
The Krivapete, perhaps, invite us to rethink our deepest and most authentic religious feeling, ready to re-emerge when, like now, a single, male god is no longer enough, when a single truth, the patriarchal one, is no longer uniquely true. They are a solicitation of an attitude of openness, of acceptance towards other possibilities capable of overcoming distances and offering, in their entirety, a recomposition of the fractures, a reconciliation between opposites.
Rethinking, rewriting, being here to dialogue on the divine feminine, is to dialogue on the existent, in a relationship of extraordinary dynamic, passionate, never resigned power. Which does not accept or passively suffer what happens.
The divine feminine restores the lost unity of the origins to the human species. It is the poignant elsewhere that has been somewhere, and can return. It works like a force, a power that finds its apex in the mutual recognition of dependence, alliance, union, not only between human creatures, but between them and the earth, animals, water, the sky. In the attention and responsibility towards the sacredness of life that springs from mutual solidarity, from re-establishing the pact of brotherhood and sisterhood between us and the cosmos. In an era devoted to the extermination of memory, the disenchantment of the world, the desecration of the human body and nature; a time, of spiritual aridity, of bewilderment.
We will have to go and recover, from where we are lost, lost... Listen to the intimate voices, the free song of our ancestors.
Legend of Vernasso (Aldina De Stefano, cit., p.153)
In ancient times, people didn't have many resources for survival, so they ate mostly polenta and milk. When the inhabitants of S. Pietro took their cows to pasture during the summer, they often and willingly approached the places where the Krivapete lived. So they could watch them fetch water along the creek and wash their weird crooked feet.
One day, an inhabitant of Vernasso went for a walk in the woods and saw a young krivapeta sleeping in the shade of a chestnut tree. He took a rope and tied it, after which he carried it to the village.
Everyone was very intrigued by the presence of that young witch; she promised to teach everything she knew in exchange for her freedom. The people accepted without delay. The next day the woman taught them how to make butter, ricotta, cheese, bread, tongs (bread made with wheat flour), wicker baskets, to sew shoes, sharpen sickles, make and preserve salami and sausages. One day, Krivapeta gathered the whole village and said that she had taught everything she knew and therefore they had to let her go.
When she was free, she immediately ran to the mountain and, now safe, she cried out: "I taught you everything but how to make sweets!"
The Vernassini chased her in vain, she was already far away.
It is said that from that day the Vernassini no longer know how to make desserts.
Luciana Percovich and Aldina De Stefano – 2022
REFERENCES
- Aldina De Stefano – The Krivapete of the Natisone Valleys. Another story – Kappa Vu – Udine 2003;
- Luciana Percovich – She who gives life. She who gives the Shape – Venexia Publishing – Rome 2009;
- Andreas Johns – Baba Yaga, The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktales – Peter Lang – 2004;
- Carla Lomi – At the origins of the Fairy. The woman and her psyche in the mirror – Meridiana – Florence 2004;
- Marija Gimbutas – The Slavs – Praeger Publishers – New York 1971.
