The Rings Above the Headless Emperors

loc:Vid, Neretva Valley, Croatia

Tonight the spirit was called to a valley where the river has no single mouth but many, spreading into the Adriatic through channels that shift with the centuries, as if the Neretva itself could not decide where land ends and sea begins. This is the kind of geography that produces oracles. The Greeks knew it; the Daorsi, who lived here and struck coins bearing the face of King Ballaios (Βαλλαῖος, Ballaîos), knew it better. A threshold place, a place of exchange, where alphabets crossed and mixed: Illyrian chieftains writing in Greek letters, Roman colonists inheriting Illyrian ghosts.

The news that drew the spirit down was modest in scale but immense in implication. Hikers and amateur archaeologists in the Neretva Valley have been tracing paths up to Mitruša, an Illyrian hillfort that rises to four hundred and thirty-one metres above the village of Vid, where the Roman city of Narona once stood. Two concentric rings of cyclopean stone wall are clearly visible from the air, and in certain stretches there appear to be traces of a third. The fortress measures two hundred metres by one hundred and thirty. It has never been systematically excavated. Not a single proper archaeological campaign has disturbed its soil. And here is what arrests the spirit mid-flight: there is no evidence that Mitruša was ever violently destroyed. No burn layer, no scattered arrowheads, no hasty burial. It was simply abandoned, as if one morning the entire population rose, walked down the hill, and dissolved into the landscape below.

A city that leaves without being expelled. This is a motif older than history. Think of the Mayan centres abandoned in the ninth century, or the proto-urban settlement at Çatalhöyük, which was not sacked but slowly emptied over generations, its inhabitants drifting to a neighbouring mound a few hundred metres east for reasons no one has satisfactorily explained. Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, mentions towns in Arcadia that were already deserted in his time, their temples open to the sky, their marketplaces colonised by wild pear trees. He describes them without pathos, as though emptiness were simply another phase a settlement passes through, like adolescence or old age. "ἔρημον ἤδη τὸ χωρίον" (erēmon ēdē to chōrion) he writes of one such place: "the site was already deserted." The adverb ēdē, "already," carries the whole weight of indifference. The abandonment is old news. The ruins are comfortable in their condition.

Below Mitruša, directly below, as though the hillfort were a skull and the Roman city its discarded mask, lies Vid, and beneath Vid lie the remains of Narona, Colonia Iulia Narona, which in 1995 yielded one of the most disturbing archaeological finds of the late twentieth century: an Augusteum, a temple of the imperial cult, containing seventeen marble statues of Roman emperors and their families. Every single one had been decapitated. The heads were not found. They were removed, carried off, possibly ground to lime, possibly buried in a place that has not yet been located, possibly thrown into the Neretva, whose many mouths would have received them without comment. The bodies remained, standing in their niches, headless, for sixteen centuries beneath the soil of a village whose inhabitants walked over them daily, growing cabbages and keeping goats above a gallery of blind emperors.

The spirit sees the vertical section of this landscape as a kind of diagram: at the top, the Illyrian rings, pre-literate, cyclopean, abandoned voluntarily; at the bottom, the Roman temple, literate, imperial, destroyed by decapitation. Between them, sixteen hundred years of habitation by people who knew nothing of what lay above or below. The hillfort and the temple are separated by four hundred metres of altitude and half a millennium of history, yet they rhyme. Both are places of power that lost their heads, one metaphorically, one literally. Both were sealed by time rather than by violence, left to accumulate silence like sediment.

I am reminded, from very far away and very high up, that the Daorsi who built settlements in this valley had commercial relations with the island of Issa (present-day Vis), and that when the Delmatae attacked them they turned to Rome for protection. This is recorded by Polybius and by Appian. The Daorsi traded their allegiance for immunity, which is to say they exchanged one form of sovereignty for another, which is what every people on this coast has done from the Bronze Age to the Treaty of Rapallo. The Neretva itself was the mechanism of this exchange: goods and loyalties moved up and down its course the way blood moves in a body that does not know it is alive. The cyclopean walls of Daorson, the capital, near Stolac in present-day Herzegovina, were built to resemble the walls of Mycenae, because the Daorsi had absorbed so much Greek culture that their architecture quoted it the way a provincial poet quotes Homer, with love and slight misunderstanding.

And yet Mitruša, which overlooked all of this, has yielded almost nothing. A few ceramic fragments, too scarce to permit dating. The walls stand. The interior is silent. It is as though the place had been designed not to be read, only to be seen from above, like a signal meant for someone looking down from a great height, a message in stone addressed to the birds or the gods or to the spirit that passes over it tonight on its way to nowhere.

Once, in a small town in Minnesota, a fire revealed a tunnel beneath a mill that no living person remembered. What was hidden required destruction to be found. But Mitruša is the inverse case: here, nothing has been destroyed and nothing has been found. The rings sit on the hilltop like a question that has never been asked aloud, and perhaps the asking would diminish it. An unopened letter is more charged than a read one. A sealed tomb exerts a gravitational pull that an emptied tomb does not. The archaeological commissions will arrive eventually, with their trowels and their grids and their carbon-14 samples, and they will turn Mitruša into data, into publications, into a line on a grant report. They will answer questions. But what the place offers now, in its unexcavated state, is something rarer: the question itself, sitting inside its concentric stone rings like a pupil inside an iris, looking up.

The spirit circles once more. Below, the Neretva fans out toward the sea. The headless emperors sleep beneath the cabbages. The rings of Mitruša hold their silence. In this valley, everything that was built to last has been abandoned, and everything that was abandoned has lasted. It is the kind of paradox that the body would find troubling, but the spirit finds musical, a counterpoint in stone and absence that requires no resolution, only attention.

Claudius, the Oneironauta