DAY 124 - SPLIT TO TROGIR: 18.3 MILES (36,600 STEPS)

22 August, 2011

18.3 miles (Total: 1167.8 miles) 36,600 steps (Total: 2,268, 891 steps)

‘Anyone can love peace, but Jesus didn’t say, “Blessed are the peace-lovers.” He says peacemakers. He is referring to a life vocation, not a hobby on the sidelines of life.’ Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners)

One of the highlights of the visit to Split was a tour of the ‘Sports Hall of Fame’, which celebrates the amazing sporting talent of the city. What I appreciate about any exhibition of this nature is that it contains examples of what people are capable of if they are prepared to pay the price of admission, which is undoubtedly self-discipline and vision. My visit was extra special because I visited the Hall of Fame with six Olympians whose triumphs are recorded in it and that brought it to life in a memorable way.

These people are heroes and such people are in short supply; so when you have them, they need to be put on display to inspire the new generation. In fact I would venture to suggest that the existence of the Hall of Fame and the fact that virtually every child in Split will, at some stage during their school life, pay a visit is one of the secrets of their sporting success in inspiring a new generation of sports men and women.

The visit to the Hall of Fame and one of the leading visionaries behind it is a legendary sports journalist from ‘World Soccer’ called Zdravko Reic—he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football facts and figures and a wonderful repertoire of great stories from a life of following the sporting greats, and not-so-greats, around the world. Mr Reic had said that I should come by the Hall of Fame on my way out of the city and he would walk with me to the city limits.

I always feel a bit low when I leave a place which has special memories—Athens, Tirana, Sarajevo, so I was grateful for the opportunity to walk with someone a little bit of the way. As agreed, I arrived at 8am at the Hall of Fame, but as I turned the corner I found about forty people had turned out to wave me off, with Mr Reic walking towards me with a beaming smile.

As I got closer I recognised many of the faces of the Olympians who had shown me round the Hall of Fame.  I felt utterly inspired that these people would have so captured the vision of the Olympic Truce and its possibilities that they would turn out at 8Aam on a Monday morning to join me on the walk. Mr Reic had organised a full turn out of the press for the send off, including Pero Smocic, a brilliant young journalist from the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, who was going to walk with me to Trogir.

Along with the Olympians there were two sweet looking twin sisters that I assumed were the children of one of the athletes, then Mr Reic introduced them, “This is Ana and Lucija Zaninovic (pictured) and they are World and European Champions at Taekwondo and  they have both qualified for London 2012.” It was amazing to think that these young girls could be world leaders in a combat sport. Of course that was by looks, and they are deceptive, but when I spoke to them they had a very familiar steely focus and determination about their goals and competition, which seems to be a pre-requisite for sporting success.

Sarina from the British Consulate had arranged for my rucksack to be taken to the bus station in Trogir to await collection, so I only had my shoulder bag, but that was enough as the temperature was already racing towards 40 degrees and we had 30 km to cover. During the middle section of the walk we were joined by television crews, who Pero thought wanted to capture the story of “Peace walker collapses on Walk for Truce”—they were to be disappointed, but only just. This was the hottest day of the year in Croatia and we were walking during the middle of the day and I was dehydrating fast.

I left Pero at the bus station in Trogir at 5pm.  I had enjoyed his company on the walk and he now had to write 600 words for the newspaper and the deadline was 6pm.  I joked that he had never had to work so hard for a story before. I walked through the narrow streets of Trogir and across the bridges in search of a hotel, which Sarina had helped book, called The Palace—it was a perfect treat at the end of a long day.  I had a bath and then went straight to bed, but ominously wasn’t able to get much sleep as I kept being woken by severe leg cramps.

Eventually I got up and read up on leg cramps on the Internet, which suggested that they were caused by dehydration and lack of salt or stretching after exercise and tended to happen during the night when the calf muscles would contract in a spasm. I had these before and decided to take a couple of Ibrprofen and try to sleep. It didn’t work and soon it was time to get up and get going to Rogoznica.

DAY 122 - SPLIT IN A TOGA

20 August, 2011 –Best Togs

Total:  1149.5 miles Total: 2,232,291 steps

“All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us? “ Reg from Life of Brian by Monty Python

One of the things which you quickly realise as you travel up through Albania and into Croatia is that, especially along the coast, people want to be Italian. Who can blame them—great clothes, great food, great sunglasses and of course great romantics—the Romans even lent their name to the word romance—well they could have done.

There is another reason why the links are so close and that is that the Kingdom of Dalmatia, which stretched the length of Croatia and down as far as Albania, was for at least seven hundred years a Roman province and a Venetian Republic. So the roots to Italy go deep. Nowhere is this connection more visible than in their architecture.

The most impressive remaining example of Diocletian Roman Architecture in Dalmatia is his Palace at Split, which was built for his retirement—a novel concept as Diocletian was the first Roman Emperor to voluntarily leave office. The palace remains largely intact and what is more, it remain lived in which adds greatly to its charm—you can imagine Romans walking through the narrow cobbled streets.

Understandably the link to Diocletian has been seized upon by the city to promote it as a tourist destination and with considerable success. 2011 has already been their best summer ever and they are attracting more and more young people, as well as the traditional Mediterranean cruise ships.

So there was an unexpected surprise when we paid a courtesy call on the Deputy Mayor of Split–Jure Sundov and he presented me with an invitation to the special, once a year, Days of Diocletian Banquet to be held in the vast subterranean basement of the palace. I was told that everyone had to dress in Roman dress and I saw a nice ‘get out’ clause apologising that I hadn’t packed my Roman toga. They had pre-empted this and presented me with a toga—no excuse!

The evening was a fascinating blend of public spectacle and private dining. The public spectacle in the main square was a Roman gladiator contest that the participants seemed to take very seriously as they clattered and thumped each other with wooden swords and pitchforks, with only thin padding on the spikes. The cheering and lust for battle of the spectators—mostly tourists—by the combatants, showed how little we have travelled from the gladiatorial spirit and why concepts such as truce are so difficult to implement. Informed by Slavica’s observation about the attitude of women towards war, I noticed how the women seemed to be more engrossed by the spectacle of the fight than men; and certainly when it came to the judgement of the thumbs up to live or thumbs down to die, there seemed to be a disproportionate number of thumbs down from the ladies if the poor gladiator hadn’t put up a decent fight—though of course, there were no females involved in the contests.

The banquet, in the cool basement, provided welcome relief from the stifling heat above ground. The recipes were all authentic Roman meals and that was very interesting because I grew up under the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall and I recognised some of the dishes, most notably broth with barley, that is a part of Northumbrian cuisine to this day. My political instincts were to try at all costs to avoid being photographed in costume – if there is a negative story, you can be assured which image the picture editor is going to pull from the file to illustrate the ‘political plonker’.

Normally, the only time those pics of you in your House of Lords Induction ‘Santa Claus’ outfit ever get seen in public, are if you have been convicted of fiddling expenses, or have been caught getting up to nefarious activities in a tax-haven. Anyway, out of affection for picture editors, I wanted to give them a few more options for when they are needed—though, as I am not claiming any Parliamentary expenses at all this year and not earning any income either, and have no assets and therefore no need for a tax-haven, it may be tempting fate to think that they may remain on file and unused for a little longer—famous last words!

DAY 121 - SPLIT

19 August, 2011—The Story of Marko Antun De Domnis

Total:  1149.5 miles24,200 steps Total: 2,232,291 steps

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

The history of Split is absolutely fascinating: we had an excellent tour, which in an hour only touched the surface of what was here. The Palace of Diocletian was built in the fourth century, under a strong Venetian influence and architecture.  I will perhaps write more about this emperor who was the last to allow the Olympic Games before making way after his death to Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity, or more precisely, his mother’s, led to the closure of the Olympic Games after twelve centuries of Games and of the truce, because they were deemed a pagan celebration.

This tradition of people claiming both spiritual and temporal (political) power, has been both a disaster and a break on human progress, wherever it has become manifest. Man has always craved power and the ultimate power is for man to claim that he or she speaks, and most crucially judges, for God. They of course all want God’s power, but aren’t so keen on his love or grace:

Enter, Case 1—Marko Antun De Dominis, Archbishop of Split in the early seventeenth century (appointed 1602). Dominis, a Croatian, was considered one of the most educated Europeans of his time, specialising in mathematics, physics, theology and philosophy (especially branches of rhetoric and logic). Many of his explorations in physics brought him into conflict with the church; such as his experiments that showed how a rainbow was created and explained the colour spectrum.  Of course the church taught that this was a sign from God from the time of Noah, so a bishop who produced a glass ball filled with water and created a rainbow in sunlight was asking for trouble.  The same was true of his explanation of tides being caused by the interaction between the earth and the moon. Both are common knowledge now, but heresy in eyes of the early church.

Dominis’s main research focussed on the great schism between the Catholic and Protestant churches following Martin Luther’s Reformation. He wrote a ten volume masterpiece on The Church and State, delivering a series of recommendations about how the church could be unified.  Now explaining rainbows and tides may be one thing, but any suggestion of the church relinquishing it’s hard won political power and wealth, was deemed absolute heresy.  Dominis was summoned to Rome to stand trial before the Inquisition, all copies of his manuscript were ordered to be burned, and it was expected that after a bit of torture by the Inquisition, the troublesome priest would recant and his dangerous ideas would be suppressed.

Dominis being a smart fellow knew this, but thought his ideas were right, so he fled first to Venice – who at the time did not have an extradition treaty for heretics with the Vatican.  From Venice he was invited to England, under the protection of King James I, who then sponsored the entire ten volumes of Church and State – presumably because Dominis’s first demand that the Pope’s rule must be limited from that of Master of the Church to its servant, fitted nicely with the English king’s desire that he should be the Head of Church and State in England.  Instead, he proposed that the Church should be ruled by a synod. Now these views were bad enough, but the last straw was the claim that no one can stand between the Ruler and God: that the Church therefore had no right to instruct the Ruler in any way and that the Ruler had no right to instruct the Church.

Under Pope Urban VIII he was imprisoned and tried by the Inquisition and surprise, surprise was found guilty.   However, Dominis had died in prison some months earlier, so his corpse was exhumed and burnt along with copies of his book and he was condemned to enter perdition and oblivion. But his ideas lived on and almost four hundred years later, many of his ideas were adopted by the Vatican II Council – presumably he is now pleasantly on his way out of purgatory and marching towards beatification.

One of my favourite hymns is ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ and especially the second verse—it was written three centuries too late for poor old Dominis, but it is just in time for us:

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago—
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.