Chions

The name appears for the first time in 1072 as villa Caum, then as villa Chaum and as Caono. Giovanni Frau put forward, with reservations, two possible origins — a nickname given to a haughty person, or else the word for a pumpkin; Pier Carlo Begotti's later reading is decidedly more convincing, and brings it from the Latin cavus, an artificial canal. As for the final s, it is not etymological at all: it was added by analogy with other Friulian place names. This is fertile ground, rich in water, and the Romans squared it off: Chions lay within the agro of Concordia and the territory was centuriated, and that Roman division of the fields can still be read in today's countryside. Of the medieval village there remains a patch of raised ground where the centa stood, the small rural fort — and perhaps its tower too, because the bell tower of the parish church may have been made out of it. In the frazione of Taiedo the church of Sant'Andrea was built in 1420 and consecrated the year after, and there the people and count Sbrojavacca together held the right to elect their own parish priest: a legal institution that lasted until 1938.

Under Venice Chions lived quietly for centuries, with one exception, and the exception is remarkable. Between 1575 and 1585 the fief of Tajedo was the centre of a dispute between the Altan and Savorgnan families; and into that quarrel over one small fief there came the doge and the patriarch of Aquileia, and then the grand duke of Tuscany, the duke of Ferrara, the duke of Savoy, the archduke of Austria and even the kings of Spain and of France. At Torrate the castle of the Sbrojavacca was demolished in 1820 and only its tower is left. And the last thing to be lost here was the language. Chions was a Friulian-speaking comune, and within a few decades Venetian took its place: a survey by Amedeo Giacomini, at the end of the nineteen sixties, found Friulian in a very poor state, by then limited to the old alone; in those same years Giuseppe Francescato noticed in the local Venetian some weak traces of Friulian, and noticed where they lay: not in the lexicon, but in the morphology, and particularly in the way verbs are conjugated. On that basis Chions was left out of the official list of the Friulian-speaking comuni.