Gonars

In 1968, between Gonars and Fauglis, a sarcophagus of the eighth century was found. Inside were two skeletons, perhaps a Lombard husband and wife, and a bronze cross — and that cross seems to correspond so exactly to the cross of a capsella in the treasury of the cathedral of Cividale that it may well be its matrix, the mould it came out of. From that it has been supposed that the man buried here was a goldsmith, and that the cross in his grave was a tool of his trade. Around Gonars and Porpetto other Lombard things have come up — spearheads and arrowheads, spathae, shield bosses, and among them a parade boss so richly decorated as to suggest a noble or a military commander — which points to a military settlement. Older names survive as well, and they are Roman: Ontagnano is a prediale, one of those field names built on the name of the colonist the land was assigned to, and it comes from Antonius; Sacavan, a piece of ground north of the village, is another; and Jevade is the name of a road, and it means that the road was built raised, on a bed of stones and gravel, in the way the Romans made roads. After the Hungarian raids this plain emptied so far that a document of 1028, by which the emperor Conrad II granted the patriarch the government of these lands, describes them as almost uninhabited, a country of woods and waste.

On the twenty-third of February 1942 the fascist regime opened a concentration camp at Gonars, intended above all for prisoners from what are today Slovenia and Croatia. Two days later the first transport arrived: five thousand three hundred and forty-three internees, one thousand six hundred and forty-three of them children, from the province of Ljubljana, from the camp on the island of Rab and from the camp at Monigo, near Treviso. The camp was dismantled on the eighth of September 1943, immediately after the armistice, and everything was done to make it disappear: the buildings were demolished, the materials were used to build a nursery school nearby, and the ground was turned into a meadow. Only in 1973 was a memorial made, in the village cemetery, the work of the sculptor Miodrag Živković; into its two underground crypts were moved the remains of four hundred and fifty-three Slovenian and Croatian victims, and it is thought that at least fifty more people died in the camp of hunger and of torture. Apart from that memorial nothing of the camp remains, and many people in the village itself do not know it was there. Among those interned were the writer Vitomil Zupan, the poets Alojz Gradnik and France Balantič, the historians Bogo Grafenauer and Vasilij Melik, the sculptor Jakob Savinšek and the politicians Anton Vratuša, Boris Kraigher and France Bučar. Gonars is twinned with Vrhnika, in Slovenia.