Trasaghis

In July 1944 this territory was caught up in operation Ataman: the Nazi occupiers settled tens of thousands of Cossacks in Carnia, arrived with their families, to use them against the partisans. The Cossack units renamed Trasaghis with the name of Novorossiysk. Then, on the second of May 1945, with the war already over, some German units in retreat attacked the hamlet of Avasinis and massacred part of its population: fifty-one civilians were killed. Thirty years later came the earthquake of 1976, which brought down most of the village, including the church of Santa Margherita: only the bell tower was saved, and the ruins are still there beside the new church. The little church of San Michele dei Pagani at Braulins also survived, badly damaged: it probably arose in Lombard times and was restored in the thirteenth century by the people of the castle of Bragolino, and its small semicircular apse, of squared stone, has the marks of that century.

Everything else was rebuilt: the town hall, to a design by Arnaldo Zuccato, and the church of San Bartolomeo at Alesso, inaugurated in 1988; at Avasinis, in 2000, the Hungarian painter Mészáros György frescoed the ceiling of the church of San Nicolò. At Peonis, in via Chianet, a devotional triptych of the second half of the eighteenth century is preserved, attributed to Biagio Cestari of Osoppo: in the middle the Madonna and Child adored by Saint Anthony of Padua, at the sides Saint John the Baptist and Saint Dominic. And Avasinis, the village of the massacre, is known today for something else: the feast of the raspberry and the blueberry. The fruits grow wild on the slopes around, the women of the village pick them at dawn in summer and turn them into jams, grappas, syrups and elixirs, which were already made here in the nineteenth century. At Alesso, on the shore of the lake of Cavazzo, on the fourteenth of August there are fireworks; at Trasaghis the village feast is that of the cais, the snails caught on the Montisel hill, complete with a race open to all ages.