Moena

In the middle of the village there is the statue of an Ottoman janissary. Tradition has it that he was wounded at the siege of Vienna in 1683, that he ended up here, that he fell in love with a woman of the place and founded a family; and every year, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first of August, Moena devotes a festival to him called La Turchia. It is a Ladin village: at the last census that asked, three inhabitants out of four declared Ladin as their mother tongue, and Moena is one of the eighteen comuni of Ladinia and one of the six of the Comun General de Fascia. But it is also one of the eleven of the Magnifica Comunità di Fiemme, which is another valley and another community: until the nineteen twenties it was called Moena di Fiemme, and to Fiemme it still belongs.

The coat of arms, recognised in 1929, shows a boatman pushing his craft with a long pole, moving from the night towards the day — a strange image for a village that stands at twelve hundred metres among the Dolomites. The name is less strange: it comes from a word of the Venetan and Ladin dialects meaning crumb, from the Latin for soft, and here it means soft ground, marshy. The first mention is of 1164 and is the consecration of the church of San Vigilio by the bishop of Trento; the tradition that before that date Moena belonged to Bressanone, says the source, finds no support in the documents. Language here too is drawn by the old borders: Forno, down along the Avisio, was an autonomous comune until 1928 and still speaks a Trentino dialect, not the Ladin of the rest of the comune. And from Moena came Domenico Chiocchetti, who during the Second World War decorated the Italian Chapel in the Orkney Islands.