The Gologorica Line

Not to the central Istrian group its neighbours belong to. Małecki puts it in a north-western wedge running out from the Čepić lake — with Gradinje, Cerovlje, Novaki and Zarečje — which is «odciętego przez wioski rumuńskie od swego centrum», cut off from its own centre by the Romanian villages: Nova Vas, Šušnjevica, Brdo and Grobnik, the Istro-Romanian settlements. The village's speech came from the other side of a Vlach-speaking barrier and was then worked on from all sides by the central dialects.

«ne znamo, mala, bárka, jedán» · «trukińu» for maize, «susêd», «na pütu», «dotaju» · «stiéna, ceno» for cheap, «tiesto, drién, pedestiét, piet» · «jabuka, vuk, puna, vuna, dužni» · «venac, pisak» for sand, «ždribac, sirak» · «nevêste, žene, kozé». That is a page of the family's own village speaking, taken down by a stranger who wanted nothing from it but its vowels.

«besêda, dretva, léto, koleno, člověk» · «kral', pole, l'udi, vol'a» · «klenémo, zet, žetva» · «soka, srieda» · «gnizlo». A different set of reflexes, and Małecki assigns it a different code. The two parishes this line runs through — one where the family married, one where it lived — were, to a dialectologist, two dialects.

Twice in 1894 the paper refers back to it as a known thing. In July: «il rappresentante comunale di Moncalvo, certo Ivić, è quello stesso che negò la sepoltura alla salma del nostro illustre storico Carlo De Franceschi» — the communal representative of Moncalvo, one Ivić, is the same man who refused burial to the body of our illustrious historian Carlo De Franceschi. In August: «colui che già un tempo volle negare la sepoltura alla salma dell'illustre storico istriano Carlo Defranceschi». This archive already had the line about him resting in the humble cemetery of Moncalvo. It did not have the fact that his getting there was contested.

«Invitati gentilmente dall'intera popolazione di questo villaggio, la banda dei dilettanti e molti cittadini di Pisino vennero domenica scorsa alle 4 pom. qui, nel luogo natio dell'illustre storico istriano Carlo Defranceschi» — invited by the entire population of this village, the amateur band and many citizens of Pisino came last Sunday at four in the afternoon, here, to the birthplace of the illustrious Istrian historian Carlo Defranceschi. The whole village went out to the entrance to meet them, and the women and girls had brought a great vase of flowers in the visitors' honour.

Five men from Dol, an hour off, wanted to start something; the village's own people talked them down. Then a large stone landed on the musicians' table and smashed the flower vase, and a second crushed a trumpet. Nobody was found, but «le parve che le pietre fossero state scagliate dal campanile» — it seemed to them the stones had been thrown from the bell tower.

The band formed up to leave and came back at a run: stones were falling at the village exit from every side. Children were got to safety and a second attempt made, and «ci vedemmo assaliti da una decina di contadini, che da una parte con sassate dall'altra colle daghe sguainate ci si slanciarono contro» — about ten peasants came at them, stones on one side and drawn blades on the other. Fifteen wounded, twelve from Pisino and three from the village, two of them seriously. «Una vera carneficina.» One assailant was disarmed of a large flick-knife.

The party went back to Pisino «ad eccezione dei due colpiti gravemente, che rimasero uno nella casa della famiglia Peschle e altro in quella Defranceschi» — except the two badly hurt, who stayed, one in the house of the Peschle family and the other in the Defranceschi house. Four gendarmes came out from Pisino the same night with the district doctor, Dr de Beden.

The paper reports that against Ivić, «causa la sua intemperanza, le sue villane e rozze maniere, il suo interessato odio contro l'elemento italiano si ribellò quasi tutta la popolazione di quel paesello, la quale volle destituito dal posto di delegato comunale» — almost the whole population of that little place rebelled and wanted him removed from the post of communal delegate.

«Il giovine Pensiero» of 15 June 1895 prints the trial, plainly of the same affair — the band, the departure, the stones. Among the witnesses: «Entra Vittorio Defranceschi fu Francesco, Gollogorizza d'anni 23.» Vittorio Defranceschi, son of the late Francesco, of Gologorica, aged twenty-three. He is named in other men's evidence too — one witness says «Vittorio Defranceschi mi diede un calcio», Vittorio Defranceschi gave me a kick; another says the Defranceschi came out of the inn and dragged him off to drink with them. The shouts the court was trying to pin down were «crepa i taliani, bastonemoli» and «živio», and the advocate Dr Trinajstić addressed the bench in Croatian.

Anna, daughter of «N. Sig.r Tommaso Bembo» — Nobil Signor. Bembo is a Venetian patrician name, and there were Bembo at Valle. A De Franceschi of the bishop of Pedena's village marrying into that, in 1795, is a step this archive had no evidence of.

«il Sig.r Piero De Franceschi» — not a plain name in the register but a title, and the same title the parish priest gives the bride's noble father a line later. It sits with what the Gologorica registers already show: a Dominus Josephus Defranceschi standing godparent through the 1760s and 1770s, and a Defranceschi signing as parish priest in the 1780s.

All three publications set aside by letter from the bishop of Parenzo. That happens for haste, for distance, or for people whose business the bishop takes an interest in. Piero was marrying a hundred kilometres from home, in another diocese, which alone would explain a good deal of it.

The named witness is «il sig.r Pietro Basan da Lindar». Lindar is the next parish along from Gologorica, inside the same small diocese of Pedena. He travelled to the far coast with a man from home.

«gli artigiani sopraggiunti dalla Carnia e dal Friuli» — the artisans arrived from Carnia and Friuli. Matejčić is not writing about this family; she is explaining who was building in the Pisino country in the eighteenth century, and the Defranceschi are her example of it. That is a fifth witness to the Carnian crossing, from a discipline that has no stake in the question.

Not a house. «il proprio palazzetto con portico ad arcate» — their own small palace with an arcaded loggia, in the modest but harmonious Zopf manner she describes going up around Pisino castle in the same decades. Carlo told Kobler that his great-great-grandfather Giambattista del fu Leonardo built the Gologorica house in 1711; the style Matejčić describes belongs to the later part of the century. Either the house was rebuilt or enlarged, or Carlo's 1711 is the older core of it.

«blasone sulla facciata» — a coat of arms on the front. This archive has an arms page and a problem on it: Carlo describes his family's arms in a private letter to Kobler — a Greek cross crossed above by two arrows, a pomegranate below, a plumed helm over the shield — and the description matches nothing in any armorial consulted here. There is, on the front of the family's own house at Gologorica, a carved shield. Whether it is that one is a question a photograph would answer.

The register names her four times and always the same way: «Theresia Defranceschi nata Grach». She is the mother at the baptism of Franciscus Antonius on 13 April 1785 and at the baptism of Joannes Baptista on 13 August 1787, and she stands twice as a godmother in the same book. This archive had her as Marianna, carried forward from a first pass over the film. Theresia is what the page says, in a clear hand, in four places. Corrected here and in the people records.

At the 1785 baptism the godfather is the «Archipresbyter Grach[ich] Cherbunensis» — the archpriest of Krbune, the next parish over, and of her own surname. The other godparent is a Catharina Defranceschi. The status column for the whole household reads «Cives»: townspeople, not rustics.

Folio 3 of the book is headed 1785; the earlier reading had it as 1788. The consequence is that Franciscus Antonius was born three years before this archive thought.

The page carrying the 13 August baptism is headed «1782», in a hand that writes its 7s plainly enough elsewhere. It cannot be 1782: its entries run from 13 April to 7 October, folio 5 before it is headed 1786, and folio 7 after it opens on 16 October 1787 and closes with the record of the spiritual visitation of Gologorica on 8 April 1788. The year is 1787 and the heading is the parish priest's slip. It is worth saying out loud, because a heading is the first thing a reader trusts.

A long white block of two and three storeys under a tiled roof carried on projecting wooden brackets, with a tall Istrian chimney of dressed stone. At the near end, exactly as Matejčić describes it, an arcaded loggia: two round arches on stone columns, a stone balustrade, and a flight of stone steps up to it from the lane. Palms and a chestnut in front of it, a dry-stone wall, and a motorbike parked under the balcony. It is a lived-in house on a village street.

Set into the wall, a plain framed tablet in Roman capitals: «[A]N.O DOMINI [17…] / GIO: BATISTA / DE FRANCESCHI / FECCE FARE PER SE / ET HEREDI SVOI» — in the year of Our Lord, Gio. Batista De Franceschi had this made for himself and his heirs. The year is worn and this archive will not put a figure on it from these photographs. The name is not worn at all.

An aedicule with scrolled volutes and a moulded cornice, framing a marble relief: a haloed woman, seated or half-kneeling, her arms flung wide, drapery falling around her. It is a devotional panel set into a private house, of the kind a family put up when it had money and meant to be seen to have it.

Bishop Antun Zara (1601–1621), reporting to Rome in 1606 and 1614, says he holds temporal power over the villages of Škopljak and Tupljak «a od nedavna i nad župom Gologoricom» — and lately also over the parish of Gologorica. That dates the lordship. The benefice itself had been founded in 1444 and fell to the bishops when its last holder died; by Zara's time it had become secular lordship as well, and it was still the bishop's under Maria Theresa, when the last bishop, Aldrago de Piccardi (1766–1785), writes that he obtained the Gologorica benefice from the empress herself and is «gospodar Gologorice, Škopljaka i Tupljaka».

The bishop's people were koloni — colonus tenants, held to the land. Zara reports that his koloni at Škopljak suffer beatings, break-ins, robbery and imprisonment at the hands of the inhabitants of Gračišće and of Bernardin Barbo, captain of the County of Pazin, and that being a friend and counsellor of the archduke has not helped him stop it. At Tupljak it was worse. Under Bishop Zaharija (1550–1562), who could not find sixty florins of provincial tax, the authorities carried off fifteen colonus families with their movable goods and sold them to the Lupoglav lessee Kristofor Gušić, who resold them to one Tuzler, who left them by will to his wife. A clerk of the Congregation wrote in the margin «Commendatur Nuntio». The case was never resolved.

The canons and parish priests swore in 1656 and again in 1661 that the whole revenue of the diocese did not exceed 150 Venetian scudi: thirty went to Carniola in tax, fifteen to the roof, fifty to the keeper of the bishop's palace, ten to the chancellor, fifteen to the four little churches of Pićan. Thirty scudi were left, and on that the bishops lived at Pićan for one, two or three months a year — some for a fortnight, some for eight days. They swore that within human memory no bishop had ever actually resided in the diocese. The cathedral chapter, which had once had twenty canons, had four.

The 1656 and 1661 statements are signed by the diocesan clergy in person, with their ages: Petar Gašprotić, vicar general, 75; Ivan Težak, canon, 61; Juraj Hlaj, parish priest of Gračišće, 78; Juraj Glogovac of Lindar, 56; and «Juraj Kukurin, župnik gologorički, star 52 godine» — George Kukurin, parish priest of Gologorica, aged fifty-two, so born about 1604. The report was carried to Rome by Petar Šestan of Novaki, travelling with «Zec Mihovila, gologoričkog kapelana» — Mihovil Zec, chaplain of Gologorica. Two men who served the family's church before the family got there.

Zara found that in every parish except Pićan and Gračišće the liturgy was Glagolitic — Church Slavonic in the round Croatian letters. He put a stop to it: «Sacerdotes omnes quasi, Petinensibus exceptis, Illyrico Idiomate Sacrum in meo primo adventu celebrabant, iam fere omnes Latino» — at my first coming almost all the priests celebrated in the Illyrian tongue; now nearly all in Latin. He would ordain nobody who could not manage the grammar, and sent his older seminarians to Ljubljana and Graz. Almost all his priests spoke Croatian, Italian and German. Grah adds that the Glagolitic outlived the diocese: the last Glagolitic priest died at Grimalda in 1849.

A year and a book. Not a tradition, not a nineteenth-century recollection, not a review's round number — the baptismal register of the parish of Gologorica, 1661. That register exists, it is in the state archive at Pazin, and this project has already learned how to read that hand and that Latin. It is now the single most specific unopened target the archive has, and it is of exactly the kind it has just spent a fortnight proving it can do.

Four accounts have given four dates for the crossing: the sixteenth century, 1610, the mid-seventeenth century, about 1700. 1661 is a document, and it sits inside the mid-seventeenth-century answer. It does not overturn the others — the Rijeka fond genuinely starts at 1610, and Hauptmann in 1945 reported an inventory from the beginning of the seventeenth century in the house itself. What 1661 gives is a floor under one of them.

Farmers, merchants and weavers, before the jurists and physicians. Weavers. The 1679 headmen's list from the Val di Gorto that this archive published is explicitly a list of «tessitori», and Brhan's study of the migration says the weavers came especially from the Quartiere di Socchieve. The trade runs the whole length of the road.

The same authors, describing the Rijeka fond, state plainly: «ustanovljeno je da je u kutijama došlo do spajanja fondova dviju obitelji De Franceschi koje zajedno nemaju ništa osim istarskog zavičaja i prezimena» — it was established that in the boxes the fonds of two De Franceschi families had been merged, families which have nothing in common but an Istrian homeland and a surname. And the state archive at Rijeka holds a separate fond titled «Obitelj de Franceschi iz Šegeta» — the De Franceschi family of Seget. This site publishes both a Gologorica line and a Seget line and has always been careful to keep them apart; the carvings say the same thing, since the Seget-Umag arms are a lion and a star and the Gologorica arms a cross, two arrows and a pomegranate. But any fact this archive has taken from a Rijeka box now has to be checked against which family that box belonged to. That is a real piece of housekeeping and it is going on the research log.

A trial at Pazin over petards. «Medju odsudjenimi nalazi se i jedan Istran talijanske narodnosti, sin naime talijanskoga povjesničara gospodina Karla de Franceschi-a posjednika iz Gologorice (po njegovu Moncalvo) obćine Pazin.» Among those condemned is an Istrian of Italian nationality, namely the son of the Italian historian Mr Karlo de Franceschi, landowner of Gologorica — in his usage Moncalvo — commune of Pazin. A seal reading «Circolo Garibaldi sezione Pisino» was produced at the hearing. That son is Camillo, and the Trieste society's own guide says he was sentenced to two years' hard imprisonment at Gradisca after an explosion at the unveiling of a monument in 1889. Here is the other side reporting it — and note how it fixes the father: landowner, of Gologorica, «po njegovu Moncalvo», in his usage Moncalvo. Even the name of the village was contested.

«Gologorica pred sudom» — Gologorica before the court — ran in five instalments from 21 November 1895 to 2 January 1896. Two men of this surname appear in it, and not as gentry. 28 November 1895: «porinuli ga neki u konobu Antuna Defranceschi» — some of them shoved him into Antun Defranceschi's tavern. 5 December 1895: «za koju mu je kasnije Viktor Defranceschi rekao, da je Frane Rabar» — Viktor Defranceschi told him afterwards that it was Frane Rabar. Rabar is the surname on the stone standing next to the family monument in that cemetery today.

A debate about a new road: «posto bijaše cesta istočno od Gologorice izmjerena, kojom bi se dolina Raše kod stancije Defranceschi (Zamporovica) jedino zavojima dotaklo» — since a road east of Gologorica had been surveyed, which would reach the Raša valley at the Defranceschi farmstead (Zamporovica) only by hairpins. The same page also spells it Zamperovica. A stancija is a farmstead, and this one has a place-name of its own. It is a thing to look for in the cadastre, and it is the family's land under a name this archive has never seen.

A Čakavian dialogue in «Pučki prijatelj», two men arguing about the history of Lovran: «Neka zame storiju od De Franceschi, onega z Gologorice, pa će na str. 85. nać ovo ča sam ti ja rekal… Ča je oni De Franceschi pisal, to je za njih bilo od vavek sveto Pismo.» Let him take De Franceschi's history — the one from Gologorica — and on page 85 he'll find what I told him… What that De Franceschi wrote was for them always Holy Scripture. Written in dialect, twenty-eight years after his death, by people on the other side of the argument, and they are still checking him page by page.

«Joannes, Aloysius», son of Leonardus of house 8, born 4 November 1876. Against his death, aged twenty-one years eleven months and twenty-four days: «Miles Polae sclopeto se interfecit» — a soldier, at Pola, he killed himself with a gun. The household page says it in slightly different words, «ictus bolae sclopeti se interfecit», and the parish index repeats it. Two entries in two books, and neither of them looks away.

«Ersilia-Maria», of house 87, born 8 December 1878, died at thirty-five years eight months and five days, and the adnotatio reads «in nosocomio (amens)» — in hospital, of unsound mind. Nine days after the war began. That is the whole record of her.

«Mortuus Tergesti in nosocomio.» Leopoldus Antonius, of house 8, born 29 January 1884, died in hospital at Trieste two days before his thirty-eighth birthday, leaving a wife and children whose page carries a faint pencil note about emigrating.

Against four of the thirteen children of Antonius the mason, the priest wrote «degit Americae» — he lives in America. Nicephorus born 1890, Josephus born 1892, Albina born 1900, Joachim born 1907. One of those, Albina, this archive has already followed onto the Conte Rosso out of Genoa in August 1922. The other three are still to be found.

Across the nine households the conditio column runs: agricola, lapidarius, murator, sartor, civis, mercator, nauta, obstetrix — and, for Julius of house 9, «director scholae industrialis», director of the industrial school. A tailor born in 1785, a stonecutter, masons, a midwife, merchants, a sailor and a headmaster, in one surname in one village.

The parish of Boljun, eight kilometres north of Gologorica, kept its registers in Glagolitic script: marriages from 1576, baptisms from 1598, confirmations from 1588. The original is in the archive of the Croatian Academy at Zagreb, III c 4, and Dražen Vlahov published it in facsimile with a Latin transliteration. Kurelić went through it to ask a political question — whether Habsburg subjects avoided marrying Venetian ones — and in doing so printed the names.

Klara Kovač and Anton Kaligarić, 1585. Grgora Matijašić and a Gašparić, 1590. Agata Ilijašić and Šimun Gašparić, 1603. Marina Sergović and Juraj Ančić, 1607. Ivana Križmanić and Ivan Gortan, 1608. Ivan Cinić and an Elena, 1608. Six households of Gologorica, named, dated, and all of them Slavic — Kovač, Kaligarić, Matijašić, Gašparić, Ilijašić, Sergović, Ančić, Križmanić, Gortan, Cinić.

No De Franceschi. Not in the Gologorica marriages, not anywhere in two hundred and twenty-one pages about the sixteenth-century county of Pazin. That is a controlled negative and it is worth as much as a positive: the family's first recorded appearance at Moncalvo is 1661, Carlo told Kobler in 1876 that «si stabilirono in Istria intorno al 1700», and the village that Gian Battista married into in the 1660s was a Slavic village of Kovači and Gašparići that had been there all along.

Kurelić lists the boundary disputes of the county, and one of them is «Gologorica and Tremaun, 19 February 1472», with the captain of Pazin sitting as one of the commissioners. The original is in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna; Milko Kos published a Croatian translation in «Pet razvodov», pp. 189–202. That is the earliest document naming Gologorica that this archive has found — 189 years before the family arrives in it.

In a footnote listing the oldest surviving parish registers of Istria, Kurelić gives Svetvinčenat baptisms from 1569 and marriages from 1581 — among the very oldest in the province, and all in the State Archive at Pazin. The Carnian household there was traced through a household book of 1734. The registers behind it run a hundred and sixty-five years further back than that.

Born at Gologorica on 31 January 1909. Died at Dachau on 7 August 1945. The camp was liberated on 29 April 1945, so a death there in August is a death among the thousands who did not survive being freed — typhus was still killing the liberated well into the summer. He was thirty-six. Nothing else about him is in this archive, and finding out how a man from this village came to be in that camp is now a piece of work in its own right.

Born at Gračišće on 12 March 1892, died in New York City on 26 April 1940, with six separate citations behind him in the tree. This site's Diaspora page has argued that the United States records held only one family it could trace back to Gračišće — Basilio and Dario, of Gallignana. Here is a second, and a much better documented one.

Born at Gologorica on 20 November 1942, died 15 January 2023. This archive has published that the surname is down to about ten people in Croatia and that the last of the Gologorica line left. A man born in that village in the middle of the war lived until two years ago.

Born at Gologorica 28 October 1860, married a Domazetovich, died at Trieste on 22 June 1941. One more of the quiet westward moves the archive keeps finding one at a time.

The tree carries a run of Gologorica deaths this site has never had: Francesco, died 13 September 1719. Gian Battista, born 1673, died 11 September 1743. Cattarina, died 28 September 1740. Gisanna, born 1684, died 20 April 1774. Antonius, born 1742, died 17 September 1802. Cattarina, born 1756, died 21 May 1792. Gian Battista, born 1753, died 23 January 1813. Set beside the 1711 tablet and Carlo's «il vecchio stipite» dead in November 1686, that is most of a century of the house filled in.

«Na trgu je pokraj crkve velika kamena palača obitelji De Franceschi, dvokatna građevina s balkonom i portalom iz 1711., ukrašena grbom i natpisom te reljefom s prikazom Isusa. Mnogi drže da je to jedan od najljepših primjera skromne palače seoskih posjednika, funkcionalna i jednostavna u svojim dimenzijama i ukrasima.» — On the square beside the church is the large stone palace of the De Franceschi family, a two-storey building with a balcony and a portal of 1711, ornamented with a coat of arms, an inscription, and a relief showing Jesus. Many hold it one of the finest examples of the modest palace of a rural landowner, functional and plain in its dimensions and its ornament.

When this archive first tried to have the house drawn, it said the relief panels above the door were invented by the image model, then corrected itself from the family's own photographs, which show an aedicule with scrolled volutes and a haloed figure. A published architectural survey now names it: a relief of Christ. The tablet, the arms and the figure are all real, all of 1711, and all still there.

This is the correction that matters. Gologorica changed hands until 1443, when the provost of Pazin, Andreas Schuel, bought it and with other property founded a benefice — an endowment to maintain priests bound to say Mass three times a week in St Nicholas's at Pazin. The Emperor Frederick III then took the right of appointment. The holders were, to the eighteenth century, mostly the captains of Pazin or the bishops of Pedena; then the Marquis de Prié; then Charles Antoine Biotz; and «naposljetku od 1772. obitelj De Franceschi koja je gologorički beneficij držala u zakupu do ukidanja feudalnih odnosa 1848. godine» — and finally, from 1772, the De Franceschi family, who held the Gologorica benefice on lease until the abolition of feudal relations in 1848.

This site has carried the lease from Carlo's own letter to Kobler — the «affitto fermo» of the bishop of Pedena, renewed by every bishop, which is why the village is missing from the 1498 urbarium: «perchè ne era Dominus il vescovo di Pedena». The two accounts fit together rather than contradict. The bishops were among the earlier holders of an endowment founded in 1443; the family took the lease of it in 1772 and kept it for seventy-six years, through the suppression of the see of Pedena in 1788 and out the other side, until feudal tenure itself was abolished. Seventy-six years is a long time to be the man who collects, and it is the economic fact behind everything else on this page.

The historic core sits on a narrow ridge running north to south. The walls were an elongated irregular quadrangle; only a small stretch survives with the north gate, the rest pulled down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or built into the fronts of the houses. Deep ditches with drawbridges defended the north and south ends and were gradually filled in and turned into gardens and vineyards. The walls are thought to be sixteenth-century, put up after Gologorica had been taken and burned in 1463, 1508 and 1511.

The parish church of Sts Peter and Paul is a seventeenth-century single-nave baroque rebuilding of an older Gothic church, of which there survive a Glagolitic inscription of the priest Juraj Kaligarić, 1595, an Imago pietatis relief of 1446, and a fifteenth-century chalice. The bell tower was begun in late Gothic and finished in 1740 — twenty-four metres, three storeys, fine ashlar, biforate openings on the third. And above the north entrance, by the pond, the oldest building of all: the small Romanesque church of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

«Iz Gologorice potječe i plovan Mikula Gologorički, notar i pisac hrvatske glagoljaške verzije često spominjanoga Istarskog razvoda iz 1325.» — From Gologorica came the parish priest Mikula Gologorički, notary, and the writer of the Croatian Glagolitic version of the Istrian Boundary Settlement of 1325 — the great delimitation between the patriarch of Aquileia, the count of Gorizia and Pazin, and Venice. One of the foundation documents of Croatian literacy was written by the priest of this parish, three hundred and fifty years before the family reached it.

«ŽAG, MKK – Župni arhiv Gologorice, Matična knjiga krštenih (1691–1763)» and «ŽAG, MKU – Župni arhiv Gologorice, Matična knjiga umrlih (1646–1777)». The parish archive at Gologorica — baptisms from 1691, deaths from 1646 — cited as a working source by a historian publishing in 2024. This site's Parish Books page says flatly that Gologorica has no film at all and that its registers are the great absence in every collection searched. They are not lost. They are in the parish, they are being used, and their dates are now known. Deaths from 1646 would reach a generation earlier than anything this archive holds for the village.

On 2 October 1722 the archpriest Petar Kruzila (Petrus Cruzilla), parish priest of Gologorica, walked the twenty-one kilometres to Sveti Petar u Šumi to discharge a vow. He had refused to believe the image wept. Then, riding, he came off his horse and was struck deaf where he fell, and kept his bed forty days; having made his vow to the Virgin he felt better at once, and «wished to tell everyone of his case and of his doubt». He stayed in the parish until he died there on 25 September 1731, entered in the Gologorica death register as «Reverendissimus dominus Petrus Cruzilla, protonotarius apostolicus, archipresbyter et parochus Gologoriziae».

He is the priest who was baptising at Gologorica in 1722 — the man whose hand wrote the entries for the household that had cut ANNO · DOMNI · 1711 over its door eleven years before. The paper cites him as the regular administrator of baptisms there in that year. Whoever of this family was born, married or buried at Gologorica between about 1720 and 1731 was written down by a deaf apostolic protonotary who had fallen off a horse for doubting a miracle.

The same paper, citing Camillo De Franceschi's «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino», notes that Antonio Bartolomeo Bono, vice-captain and administrator of the County of Pazin in 1723–24, «porijeklom je bio iz riječke patricijske obitelji» — was of a Rijeka patrician family, and had read law at Padua in 1705–6. The traffic between Fiume's patriciate and the County of Pazin's administration ran both ways, and that is the same channel Kobler's «venuto da Pisino» household went along in 1740.

«Župa Gologorica spominje se 1324., a vjerojatno je postojala i ranije» — the parish is mentioned in 1324 and probably existed earlier, within the diocese of Pedena. Which is a year before Mikula Gologorički, priest of this same parish, wrote the Croatian Glagolitic version of the Istrian Boundary Settlement of 1325.

In the index: «FRANCESCHI C. de — 170, 189, 192, 193, 211, 263», with «L'Istria, note storiche, Poreč 1879» cited at pages 10–11, 38ff, 45 and 67. Križman uses him for the topography of the Istrian war of 177 BC, for the siege engines at Nesactium, for the identification of Livy's lost towns, and for the question of whether the Pontic Histri and the Adriatic Histri are one people. He sits in the text beside Kandler, Gnirs, Benussi, Zippel and Müller — which is the canon. Ninety-nine years after he published it, a professional classicist was still arguing with his book rather than around it.

«Najmanja je vjerojatnost da ćemo pogriješiti ako glede Mutile prihvatimo Kandlerovo, De Franceschijevo i Gnirsovo mišljenje koje na temelju sličnosti imena poistovjećuje Mutilu s Medulinom» — we are least likely to be wrong if, for Mutila, we accept Kandler's, De Franceschi's and Gnirs's view identifying it with Medulin; and for Faveria they propose Mutvoran. Two lost towns of Livy, placed by a man from Gologorica, still the best answer in 1979. And Medulin is one of the towns in the southern-Istrian cluster this archive has just opened.

Gnirs proposed that the ancient Alùon was a settlement of the Istrian interior, on the Veli potok between Pićan and Gologorica, at the place where the Roman inscriptions CIL V 322, 323, 424 and 425 were found. Križman indexes Gologorica at page 98 for it. This archive's story starts in 1644 with a baptism register. There were people writing on stone in that valley sixteen centuries earlier, and the stones have numbers.

The book is out of print and second-hand copies are scarce, but the full text is online, uploaded to both Scribd and idoc.pub. It was read there in September 2026. A proper library copy is still worth having, because the apparatus is the point of the book.

«In the village of Gola Gorica (12 km from Pazin) the people's militia had, according to one report, armed itself with historic sabres. Inspection established, though too late, that the militia had been quartered in the country house of the De Franceschi family.» He adds why the name meant something to him: the family «gave good Istrian historians through two generations. Carlo (d.) and his son Camillo (aged 70), together with Benussi, have deserved most of the history of Istria.»

Camillo, the present owner, «was director of the library in Pula, and is now somewhere in Italy». The house had therefore been sequestered and put under the Administration of National Property for Istria. In 1943 the partisan hospital from Pazin was moved into it because of the bombing. After the German advance it was no longer kept up — the owners had stopped coming for the summer. After the German capitulation it served as a guardhouse for the people's militia, and the former District Committee of Čepić «carried off four cartloads of various things». Hauptmann compares it to the emptied castle of Baroness Hütterot on Sv. Andrija by Rovinj — except that here not even the thin list of removed items that Rovinj had was left behind. The Čepić committee listed only what remained, and did that post festum.

«Sorting the chaos in the house, I reassembled the library, in which all the scholarly works of the two men are now brought together.» «The library itself is, for Istrian questions, exemplary. I gave up any listing of the books, because one may safely assert that the library, as regards the historiographical questions of Istria, is complete.» He names the runs: Atti e memorie della Società Istriana di archeologia e storia patria, the Archeografo Triestino, Memorie storiche Forogiuliesi, the Archivio Veneto. Then great numbers of single issues of the most varied journals, kept for their Istrian content, and newspaper cuttings — their own and other people's. And an offprint collection sorted by subject into boxes on a register system, so that specialised literature on archaeology, or on the biographies of Istrians, or on folklore, could be found at once. The non-scholarly part: «old and new editions of Petrarch, Dante, Tasso, in general a great number of books of the most varied content — old editions of Machiavelli, bibles, the Venetian statutes.»

«The manuscripts of Carlo and Camillo are saved in fair number, though they were scattered everywhere.» He had too little time to separate published from unpublished — but a glance convinced him they all had to be kept, and his reason is a working historian's: «It happens, for instance, that in composing a work the writer used his own notes and those of his forebears, and of course did not carry the whole of that into the printed work.» He names Carlo's Gita a Cosgliaco and «a collection of biographies of famous Istrians which Pietro De Franceschi gathered fifty to a hundred years earlier» — an ancestor-collector this archive has never had a word about. And the Istrian travel accounts: Gita a Colmo, Bogliuno, Rovigno.

«The noble family De Franceschi has lived, according to the material found, at least from the beginning of the XVII century at Gola Gorica. Beside the modest manor — if the house may be called that — it possessed some land in the neighbourhood. An inventory from the beginning of the XVII century is preserved, which gives a fine insight into those circumstances.» This archive has cited that sentence at second hand for a year and treated it as a rival date to 1650 and 1700. Read whole, it is an archivist's inference from a box of papers in a house, in one afternoon, with a militia billeted in it — not a documented arrival. He is describing the same thing the Rijeka fond describes: a collecting family whose oldest paper is older than the family's presence.

Account books old and new; lists of dues from the Gola Gorica district, paid to the church or directly to the lordship, running down into Carlo's and Camillo's own correspondence. That correspondence had once been well ordered; he found it «all scattered» and could only roughly put it back. And then material from around Pazin that had strayed into the family's ownership through the historiographical enthusiasm of its two representatives: · Protocols of the circulars of the Pićan bishop Aldrago Antonio de Piccardi, about 1780 · «Atti di nomine e investiture dai parochi della Contea di Pisino», 1728–1776 · a copy of the Venetian–Istrian chronicle called the Barbara · a chronicle of Pula and its district written in 1726 by a Pula archdeacon · and «especially a complete population census of the town of Rovinj, 1650–1736» — which he calls a rich find · the urbarium of the castle of Momiano, 1584/5, in two volumes — «a small consolation for the destroyed urbarium in Pazin castle»

«The search for treasure written in Glagolitic was for the first time crowned with success. It is known that the Italians rooted out Glagolitic in stone and on paper. While some stone inscriptions are still found, on paper Glagolitic is very rare.» «For the church at Hum (Colmo) a parish register from the middle of the XVII century has now been found, written largely in Glagolitic — and likewise one for the confraternity of the church of St Roch near Hum.» So there was not one Glagolitic Hum book in this house but at least two, and the Rijeka fond's «income book of the parish church at Hum, 1610–1685» is a third description of the same small hoard. This is the answer to the question this archive asked yesterday about Vlahov's published Registro della chiesa parrocchiale di Colmo: the family had the Glagolitic books of Hum, more than one of them, and an archivist carried them out of the house in August 1945.

The last line of the inventory, and the largest claim in it: «A collection of charters — mostly parchment — rotuli, papal bulls… from the year 1201 onward, for various Istrian towns, completes the find at Gola Gorica.» Signed: Zagreb, 12. VIII. 1945. F. Hauptmann.

Three things. The house was emptied twice — by four cartloads to Čepić and then by the archivist, and only the second man wrote anything down. The «seventeenth century» date for the family at Gologorica is Hauptmann's reading of a collection, not a document, and it should never again be set against 1661 as though the two were rival records. And the family's own papers are the smaller half of what was in that house: the bishop's protocols, the Rovinj census, the Momiano urbarium and the Glagolitic books of Hum were other people's records, gathered by two historians, and they are the reason this family's archive begins two centuries before this family does.

«Sadržajno je raznolika i značajna zbirka obitelji (1610-1874), u kojoj se nalazi najstarija knjiga u fondu, knjiga prihoda župne crkve u Humu (1610-1685), pisana glagoljicom, ujedno i jedina u fondu na hrvatskom jeziku.» The oldest book in the fond is the income book of the parish church at Hum — Colmo — for 1610 to 1685, written in Glagolitic, and it is the only item in the whole fond in Croatian. It sits in series 3, «Zbirka obitelji» — the family's collection, the things they gathered — not in series 1, the family's own papers.

A family archive's earliest date is the date of the earliest object in it, and this family produced a historian. The finding aid says as much: «Nema podataka tko je bio sakupljač gradiva, ali najvjerojatnije je to bio Carlo De Franceschi, a moguće je da je to činio ili nastavio sakupljati njegov sin Camillo» — no record of who assembled the material, but most probably Carlo De Franceschi, and possibly continued by his son Camillo. So 1610 is the year of a Glagolitic parish account book from a village eleven kilometres away, picked up by the man who wrote the history of Istria. It is evidence about Carlo's library, not about his ancestors' whereabouts. The four dates this archive has been juggling — 1610, the mid-seventeenth century, 1661, about 1700 — are now three, and 1610 was never one of them.

The arranged series say it plainly. 1.1 Family papers in the strict sense: probate 1794–1800, lawsuits between family members 1788–1801, papers on individual members 1791–1934. 1.2 Papers on the family's estates: 1703–1783 — contracts of sale and exchange, land let out, share-farming of livestock. 2. Miscellanea 1804–1926. 3.1 Religious bodies 1610–1805. 3.2 Secular bodies, economy and administration 1709–1874. The family's own earliest paper is therefore 1703 — three years after the arrival Carlo himself claimed, and eight years before the date cut over the door of the house.

The content note is the best short description of this family's economics anyone has written: «Kupoprodajni ugovori, ugovori o permutacijama, knjige kreditiranja i potraživanja svjedoče o intenzivnom bogaćenju obitelji tijekom 18. stoljeća, trgovačkom i financijskom aktivnošću, putem posuđivanja novca i otkupa dugova u gologoričkom kraju, ali i sve do Kastva, Mošćenica, Labina, Kranjske i drugih udaljenih mjesta.» Contracts of sale and exchange, and books of lending and of debts owed, witness the family's intensive enrichment through the eighteenth century by trade and finance — lending money and buying up debts — in the Gologorica country and as far as Kastav, Mošćenice, Labin and Carniola. That is not a farming family that prospered. It is a money-lending and debt-buying business, run out of a village, reaching a hundred kilometres. It explains the arcaded palazzetto, it explains six proprietor households by 1820, and it is exactly the Carnian merchant profile the migration literature describes.

The last sentence of the provenance note is the one this archive will be quoting for years: «Zbog nepoznavanja povijesti obitelji do sređivanja 1990. godine gradivo ovog fonda je bilo spojeno u jedan fond s gradivom jedne druge obitelji De Franceshi, onoj iz Šegeta kod Buja.» Through ignorance of the family's history, until the arrangement of 1990, this fond's material was joined into a single fond with that of another De Franceschi family — the one from Šeget near Buje. Before that there was only a temporary list, «superficial and inaccurate». The fond was separated and arranged by the archivist Ines Krota. So for forty-odd years the Carnian family and the Cretan family were one archival fond in one building, because nobody knew they were two families. This site has spent a year arguing that they are separate, against a monograph that calls them two branches of one house. The archive that holds both of them reached the same conclusion in 1990, and had to physically pull them apart to act on it.

The material was taken in in 1948, out of Pula or Poreč, with the rest of the Istrian holdings that had been prepared for evacuation, and entered in the general inventory at no. 92, page 142 — never entered in the accessions book at all. In 1950 one bundle was returned to the Naučna biblioteka in Pula along with three miscellanea fascicles, said to have come from the Financial Department of the Regional People's Committee for Istria. That bundle is somewhere in Pula, and this archive does not know what is in it. The whole fond is 0.70 metres, seven boxes, in Italian, Croatian and Latin — and open to the public.

HR-DARI-382, «Obitelj de Franceschi iz Šegeta», runs 1412–1943: 2.60 metres, twenty-six boxes and four folders, archivally arranged. Nearly four times the Gologorica fond and starting two centuries earlier — which is what an estate-owning house with a private library leaves behind, and a reminder that the two families are not comparable in anything but a surname. The 1412 start deserves the same scepticism as 1610 until somebody says what the document is.

One more thing about that Hum income book. In 1999 the State Archive in Pazin published «Glagoljski rukopis iz Huma (1608.–1639.): iz Registro della chiesa parrocchiale di Colmo», edited by Dražen Vlahov — a Glagolitic register of the parish church of Colmo, which is Hum, covering 1608 to 1639. The family's book runs 1610 to 1685. Same parish, same script, same kind of book, overlapping decades. They may be one manuscript, or two halves of one register that were separated when the family's papers went to Rijeka and the parish's stayed in Istria — or they may be two different books. The fond description and the printed edition do not cite each other, so nobody has said. The edition costs thirteen euro and is on the acquisitions list. Until then this is a question, not a claim.

«A Moncalvo di Pisino nel 1820 erano presenti 6 fuochi dei possidenti De Franceschi; Maria, Giuseppe, Giobatta (di Gallignana), Leonardo e Antonio. Erano la famiglia più influente dell'area in questione che comprendeva una decina di villaggi abitati compattamente da contadini croati.» At Moncalvo di Pisino in 1820 there were six hearths of De Franceschi proprietors — Maria, Giuseppe, Giobatta (of Gallignana), Leonardo and Antonio. They were the most influential family in a district of some ten villages inhabited solidly by Croatian peasants.

Every other proprietor in the list is given by first name alone, because they are of the place. One of them is qualified — «di Gallignana». The cadastral clerk needed to say which Giobatta he meant, and the way he distinguished him was by the village he came from. So in 1820 there is a Giovanni Battista De Franceschi, identified as a man of Gallignana, holding property at Moncalvo — the two villages this archive has never been able to join, in one line of one document.

It is not proof. It does not say he is our Joannes Baptista, the farmer of house 5 at Gračišće whom the register catches in 1787 and who would have been in his sixties in 1820; Giovanni Battista is the commonest name in both villages, and a De Franceschi of Gallignana holding land at Moncalvo could be a cousin, a purchaser or a son-in-law as easily as an ancestor. What it is, is the first object of any kind that puts the two names together — and it tells this archive exactly which sheet to order. The Catasto franceschino for the Comune di Gallignana, Distretto di Pisino, is at the Archivio di Stato di Trieste, and its Moncalvo counterpart with it. Brhan read them. So can we.

«The most influential family in an area of some ten villages inhabited solidly by Croatian peasants» is a much harder statement than «possidenti». Six proprietor households of one surname in one small village, in an Austrian cadastre made for taxation, is a local gentry — which is what the arcaded palazzetto with the shield on its façade was already saying, and what «da modesti possidenti» in Carlo's biography was quietly denying. Both can be true across a century: modest when they arrived, dominant by 1820, and the cadastre is the year the balance shows.