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Ladies and gentlemen,

first of all I'd like to thank you for bringing me to this place. And in the spirit of Sheherazade I would like to tell you a story, if I can. Or, in other words, I'd like to reveal thousand and one story which have never been told and ended in places like this one. First of all the location: in this moment we find ourselves at the foot of the Dinaric mountains, a mountain range, 650km long, which spreads itself between the river  Soča and the Trnovo mountains in the Northwest and the river Drin and the Prokletija massif in the Southeast. This mountain range is known as one of the most interesting and impressing Karst-reliefs in the world.

Besides the uvalas and sinkholes, it's the jamas which make the main elements of karst regions. Only in Slovenia there are 14 200 registered jamas, while it's assumed that it's in reality around 30 000 of them.

Not all of them are beautiful and waste like this one, but every single one of them, whether researched or not, is deeply inscribed into the consciousness of our culture.

Now the main characters of our story:  even during times when this beautiful country started to be colonized, we used to bring our neighbors to the jamas to kill them. In times of animal epidemics we threw dead cows and sheep into them. Just as we threw our  perished dogs into the jamas. 

Our history of the Twentieth century is completely in line with the big and horrifying history of Europe. But it has certain specifications. While Europe waged the war with tanks, fighter bombers and cannons, we continued to kill our people - mostly unloved neighbors - at the jamas. They owed something to us, just like we owed something to them. Now, we could say that our neighbors killed us, but wouldn't that be an obvious lie? How could they have killed us when we are here quite alive in this place, but our neighbors aren't? We are alive because we are the descendants of the murderers and not of the victims. In any case, we should keep that in mind. 

Conscience is, as written in the encyclopedia, the accumulation of  assumed moral ideas about what is good, just and allowed, and what is not. The difference between morality and conscience is that morality can be manipulated, because it exists even when no one  exceeds it, as well as when all exceed it. Conscience is different. Conscience calls us when it's exceeded. Conscience is the pain of human self-consciousness.

Whenever we murdered in beautiful places like this one, we unsuccessfully tried to convince ourselves that the neighbors did us worse. Or even better, that they would kill us if we don't kill them. But, if we really believed in that, we could have killed in public places  and in front of the eyes of the whole world, wouldn't we? But we killed them at the jamas to throw them inside, dead or half dead, and thought our neighbors might disappear in the darkness and abyss of the Karst. Years later, generations later, however, we heard their voices. All our jamas nowadays speak the lost and forgotten languages of our disappeared neighbors, and only we can hear them. If you take strangers to these places, they don't hear anything. Isn't that interesting?

The karst jamas are our petrified conscience. The jamas are the conscience of our countries and homelands which spread between two distanced rivers, the Soča and the Drin. Literature is in general concerned with the research of the human conscience. With respect to this function of literature, all other disciplines seem to be powerless: historiography, psychology, anthropology, sociology.

We can't free our conscience from what we did, said, wrote or thought. We can't extract the countless skeletons our neighbors from the jamas. But we might be able to live aligned with our own conscience by telling every single of these stories. And we shouldn't do it to justify ourselves, as well as to beg for forgiveness. In the face of  skeletons justification doesn't make sense, anyways, and our conscience will never forgive, as long as it exists. But as long as there is the telling of whatever happened, death and hurt might not be in vain. Perhaps only literature can save lives. Perhaps, I said.

Thank you for bringing me to this place and for not murdering me as I murdered you. Because, I am a writer who tries to understand and reconstruct the reasons, emotions and inclinations of the people who killed their neighbors next to the jamas. Without that it might seem as if our dead neighbors died because of some elemental force. But war is no elemental force. Our hate is no cyclonic weather-front coming from the West. We should think of the murderers every day for the murdering to stop.

Many thanks to Veno Taufer and to all those who started this Middle-European literary award in 1986 that is presented in such an important and impressing place. Thank you to the members of the jury who decided that I could fit into the rank of the award winners.

And thank you to the Vilenica-cave for letting us in, alive.​

www.jergovic.com

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