see individual bios of Bojan Gagic & Josip Zanki

The collaboration of Bojan Gagic and Josip Zanki

Although they have known each other for a long time, they have been working together since the summer of 1999. Together with Zarko Bosnjak they founded the art workshop "Planine" (Mountains) which takes place on the mountain Velebit. Their performances include "Sunday in the Country", "Manulera" and "How to explain grease to dead Beuys". The ambience "Encyclopaedia of the Dead", exhibited in the gallery "Miroslav Kraljevi?" in Zagreb was loudly received by the Croatian media as extremely controversial. In the theatre "Gavella" in Zagreb they organised the project "Theatre and Myth" in which participated 70 Croatian artists. The experimental project "Mirila" (Measures) is being exhibited for the first time as part of the project "Mutamenti inganni" (Deceiving Mutations) in Scardavilla Cloister where they have been invited by Fabio Cavallucci last May. Petar Stanovic and Zarko Bosnjak have been participating in the project "Mirila" from its inception.

"M I R I L A" [description]

I received the first explanations about construction and the meaning of Mirila from my father. But most importantly, I was the son of the one who inherited the custom and built Mirila himself, thus bestowing upon me a strong sense of ancestral tradition, akin to the Caucasian philosopher hearing in his childhood the Epic of Gilgamesh which was embedded in the tradition of his forefathers from the times before the excavation of the clay tablets.

My interest in and research into the custom was unexpectedly stimulated in 1997 when I came across a large number of Mirila on Velebit, near a village of Ljubotic. From that moment, roaming the mountain and the surroundings, I recorded and researched everything relating to Mirila, comparing my findings with rare scientific texts and the unwillingly shared popular tradition. Mirila relate to death. Moreover, it can be said that they are the origin of our physical life's realisation through death. Therefore, my story departed from a death.

Mirila are always next to a path used by the funeral procession, although the characteristics of these congregations would not befit such definition. In remote parts of Velebit and the surroundings there were villages and hamlets with no churches or cemeteries. When someone died, the body was kept in the house for 72 hours and a vigil was kept with stories from the life of the deceased, praising his qualities and criticising his deeds. After the time had expired, the body was placed on a stretcher made of wood and canvass. Coffins appeared in this area very recently. The procession stopped at the place were other Mirila had been arranged in groups, by the families of the deceased. The body was placed on the ground and the building of Mirilo began. Flat slab-like rocks corresponding to the body's length and width were placed underneath it. A rock of a naturally rounded shape or thus chiselled later was placed at the feet and a similarly shaped but somewhat taller headstone at the head. These two stones measured the deceased's height. It is said that the person had thus been measured, that his Mirilo had been made. The ritual took place at sunrise, the deceased's head turned towards east. A symbol, varying according to the age and the position of the Mirilo, was engraved on the headstone using a sharp tool. This was often done the day after the ritual. After measuring the body, it was placed on the stretcher again and taken to the church and the cemetery. A priest waited there to say the funeral prayers and the body was placed into a grave, often a large hole in the ground were the villagers were buried collectively.

I was concerned with the mystery of measuring the defunct at dawn, the engraved spirals, pentagrams, swastikas, solar crosses and moons on the headstones, later appearing epigrams "caressed (pardoned) by God" *. How did we arrive in the face of God and how does he caress us? I should have remembered; Mirila are turned towards the sun and the deceased's face is turned towards it. Is it his soul that rests on Mirilo that is caressed by the sun god, the sun of justice? As a unique occurrence in the myriad of world's mysteries, Mirila present many questions about the meaning of the ritual and the reason for its inception exclusively among the shepherds in this specific part of Croatia and nowhere else in the world.

When I first found Mirila in 1997, I just stood there and listened. It was late spring, May. I felt amidst the unknown, like a white man in an American Indian cemetery. I stopped, closed my eyes and listened. I realised that I can pass through because the transition from my time to the time of Mirila is in my consciousness. It creates everything and it is created by everything. A distant aim, I thought, for many and for me, too distant. I looked at the peaks disappearing into the distance. The blue is the darkness in which everything dissolves.

photos from Mirila project: