New Missionaries

We have our eight new missionaries in Croatia.   Croatia's border is still closed for non-essential, non-citizens coming into the country, but we were able to get special permission for them to come.

Here are all the Zagreb missionaries and the newbies in front of the Chapel of St. Mark in Zagreb, which has the roof with the Croatian and Zagreb flags.  We are so happy to have them, and they are already assigned to their locations to begin serving.

I am always on the lookout for new animals.  We saw a hedgehog the other day - the first one I've ever seen in the wild.  It was trundling along the road outside of town and by the time we stopped, it was gone.  Yesterday the elders were walking home and saw a woman in distress.  She had run over one and wanted help to know what to do with it.  They were in quandry about what to do with it.  She wanted it buried, but none of them had the means to do that.  I would have suggested a burial at sea (or the nearby River Drava), but I wasn't there.  In the end, they carefully gathered it into a handkerchief and put it under a bush where it would be hidden.  The woman was comforted by that, and the elders got to chalk up another incidence of providing service to people.

It turns out these little guys are very common around here, and although they are reclusive, they stumble about and get seen frequently.

We had a long visit with a potential member yesterday.  The sister missionaries brought her over for lunch and we had a long discussion afterwards.  She is very spiritual and friendly and we talked about a lot of things having to do with the church and living spiritually.  We are planning another lesson with her this week.

  Monday is P-Day for the missionaries and the young elders wanted to go tour an old monastery called the Žiče Charterhouse, about 30 minutes away.  Sadly, when we got there we found it closed.  It is only open Tuesday through Saturday.  One of the draws for this place is that it is in the bottom of a tiny little valley with steep sides.  There isn't anything else there, and it is so quiet and peaceful.  We found that to be true and we didn't want to leave even after we'd seen everything we could from the outside.

We only saw this end of the complex.  We walked to the two guard towers on the corners and a little way beyond on each side.  Through the gate we could see the ruins of a large cathedral.

The restored buildings are white with good roofs.  The ruins are bare stonework and no roof.  There are bushes growing along the tops of the ruined walls, and large bird nests are in several of the windows.  They might be stork nests, although they look to be a might small for them, and we didn't see any birds in them.  My guess is the nests are from large hawks.  The ruins go a long ways beyond this.
    This photo shows a shooting loophole in the corner of the wall, and beyond is a curious bent-cone roof over a tower.

The tiles on that roof are old, and obviously handmade - they are not uniform in size.  Some are considerably larger than the rest.  The reason for the bent shape is beyond me.
  Below is another photo of the outside (mostly-restored) wall.

The piles of rubble along this wall correspond with broken down flying buttresses.  In 1160, when this was built, buttresses were required to keep walls from bowing out and collapsing from the weight of the roof.  Later, walls were held in place by building in (or adding) iron rods spanning the rooms.

This angle shows a surviving buttress, but the stones were clearly on the brink of collapsing.  The photo also shows a sundial on the wall, similar to the one outside our apartment in Maribor.  This one is most curious in that there is another one just around the corner in the shade.  As far as I can tell, the sun doesn't ever shine on the one around the corner.  Maybe it's just for show, but not for telling the time.

The shadow cast by the rod shows the time as about 2:45 pm.  When I looked at my phone, it was 3:42, because sundials don't play silly games like daylight savings time.

This part of the wood-burned sign is in English and gives a concise history of the place.  They translate it as a Charterhouse, but we would call it a monastery.
  The sign also has a map of the entire ruin.

We only saw the walls at the bottom-right of this drawing.