#secerets

So I’ve come to a couple of letdowns – not dead ends, but still some bumps in the road. My dads aunt, the one with the mysterious chest at her home in Wien, is away travelling so we can’t go visit her. We will have to call her later when she is back. Another thing is that I read through the scanned pages Christine sent me, and unfortunately the information was focused on why people came to the island, and not why they left. What I can take away from the text though is that during this time period Ponza was occupied by all kinds of people. There were wars, pirates, merchants, the turks invaded, and at some point the pope got involved and they built a large church. So there might be many reasons. Maybe he became a pirate, or maybe he became a missionary. Or like the original story goes, he became a mercenary soldier who went to Europe to make some money.

On a positive note, the woman who guided us through the village museum gave us some information that could be really valuable. She gave us some names of other Ponzers in the village, and also gave us a website adress where you can request files from anyone born in Czechia. So we can turn to them to figure out the parents and hopefully other relatives further back of my great grandfather. Additionally, I might have talked my cousin into doing the DNA test. It would be really useful, whatever results our research brings, to trace where our biological roots come from.  

Yesterday we had the wine tasting with our Airbnb host Lubomir. He has a vineyard just outside of town, and makes the wine as a hobby in his basement. I can honestly say this is some of the best wine I’ve had in all my life.

By the way, he was the one who gave us the name of the woman at the museum, so he has become a bit involved as well. He knows a lot about the area. At the wine tasting we started talking about the church we will visit tomorrow, and he said something like “did you know that there are hidden tunnels under the ground?”

We got really excited, since he was the one who brought it up which means that it’s true. He had even been in them.

Apparently one of the tunnels goe all the way from Kurdejov, the church village, to the town we are in right now – and that is several kilometers away. Imagine how difficult that would have to be to build five hundred years ago. Lubomir said that in places it’s so small that you have to crawl through it, but in other places you can walk upright. The long tunnel has fallen apart so much that you can’t go through it anymore, but other parts of the tunnel are still ok. He said that there are three layers of tunnel, that you can first go down one floor, which is deep on it’s own, but then you can go down another floor and then one more. Down there it’s really dark and cold.

I didn’t ask him about the inscription. I doubt he would even have looked for it. And there is also a chance that the tunnel might have fallen apart at whatever place it was located. I’m not going to get my hopes up too much, because what I learned is that the reason my great Aunt knows about it is because she saw it as a little girl, which is about 80 years ago. A lot has happened in 80 years, not to speak of the German invasion.