This is the first piece for all subscribers I’m publishing based on my recent vacation in Croatia. It was a great trip and break from work, but also something I’ll be writing about a lot, in some way, in the coming weeks. Enjoy!

I’ve occasionally seen the sentiment that church bells are a kind of nuisance or noise pollution. I often think of this article from several years ago, about how in gentrifying neighborhoods, Black churches sometimes get hit with noise complaints over choir rehearsals or bell ringing:

The question to monitor closely in the coming years is whether that official deference to the place of religion in the public ear is maintained, or whether the penetration of public space by churches begins to be seen as the subversion of “public interests for private gain.”

These are neighborhoods, keep in mind, where the churches are integrated closely with the homes. For a certain kind of secular person, the church doesn’t really deserve to be part of the fabric of society, or the public realm; the noise from the choir rehearsal or church bell isn’t part of the city’s pleasant chaos, but a private imposition on it.

I find it curious that there are people—few, but they’re out there—who claim to love the diversity, energy, and cosmopolitanism of the city, and who will even put up with graffiti or low-level petty crime—but draw the line at church bells. All nuisances are equal, but some are more equal than others.

I found myself thinking about this one late morning on our vacation in Croatia. We had booked an all-day private wine tour—we didn’t know it was private, we figured it would be a little tour bus—but there we were, sitting in the tour guide’s private vehicle being motored around to vineyards all day.

We were staying, during this stretch, in Rovinj, a small seaside city in Istria, Croatia’s northwestern wine and olive country. It’s absolutely stunning: more beautiful than Italy, cheaper, and less touristy. Here’s the city at night, with the bell tower of the Church of St. Euphemia rising over the rest of the skyline.

Here was our view from the first winery, several minutes from town, up on a hill. It was a tiny little place—not that small for Istria’s wine country, but boutique-sized for California, probably even for Virginia. You can see the bell tower in the distance.

We were on our second or third small tasting glass, and enjoying a little platter of Istrian cured ham (just cut by hand off the whole leg, which was sitting in the prep room inside the winery’s little store), estate-grown olives, and local cheese, and it was 11am. And we heard the St. Euphemia church bells tolling.

If you can hear them from all the way out here, yes, they’re pretty loud. And I suppose it becomes difficult, when you have a pluralistic society with dozens of houses of worship with their own different expressions, to have all of that spilling into the public realm all the time.

I don’t know how many people in Rovinj are actually churchgoing or believing these days, but they obviously don’t mind the idea that the church occupies a certain central space in the city and in its identity. To a certain extent, it still orders public life. I mentioned the bells, and our tour guide said that centuries ago, the bell would toll in the evening to signal it was time to close the city gates. That’s a timescale that Americans, I think, have a hard time wrapping their heads around. And it signals a kind of communitarianism that also doesn’t come easily to a lot of Americans.

I think that the best of the NIMBYs are trying to capture this sort of sense of place or identity when they get upset about a burger joint or a dry cleaners being torn down. And I write about how it’s good to seek some sort of continuity in our built environment. A couple of times, when we passed some ancient structure that had been repurposed informally over the centuries, I said to my wife, “See, it’s just like when a doctor’s office takes over an old Pizza Hut.” “Poor Americans,” she would say.

It kind of isn’t. I think it was Peter Blake, in God’s Own Junkyard, who said something to the effect that the equivalent of the church steeple in suburbia is the weathervane on the Howard Johnson’s roof. But it also kind of is. It’s the same human ingenuity and entrepreneurship: taking whatever raw material exists, and doing what you can to repurpose and enliven it. When we code cheap building conversions as downscale, for example, we’re missing the enduring humanity of what’s going on there.

Urbanists, and a lot of non-urbanists for that matter, yearn for this sense of community and place, maybe without having the language to express it, or the built environment in which it can feel earnest. Making places that are worth loving, as James Howard Kunstler puts it, is what urbanism is all about.

To a great extent, suburbia is an alternative to a public realm; everyone has a little yard, instead of a square or a green or a park, for example. That’s why I sometimes ask whether you’d give up some of that private space and comfort for a richer and larger commons. That’s what people do, and have done for longer that than the United States has existed, in a little city like Rovinj. It isn’t “communism.” These are hardworking Catholic villagers. It’s something natural and deeply human.

When people say that America should be more like Europe, they usually mean it should be more secular, have better healthcare, and have fewer guns. But we can also learn from Europe’s old villages, where the streets are car-free, and the church bells still ring.

Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

Nooks and Crannies

Thanks for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of over 300 posts and growing—more than one full year! And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share