The Orcolat

The story

If you ask a Friulian what an earthquake is like, he will not talk to you about seismic waves. He will tell you about an ogre.

He is called Orcolat. In Friulian, orco means a monstrous being: a big, heavy creature, who sleeps beneath the mountains. As long as he sleeps, all is well. The villages stand, the houses do not tremble, the children play in the meadows. But if something disturbs him, if he turns over in his sleep, if he gets angry, the earth moves.

Friuli is a land of earthquakes. It always has been. The old people knew it, and needed explanations: why does the earth, which gives bread and houses, sometimes take everything away in an instant? An explanation, however ancient, was better than silence. So the Orcolat was born. A creature to fear, to respect, and if possible not to wake.

In some villages they also tell how to calm him. It is told, for example, that at Bordano someone once tried to put him to sleep with mushrooms that make you drowsy, and that things did not go as planned. It is a children's story, and it is a fable. Because no mushroom, unfortunately, can stop the earth.

Those who were there on the evening of the sixth of May 1976 knew this well.

It was nine in the evening. Suddenly, the earth began to move.

It lasted fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-nine seconds that nobody has forgotten. The earthquake had a magnitude of between 6.4 and 6.5. It struck the belt of hills north of Udine, and in an instant carried off whole villages. Gemona, completely destroyed, lost four hundred people. Venzone, Osoppo, Majano, and dozens of other municipalities were damaged. In all, more than a hundred villages, between the provinces of Udine and Pordenone. The dead were almost a thousand. The injured over three thousand.

And it did not end there. In the days and months that followed came hundreds of aftershocks. On the fifteenth of September, a shock of 5.9 caused new victims and new collapses, just when many Friulians thought the worst was over.

Since then, for Friulians, the word Orcolat has a deeper meaning. It is no longer only the creature of a fable, but the name of a wound. When they say "the Orcolat", they think of the sixth of May.

And there is another thing Friulians remember with pride. After the tragedy, they did not leave. They stayed. They rebuilt. With a determination that became famous throughout Italy, they put houses, schools, churches, villages back on their feet. They say you must start again together, and that is what they did.

On the sixth of May, every year, Friuli stops to remember.

The ogre, perhaps, still sleeps beneath the mountains. Friuli knows it, and lives with him. Not with fear, but with memory.

Because legends, sometimes, serve this purpose: to give a name to what cannot be stopped, and to decide, together, how to remain standing.