The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  Minutes after we have settled in the living room of Elena’s parents’ apartment, Paolo proudly produces his workbook from forty-four years ago. It bears the name of the company, his registration number, and the dates of his employment:

  CAPAG CH, 7265, 5.5.66, 14.7.66

  In the summer of 1966, Paolo worked on the pipeline’s construction for two months as a driver, ferrying workers to and from the site, morning and evening. He had been employed by a Swiss company, CAPAG, who were subcontracted to do the pipe-laying from the main engineers, Bechtel of San Francisco, who were themselves hired by the TAL consortium. He never knew where the pipeline was heading, but his memory of that pivotal year is clear.

  Paolo is an Italian who grew up in Istria. In 1954, when he was fourteen and the Free Territory of Trieste was abolished and divided by the UN, his family moved from Yugoslavia to Zone A, the Italian part of the territory. Like thousands of others, they were placed in the refugee camp of Padricano, which was one of four settlements created among the Slovenian villages on the carso in the hinterland of Trieste.

  After twelve years in the camp, aged twenty-six, Paulo was recruited to work on the construction of TAL. ‘A newspaper asked specifically for people from Istria to work on the pipeline – they had priority over the Triestinos’. He was employed carrying men from the refugee camps to the various worksites along the 20 km stretch of pipeline that was being buried in the carso.

  When we ask Paolo why he only worked on the project for two months, he rolls up his right trouser leg to reveal a vivid scar above his knee. Falling from the works lorry, he was badly injured and was laid off. He never received any compensation. Like the landscape scarred by the pipeline at Hacı Ali in Turkey, Paulo’s body still carries the marks of the construction.

  We leave the apartment and drive through the village of Sistiana towards the hamlet of Mavhinje, further inland. Paulo is keen to show us the place, once a construction site, to which he had regularly driven workers. Up on the hill, among the woods of oak and field maple, we stop the car by pipeline marker post A30. The corridor of TAL is clearly visible, a straight swathe cut through the trees several metres wide. To the south it crosses tight fields of grass; to the north it rises up to the heights of Mount Ermada on the border with Slovenia. Nightingales sing in the warm evening.

  This land is in the Commune of Duino, where Rilke worked and where, according to Bruno, the mayor refused to agree to the expropriation of Slovenian fields. Perhaps it was these parcels of grazing that he was trying to defend?

  TAL KP 35 – 4,642 KM – GRADISCA D’ISONZO, ITALY

  For the better part of twenty kilometres the Transalpine Pipeline runs along the strip of land that lies between the Slovenian/Italian border and the Adriatic. It is like a bone in the limb of territory that joins Trieste to the main body of Italy.

  After leaving Marzia, we take the train from Trieste to Mestre, Venice’s mainland city. This railway line was built under Mussolini to replace the Sud Bahn that ran from Vienna via Laibach – now Ljubljana – to Trieste. The train skirts the pellucid gulf, mussel farms chequerboarding the sea. Out there on the blue, three tankers are still anchored, silent like the pipeline in the carso, coiling its way behind the city. In the heat of the afternoon, the world is asleep. While the Triestinos slumber, the pipeline labours, pumping and pulsing its explosive load. How is it that these projects, so politically potent in their creation, become forgotten?

  In May 1915, the kingdom of Italy entered World War I. That spring a number of Futurists performed their final collective action, enrolling in Italy’s fastest military division, the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists’ and Automobilists’ Battalion.

  Marinetti, together with the painter Umberto Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia, were quickly drafted to the front, high in the Trentino Alps. Boccioni’s diary conveyed his passionate delight at seeing action:

  Captain Ataneo in spite of orders to retreat, remembering, Buzzi says to Marinetti and me: ‘You advance’. We go. Zuii Zuiii Tan Tan. Bullets all around. Volunteers calm on the ground shoot Pan Pan. Crack shot Sergeant Massai on his feet shoots, first shrapnel explodes. We arrive hearing a shout we throw ourselves on the ground: shrapnel explodes twenty steps away and I shout: ‘At last’.10

  A year later, Boccioni and Sant’Elia were dead. Boccioni fell from a horse while training; Sant’Elia was killed at the Eighth Battle of Isonzo. There were twelve brutal battles along the River Isonzo, Italy’s Somme. By the time the Eighth Battle began, on 10 October 1916, almost half a million soldiers had died.

  Dead at twenty-eight, Sant’Elia had built only one project, a villa near Como. Yet his drawings and the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture were profoundly influential on the development of the twentieth-century city, leaving their mark on Republican Ankara, Soviet Rustavi, and today’s late-capitalist Baku. Sant’Elia’s influence can also be seen at the war cemetery at Redipuglia, a massive piece of fascist architecture, which contains the bones of 100,000 dead. Walking from the nearby train station, we climb the monumental steps that lead up to the three bronze crosses and look out over the carso. Five hundred metres from the crosses runs the Transalpine pipeline on its journey to Austria. During its construction in the 1960s, workers from the Istrian camps had to negotiate nearly ten kilometres of trenches and shrapnel, mines and shells, on the battlefields of Isonzo.

  TAL KP 60 – 4,667 KM – UDINE, ITALY

  Near the city of Udine, TAL passes under the railway upon which we are travelling. Udine is a garrison town, a rail hub and a node on Bratszvo, the great gas pipeline from Siberia. For four centuries, as part of the Venetian Republic’s mainland dominions, Udine was key to its control over trade routes across the Alps to Bavaria and Bohemia. Goods from Venice flowed through Udine, over the mountains and on into the German heartlands.

  In the seventeenth century, Venice’s territories dwindled, sandwiched between two empires: the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Udine became increasingly important as a bastion against both threats. Its heavily fortified castle still dominates the town. But with the loss of her colonies and ports, and the rise of Austria, Venice’s economic power was waning. Her cloth exports declined by 90 per cent between 1600 and 1715.11

  Eventually, in 1797, the Venetian Republic fell to Napoleon’s armies, which cut a swathe through northern Italy. Subsequently incorporated into Austria, the new territorial acquisitions helped Vienna boom, and out from that city reached the tentacles of its trade system, manifested in due course by railways.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, Austria constructed rail lines running across the empire to Laibach, Trieste, Fiume and Venice. By 1858 this entire network had been privatised, with the lion’s share purchased by the Rothschild Bank of Paris, drawing in capital from London and Vienna.12 Like the Baku–Batumi Railway that the Rothschilds financed fourteen years later, these iron roads not only facilitated the transfer of troops, people and goods, but also of fuel – oil in the Russian Caucasus and kerosene from Fiume in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  The fall of Udine accelerated the passage of Venice into the industrial world. In 1845, when John Ruskin arrived in La Serenissima, the new railway was still under construction.

  The afternoon was cloudless, the sun intensely bright, the gliding down the canal of the Brenta exquisite. We turned the corner of the bastion, where Venice once appeared, and behold – the Greenwich railway, only with less arches and more dead wall, entirely cutting off the whole open sea and half the city, which now looks nearly as possible like Liverpool at the end of the dockyard wall.13

  Writers such as Ruskin helped to create Venice in the European imagination as a gem to be preserved on account of her art and architecture, and perhaps as a reminder of a pre-industrial world. A pre-modern city revered as utterly civilised, and yet without cars and skyscrapers, shopping malls and undergrounds. She was everything the Futurists reviled. After World War II – in which it was agreed by all sides that she should be left untouched – Veni
ce became a theatre not only for mass tourism but also for the super-rich. Among their number were those who had amassed their fortunes through the building of the hydrocarbon world, such as Enrico Mattei, the mastermind of the Italian oil company ENI, and John Browne, CEO of BP.

  The Rialto, at the heart of the city, was the centre of Venetian banking, which in the Middle Ages financed merchants travelling to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Ten minutes’ walk through the alleyways from the Rialto lies the Corte seconda del Milion, where in the thirteenth century Marco Polo’s family lived and traded. Nearby too is the Riva del Carbon, the ‘Coal Quay’, a fitting address for Browne’s apartment.

  Browne first visited the city at the age of twelve with his parents, in 1965, as the trench for the Transalpine pipeline was being excavated across the carso. Three decades later, as the project in the Caucasus was well underway, he acquired his property in the Rialto. Soon after the final inauguration of BTC, at the Ceyhan Terminal on 13 July 2006, he came here to rest, as he often did in the summer months. He saw Venice as ‘a place that makes me happier than anywhere else, a place to reflect and think. Venice, La Serenissima, creates a curious mix of calm and inspiration. If people are prepared to listen, I believe the stones themselves speak to you.’14

  Browne’s wealth is the product of thirty-seven years of intense and dedicated work for BP. By the time he left the company in May 2007, his remuneration package, of wages and shares, was approximately $35.7 million.15 He invested some of his wealth in a collection of pre-Columbian art, early printed books and the Rialto apartment.

  Some part of this fortune is a direct consequence of his role in driving BP into Soviet Azerbaijan – personal wealth drawn from Baku oil. In this he mirrors a parade of European plutocrats such as Zeynalabin Taghiyev, Ludvig Nobel, Alphonse de Rothschild and Marcus Samuel: Caspian crude transformed into private art collections and libraries, mansions and vineyards.

  19 THE CASPIAN!

  TAL KP 121 – 4,728 KM – PALUZZA, ITALY

  We are hunting for the pipeline at Paluzza, north-west of Udine, on the Italian–Austrian border. The River But carves a narrow valley through the Carnia Alps, where the mountains rise sharply from the flat valley floor, so we assume that TAL will be easy to find – even though, as with BTC, there are no publicly available maps of its route. There is a warm wind blowing from the south. In the gardens of the village houses red tulips bend in the breeze. Blankets of pine and oak cover the mountainsides. A few people are tilling plots by hand in the meadowland. The soil is the pale colour of chocolate powder.

  Also once under Venetian control, Paluzza was absorbed into the Habsburg Empire after La Serinissima fell to the Austrians. Along the valley of the But runs a Roman road, the Via Julia. Its construction was ordered by Julius Caesar to connect the Roman city of Aquileia, on the Adriatic, with the iron- and gold-rich Celtic kingdom of Norium in the mountains to the north. This was already an ancient route. The body of Oetzi, a Neolithic man, was discovered in 1991 exactly where he had frozen to death 5,300 years before not far to the west of here, on his way through one of the Alpine passes.

  Crossing the Pontaiba stream into the hamlet of Zenodis, we wonder where the livestock is. Could it be that they are up on the high Alps? But cattle culture has largely gone from here. In its place has come a leisure landscape, the cow byres transformed into holiday homes. There is some forestry work, but most of these villages depend upon tourists from the south or north: walking in summer, skiing in winter. The landscape has been re-created to be viewed. Down the valley passes the Via Julia Augusta, a cycling route named after the Roman road, celebrating a 2,000-year-old feat of engineering. Brochures funded by the EU say the route is designed to ‘link the distinct peoples of Europe’. We set foot on the 404 Sentiere de Farinari, an immaculately constructed mountain footpath, an autostrada for walkers, mountain bikers and joggers, built with funds from the provincial capital of Udine, and the regional capital of Trieste.

  This tourist economy is dependent upon cheap hydrocarbons – fuel for the cars and buses, to build the roads and paths, power the chair lifts, and provide the expected levels of comfort for the visitors in their hotels and pensioni. The electricity pylons marched up this valley in the wake of the pipeline. Through this demand for a constant supply of fuel, even the arcadian Sentiere is connected to the Task Force in the Gulf of Aden and the oil platforms off Baku.

  Heading back down towards the river, we pass the ruins of an old watermill. Its roof is caved in, rafters collapsed, walls tumbling down. There are twelve such redundant mills marked on the map, once the active engines of the flour millers, the farinari.

  SIOT ATTENZIONE! OLEDOTO INTERRATO

  And there it is. Bold, black lettering on yellow metal; beyond the sign, the red marker posts marching away. We ford the river and walk straight along the pipeline, buried a metre or so below our feet. The ground is easygoing because the pipeline ‘corridor’ has been cleared of boulders and stripped of large vegetation. It runs naked, slicing through willow saplings and pine woods.

  Since the vegetation is cut back, someone must be employed to stop its regrowth, to groom it each year. This pipe has lain in the ground for at least forty-four years now, its route cleared annually. Each marker post is topped with a cone-shaped steel hat and numbered sequentially in white:

  756 757 758 759

  The numbers are designed to be read from the air, from a helicopter.

  It is strangely thrilling to follow the route unhindered, after all the challenges around the pipeline in the Caucasus. The path, exactly three metres wide, snakes inexorably on – out of the forest, through meadows, across a main road, before plunging once more back into the forest. Underfoot are cowslips and wild strawberry plants.

  We can imagine the pipeline’s route plotted on a map in some distant office half a century ago; plans drawn up by Bechtel, agreed by the shareholders in TAL, approved by Maurice Bridgeman, CEO of BP, in Finsbury Circus in London. The pipeline lies in the earth, and all the men that fathered it – where do they lie? We know the fathers, visible and invisible, of BTC: Browne, Heydar Aliyev, Shevardnadze, Bagirov, Grote, Morningstar. Who were the fathers of TAL? As with Aliyev and Shevardnadze in relation to BTC, the Transalpine pipeline depended upon the support of the dominant political players in the each of the states through which it passed. In the case of Italy, this meant Aldo Moro, prime minister between 1963 and 1968. As with Browne in relation to BTC, the TAL required the driving commitment of Maurice Bridgeman. It would be harder to find the fathers of TAL than it was to find those behind BTC, partly because this pipeline is now forgotten. A consequence of this is that there are no guides, such as Mayis, Manana or Ferhat, to help us. TAL, an object still so politically important, carrying so much wealth over such a long distance, is now unseen and known to few people.

  Heads down, we follow the route as if it were a sacred line. There is not a sound from the pipe underground. It is silent throughout its length except for the hum of the pump stations. It is a road, but a buried road only used for one commodity; a private road owned by a set of companies, who in turn have millions of shareholders who undoubtedly do not even know that they own this pipeline. Perhaps, one day, this feat of engineering will be celebrated like the Roman road that passes down the valley and gives its name to a tourist route. But today it leaves little mark on the public imagination.

  The route of TAL comes to a clearing, or rather rough meadowland between a house and its outbuildings. The pipeline cuts straight across. We stop. Is this semi-public space, or is it private?

  We slink back into the woods, and the pipeline fills us with a strange melancholy. What an odd thing to be doing on a Friday afternoon, hunting for something we are supposed to ignore. Then there is a hare, running straight down the ‘corridor’, cutting through the scrub on the river’s bank. The hare lifts us up. Somehow it is laughing at us. It, and its progeny, will outlive all this.

  752 751 750 749 748

&
nbsp; TAL KP 130 – 4,737 KM – PASS DI MONTE CROCE CARNICO/PLOCKENPASS, ITALY/AUSTRIA

  The valley of the River But narrows to the Canale di San Pietro, which we follow to the base of the mountain. Here is Timau, a village in the shadow of massive limestone crags. Over the houses looms the Creta di Timau, its summit 1,000 metres above the roofs. The vastness of the grey stone is exhilarating and frightening. The mountain feels menacing: perhaps it is the shadow of the long, bitter fight that took place here. As in the Caucasus, this corner of the Alps is a jigsaw of nations and ethnicities – Italian, Austrian, Slovenian, Friulian and Ladin. In the early twentieth century it became a killing ground.

  The village still displays rusted field guns, a stretcher frame, barbed wire and spent shells. During the Battles of the Izonso, at the same time that the Ottomans fought the Russians in the Caucasus, World War I brought conflict to these mountains. Supplied with munitions and fuel along road and rail from Fiume or Udine, the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies struggled over fragments of rock. Advances or retreats were measured not in horizontal kilometres, but in vertical metres, in altitudes. The Italians called it il fronte verticale.1

  When we travel the road beyond Timau, which follows the Via Julia, we are dazed not only by the altitude but also by the insanity of war. The rock face, 400 metres above the valley floor, is pitted with a myriad of man-made burrows, tunnels carved into the limestone by Italian troops trying to hold ground in the face of Austrian counterparts dug into the rock on the northern face of the mountain. From these gallerias snipers on both sides shot at any sign of movement, while explosives were detonated to set off avalanches over enemy positions. We think of Boccioni celebrating the fighting in the mountains. ‘Zuii Zuiii Tan Tan’ went the bullets. And the roar of the shelling in these valleys rang out as the world of hydrocarbon technology pounded the sheer rock.