And I was alive and beautiful. I filled Rama with joy. But he wanted something that I was not. And when he killed me, he touched nothing of what I truly am.

I have lain here for centuries in the Vran mountains, free with an untouchable freedom, and loved with a love that gives new birth.

For three centuries now, the Croatian people of Rama and Herzegovina have venerated a lone grave at Kedžara, in the heart of the Vran mountains, as a holy place. There, according to tradition, lies the body of Diva Grabovčeva, who, in the flower of her youth, was killed by a dissolute Turkish nobleman because she resisted his lust. Diva truly becomes a beauty and the collective sister of everyone in Rama the moment she speaks with the soul of a free woman, choosing death rather than life with the wealthy bey Kopčić.

Diva was the daughter of Luka Grabovac and his wife Luca, who for a long time had been unable to have children, until, only in their old age, God took pity on Luca's fervent prayers, and granted them a lovely little daughter, Dijeva (Virgin - Virginia), or, as the people of that region pronounced it in their thoroughgoing ikavian dialect, Diva Grabovčeva.

Diva first encountered Tahirbeg as she was returning home from Holy Mass. The encounter took place when Tahirbeg intercepted a group of girls, among them Diva, at the spot where they had to cross the plank bridging Jelić's stream just before it flows into the Rama. There Tahirbeg waited for them and examined each of the girls carefully.

He took the first girl by the chin, and she yielded to him. He turned her face left and right as though searching it for some sign, gazed into her eyes, tilted her head back and searched at her throat, forced her to bow her head and show him the crown and nape of her neck, and finally levelled her face with his own, and smiled sourly, as if to say: "You do not have what I am looking for", and let her pass by him from the plank onto the path… He did the same with the other two girls, and it would have been the same with Diva too, had she approached him calmly.

Diva decided to resist him and defend her dignity. This surprised Tahirbeg, who was not used to anyone resisting him. Her gesture aroused his interest, and by it Diva condemned herself to trouble, for Tahirbeg held that a woman's resistance was a kind of coquetry, that one need only persist and the resistance would vanish. After leaving them without a word, Tahirbeg made his way to the church from which they had come, and forbade the young men and their parents to ask for Diva Grabovčeva's hand that year. He then set off again after Diva's group and, when he caught up with them, dismounted from his horse and went towards them. Diva said to him: "Whatever you may do, be sure of one thing: I will keep my honour and my innocence."

In the days that followed, Tahirbeg went in vain to places where he thought he might catch sight of Diva, but since their encounter Diva had rarely left the house. When she did go out, her mother went with her. On one occasion he stopped her and began to speak to her of his love for her. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. Diva did not wish to listen to his words and asked him to get out of her way: "for we are not meant for one another; our paths have run in different directions since time immemorial, and know this, nothing will ever bring them together, not even what you call love. He asked his father to ask for Diva's hand on his behalf, which her parents refused. This angered the bey, for he was not used to being refused by anyone. As he left, he vowed revenge for the shame done to him.

In the days that followed, he tried by every means to draw Diva's attention and to lure her out of the house. While Kopčić raged, Diva prayed to God to free her from this affliction, and resolved that she would confront Tahirbeg if he did not abandon his conduct. In her mind she carried the image of a martyrdom she was ready to endure, if only to be rid of that violent man. When she heard from his own lips that her eyes were to blame for his sinful ardour, Diva took a knife, gouged out both her eyes, and offered them to Tahirbeg on a platter, saying to him: "Here are my eyes, since they are so dear to you; let me live blind, in my honour."

Meanwhile, Diva began to dream of a brave young man who would ask for her hand and save her from Kopčić, but no such man appeared. Everyone was afraid of Kopčić, and no one dared ask for Diva's hand. When she saw that no help was coming to her, and that there was no young man to ask for her, Diva began to speak of supernatural beings who defend people from evil. She dreamed of winged angels who defend the innocent with a sword. As she sank ever deeper into such thoughts, her family decided to send her up to the mountain pastures. They devised a way of deceiving Kopčić's spies by changing the places to which they would send their sheep to graze.

Despite her caution and her attempt to cover her tracks, Tahirbeg learned of Diva's refuge. His servants seized her and bound her. He saw Diva, stretched out and tied, in a word, helpless. The sight of her green eyes took hold of him, and because of this the thought of what he was about to do was repugnant to him, but since he truly knew no other way, he began to unfasten the buttons of Diva's dress, and she was soon left almost entirely naked. To this act of his she replied: "You may do whatever you wish, but you will never have my soul. If, after this, I must go on living, however I live, I will hate you. I will hate you even if I must pretend to love you. Diva went on: Have you looked closely at my body?", said Diva. "You may freely untie me and draw this stake from your sleeve; I will not resist and I will not flee. What is unconquerable for you - my soul - will not be present in this body while you are with it." After this she prayed to Our Lady to help her preserve her honour.

By her words she remained who she was, dignified despite the position in which she found herself. With her words she struck him in his most painful places, and this wounded him. He could not even violate her, for his blood would not rise as his servant had told him it would. His defeat was complete, and this was clear to him too. At that moment a miracle occurred, and she managed to break the wooden post. With the piece left in her hand she swung at Tahirbeg and tried to drive him off. This drove him utterly out of his mind, and he lunged at her like a wild beast.

Because of this he resolved to make his crime still worse, and seized the mother-of-pearl handle of his knife and, a little above the place where he was to have violated her, so that his blood would rise, drove the blade in to the hilt, drew back from the girl, and, while she poured over him the abundant green of her eyes, he wiped the blood from the knife with black satin, thrust it back into its sheath, let his hands drop to his sides, and watched Diva fall.

After Kopčić had left the scene of the crime, an old woman ran into the house and found Diva, who, with the last atoms of her strength, was uttering the sentence that many generations after her would go on repeating: "Thank God, who granted me the grace to defend my innocence with my own blood. Praise Him too, when you lay me in the earth."

When the old woman saw that Diva was dead, she fled so that Kopčić's servants would not kill her too, and one of them only managed to threaten her into silence. For this reason Diva was buried in the mountains rather than in a graveyard, and the official cause of her death was recorded as a fall in which she broke her spine. As always, there was no judgment for the powerful. And yet, among the people there were those who felt that Diva's death should not go unavenged. According to Aralica, this happened on the day of his wedding. While the games that were part of the wedding feast were still under way, avengers struck Tahirbeg in the back of the neck, and did it so skilfully that no one noticed the shot, until his bride came near and saw, on his shaven nape, where the spine joins the head, blood trickling from a small wound and spreading out in every direction, like a thread. Tahirbeg ended his life just as he had lived it: violently.

Diva Grabovčeva perished for her beauty and for her faithfulness to her people and to the Christian faith.
What is preserved here is more than a woman's honour; what is preserved is the unsullied notion of freedom, as a possible answer to every form of force. This is the highest acknowledgement of God. The only thing human that remains beyond the reach of evil is freedom, which is expressed, in its most radical and sharpened form, in the choice between love and death. In the spirituality of the people of Rama, Diva becomes a sign of new possibilities for those who believe that love and death cannot together rule the world, and that love is God's answer to everything.

In this way, two women become indispensable in Rama on the path of growth and maturing: Our Lady and Diva. Our Lady, Mother of Grace, honoured as the never-quite-attainable horizon of God's promises, and of our own possibilities, a mother present in many sufferings but also in wondrous awakenings from the ashes, dear and beautiful, before whom one can be silent and still be understood. Diva: sister, mother, bride, alive in the beauty of the women of Rama, who bears witness that beauty is a gift for life.
Close to these two women lies the foundation for approaching a whole series of questions... Through Diva, the Vran mountains become a place of deeper encounter with the source of life. Indeed, one must come and experience what it means to carry everything with you and to leave everything behind. We cannot sully that original purity.

This is why the novel The Builder of the Wayside Inn, built on the motif of Diva, is, from cover to cover, a story of the defence of innocence as the defence of freedom, and a story of the defence of faith as the defence of the essential element of one human community - in this case, the Croatian one.

Perhaps it is no accident that Diva Grabovčeva's true name - Virginia - means Virgin. Fr Mirko Jozić therefore rightly recalls the custom in Rama that links these two women: this transformation in the consciousness of the people of Rama takes place within faith in a God who raises the dead. Thus the violence done to Diva is revealed as the futile attempt of a violent man to abolish her freedom of action by means of outward force; for the violent man who kills a young girl, even as his violent act brings her life to an end, that very same act also initiates the beginning of the process by which Diva is transformed into a symbol of a new identity. Thus the end of her life also means the beginning of a new freedom. This transformation of the consciousness of the people of Rama takes place within a horizon of hope and by the strength of faith in a God who, as Love, brings the dead out of their graves - "that not one should be lost...".

In Mary's life, bound up around the cross of Christ, there is made manifest the proclaimed truth that only the one who dares and is able to lay down his life will not lose it. A life can, of course, only be laid down for a greater value. And in the Christian understanding, the value greater than life itself is love; and so the meaningful laying down of one's life is always, directly or indirectly, bound up with love: love of God and love of one's fellow man. Laying down one's own life out of love presupposes freedom, and freedom presupposes the awareness and acknowledgement that man is entirely dependent on God, and that only and solely in Him can he find the foundation of his freedom. Thus, for the Christian too, freedom is possible only as an inescapable paradox: one's own life, in the fullness of freedom, is achieved only through radical submission to God.

Over the grave of Diva Grabovčeva, at Kedžara, the mountain winds sing without ceasing a hymn to the girl who, in the flower of her youth, crossed the threshold leading into eternity. Her grave silently becomes a holy place. Once a year, girls and young women from Rama and Herzegovina make pilgrimage there, so that, guided by hope and faith, they may lay upon Diva's grave the vow of their youth - a vow of love (Mirko Jozić).

Your Diva speaks to you:

It was long ago. They used to say I was the most beautiful girl in Rama. Today my beauty lives on in you, my little sisters and my sturdy brothers.

In your eyes there are still reflected the waters and the meadows of my youth; I breathe with you the scent of Vran, I hear your song, now defiant, now sorrowful...

Thank you for coming to the Vran mountains and visiting your Diva. How I would love for my story to help you take wing with love, to embrace life and your brothers and sisters, your own life, your children, and this land of yours.

This is my story:

My parents won me from God through prayer, as a gift. And I grew up as a gift.

When, for the first time, I was able to understand what the friar was telling us, on the walls of the burnt-out church of Our Lady in Rama, about the love of Jesus Christ - to Him be honour and glory - something took up residence in my soul that followed me wherever I went: when I tended the sheep, when I drove the barley from Zahumlje to the mill on the Rama, when I hummed with my friends at the well. That something, deeper than feeling, more enchanting than a voice, more beautiful than music, said to me: Diva, you are loved! Diva, you are free!

It was pleasant to live with that voice within me. Sometimes I would argue with it. I would say: How can I be free, when everything of mine is humiliated? The voice would prevail. And with the voice, I too grew stronger. I became more and more beautiful.

I grew ever stronger in living love and freedom at once, as Jesus Christ teaches us - to Him be honour and glory.

My friends thought me a little strange because of this inner conversation, which I had confided to them.

And all of this was resolved suddenly. I met evil in the person of Tahirbeg. He killed me because I was blossoming with a flower he could not bear to see alive.

Thus my murderer grew up close to trampled beauty, in fear of questions and with contempt for memory. Yet he could, like our godfather, who watched over and cared for me as his own child, have read Christ's message - to Him be honour and glory - in another way: that everyone is loved, that love is stronger than anyone's death, that everything love brings forth becomes part of heaven.

But my murderer exchanged shame for arrogance, repentance for fresh evils, joy for dominion over dead things.

There, that is my story, my dear brothers and little sisters! My story is fragrant with the soul of my people, and Heaven knows it too.

For, as it was then, so it is now, and so it holds forever: evil has eyes in the dark, and goes blind in the light. When you leave my grave, kindle with your life some light, that love may see. Your Diva loves you. I love you with the soul of all our martyrs.

I love you with the beauty of all our witnesses of love and freedom. May the love of the Lord ever strengthen you!
To Him be honour and glory, for ever and ever.