The Alpine culture of Slovenia

UNESCO Courier, Feb, 1987 by Matjaz Kmecl

The Alpine culture of Slovenia

THE Slovenes are a Slavic peoplewho settled long ago in the south-eastern part of the Alps, in a region where the jagged limestone peaks of the Julian and Savinian Alps slope down towards the Dinarides, and to some extent in the plain of Pannonia. Nowadays, the vast majority of the Slovenes live in Slovenia, the most northerly of the Yugoslav republics, although another substantial group has its cultural and historical centre at Klagenfurt (Celovec) in southern Austria. There is also a group in an area of north-eastern Italy stretching from Trieste to the Carnic Alps, and a small Slovene community in Hungary. There are some two million Slovenes in these areas; if the members of the farflung Slovene diaspora are counted, they number between two and a half and three million.

This region, opening onto the Adriaticin the south, forms an east-west corridor through which many peoples have passed in the course of history. Those who crossed it in a southeasterly direction include the Romans, the Crusaders, and the armies of Napoleon and Hitler; those who struck westwards include the Russian General Suvorov and the armies of Austria. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the region lay on the route of Turkish incursions into central Europe from the south.

The ancient "amber road' and manymedieval trade routes passed through Slovene territory, which was also a conduit through which many ideas of the Italian Renaissance spread eastwards. The Slovenes played an important role in the foundation of the university of Vienna, and after the Reformation were instrumental in taking Protestant ideas and writings into the Balkans. Around 1560, Ljubljana, the Slovene capital, already had its own printing press, and the first Slovene translation of the Bible appeared in 1584.

In short, Alpine Slovenia on the Adriaticwas a staging-post between the Roman and Germanic worlds of western Europe and the Slavic east, between Venice and Vienna, Italy and St. Petersburg.

Under these influences, an originalSlovene culture took shape over more than a thousand years. Among its many creative figures were Herman Sclavus of Carinthia, a monk, astronomer and theologian who translated the Qur'an into Latin in the twelfth century and dreamt of bringing about a synthesis of Islam, Christianity and the paganism of Antiquity; the great sixteenth-century polyphonist Jakob Handl (also known as Jakob Carniolus Gallus, 1550-1591); Anton Jansa (1743-1773), one of the founders of modern European apiculture; the mathematician Jurij Vega (1754-1802), who revised the logarithmic tables; Marko Anton Plencic (1705-1786), who discovered the principle of microbial contamination; Friderik Jernej Baraga (1797-1868), linguist, missionary and bishop, who was one of the first authors of grammars and dictionaries of the amerindian languages of North America; and many more, scattered around the world.

It was not until 1918 that the Sloveneswere enabled to have their own university, but for centuries before that Slovene scholars and students had made a brilliant contribution to European university life, and even today there are many Slovene intellectuals and artists in universities and scientific institutions all over the world. The nineteenth-century French writer Charles Nodier, an admirer of the polyglot Slovene culture, pointed out how as a result of their cultural history all Slovenes mastered two or three living languages in addition to their own.

Slovenia is a densely wooded region:half its area, or more than one million hectares, is covered with forest. Its wealth of animal life includes bears, wolves, ibex, marmots and chamois, and its plant life is equally abundant (some seventy endemic speies). There are many natural caves in the limestone Karst region.

Characteristic features of the landscapeare small Baroque and pre-Baroque churches built on the uplands, covered racks with harp-shaped roofs to shelter the hay from the rain which falls when the south wind meets the barrier of the Alps, and castles in varying states of preservation.

Traditional forms of art and craftsmanshipstill survive. They include lacework from the town of Idrija, naive paintings which have been used to decorate beehives for two centuries, and regional costumes. Male and female choirs such as the Slovene Cotet sing serious pieces of music a cappela, and instrumentalists play versions of the Alpine tunes known in central Europe as the music of Upper Carniola (Carniola is the ancient name for Slovenia), which have been modernized by groups such as the Avsenik Quintet.

Among its achievements in the fine artsSlovenia can point to the school of architecture founded by the Slovene architect Joze Plechik (1872-1957); the Impressionists of central Europe, notably the painter Anton Azbe (1862-1905), who founded a school of painting in Munich in 1891 at which almost all the leading Slav Impressionists studied, as well as Wassily Kandinsky and Nadezda Petrovic (1873-1915); and the Ljubljana school of graphic art. The major figures of Slovene literature include France Preseren (1800-1849), who had affinities with Byron and Pushkin, and is considered to be the greatest Slovene poet; the prose writer Ivan Cankar (1876-1918), creator of the psychological short novel and of social drama, and the short story writer Ciril Kosmac (1910-1980).