Crumbling borders

Central Europe #2: More tales from a European trip

This is a continuation of my first Substack piece, Above Bad Eisenkappel, and is one in a series that includes Yugoslavia and Other Myths as well as my pieces on Vienna and Istanbul. You can also listen to them on the podcast here, or via Spotify /Apple Podcasts.

The hiking map we used in the Austrian woods also shows the route to the border, complete with the tight bends on a yellow road up to the border post, looking like the snaking Fish River through the Namibian canyon I visited, long ago, in the first weeks of this dysfunctional millennium. It's my first big drive on the right hand side of the road: of course, most of the world drives like this, but I've been cushioned, driving only in southern Africa and (long ago, in a different hire car) on the bloody-minded island of my birth. Changing gears with my right hand still feels wrong; and what a day to really get moving. A few kilometres into Slovenia and the rain begins to pour. Surely there are short cuts? We never find one, and read later that the only tunnel through the mountains would have required us to drive onto a train, which is why The Google God showed it as a possible straight line.

The trees seem tighter together here. In fact, everything is tighter together: a country I like the idea of because it seems almost human in size. I'm generally despairing of modern states, which are much too big for their jackboots. Here, we drive by mistake right through one of the largest cities, Kranj (population under 40,000), and are out the other side before we've realised. A few Tito-era high rises and a movie poster for the latest installment of Indiana Jones (at first I think maybe Harrison Ford has only just reached Slovenia). The accidental detour doesn't make us late for lunch in Skofja Loka: and having nearly turned onto the left side of the road by mistake, we park.

First impressions stick. Ours is of a nation of matter-of-fact friendliness. A couple leaving the municipal car park, watching us struggle to interpret the Slavic words on the machine, give us their ticket for free. I wonder idly about living and working here: yet even if almost everybody speaks English passably, everything is in Slovenian, and of course no would-be immigrant speaks it. A bookshop in the medieval core is filled with books in a language only this country knows. The bibliophile in me is delighted. Imagine if the Welsh all spoke only Welsh on a daily basis. That would keep the Sassenachs out. (I don't even know what the Welsh would call English speakers, actually - Sassenach is a Gaelic word).

I'm intrigued. What caused this linguistic pride to hold so firm, surrounded by Germans one side, Italians another (and even Serbo-Croat punched with a lot more weight here till recently)? Slovene is the last Slavic language to retain dual forms, not just singulars and plurals: as if we said one moon, two moonoes, many moons. Sanskrit has the same archaic system, but Sanskrit is allowed to, being sacred and mystically ancient. Slovenes are romantic, apparently, loving to notice pairs when they speak.

Later on our trip, in the pretty, sleepy town of Kamnik, we stumble across part of the answer in a curious local museum. A general who was also a poet. Rudolf Maister wrote nationalistic clichés worthy of Rupert Brooke when he wasn't joining in the machismo wars of his day, but in holding poetry evenings at his home, he showed that being a Slovenian meant honouring writers and using the language. Perhaps only a macho soldier could have managed to instil such values in such an era. When he took land from the crumbling empire after the Great War, it was with this worthy sentiment, and so we get this tiny nation with such a quiet pride in itself. And we are reminded that the Habsburg empire was an impossibility, a multiethnic world, a flawed European Union prototype. And I who come from a multiethnic flawed African state full of small, demonstrative, largely oral languages (who have long since ceded too much ground to written European ones) reflect again on this dance of language and power. Slovene isn't going away any time soon, and that feels like a good, juicy thing. I pretty soon get that Hvala means thanks. Gratitude goes a long way in making connections.

Such thoughts are balanced by the bends in the roads. Perhaps nobody much bothered to take Slovenia over because it was too much trouble. Our hire car sputters up the hills and my father talks of his first trip into sixties Yugoslavia, a three-gear vehicle towed over the mountains by an enterprising local tractor driver.

It's not my first visit either. Lake Bled appears, turquoise, its chapel rising from the island like a perfect fantasy novel image. The car park would cost us €20 so we don't stick around. Bled these days is clearly the nation's sacrifice to mass tourism: back in the 1980s, we rowed on the placid lake in the sunshine and ate veal at a restaurant, paid in Yugoslav dinars. I remember wondering at the curious cutlet in those pre-vegetarian, but still largely herbivore days of my childhood. No photos, just a strong memory muscle being exercised again: in these Instagram days it's great to have to delve into those barely remembered moments.

Lake Bohinj is another story, hiding at the east of Julian's Alps. They sound very Roman but turn out to be named after a peak-bagging Victorian. This is not a great place for fascist myths to take hold. (Anyone who thinks Laibach are fascists doesn't get the irony: so might just be a fascist themselves. I later play my dad old videos of their covers of Live is Life and Across the Universe and we chuckle merrily). Mussolini would have been even more obviously incompetent if he'd been Great Leader of little old Slovenia, where there aren't many Slovenes to go round and somebody who knows your maiden aunt is probably about to ambush you. I finally realise that Melania Trump couldn't be straightforwardly interested in power: she was just a working class Slovenian girl making it biggish. Or something like that. Then again, Stalin was Georgian and Napoleon Corsican, so maybe leaving the small pond for the big Apple is exactly what a self-respecting would-be dictator might do.

There are beech trees round the lake. There's even a National Park sign up acknowledging them. At first I think it's bizarre honouring such an every-day tree. I grew up with a beech tree in the garden, built a haphazard treehouse in it and climbed it so much it must have hurt, knew its boughs and twigs like an extension of my body. But here the lush beech is everywhere, magnificent. I wrote a story in high school set in "Hêtreville" where the beeches had some unspecified sinister intent, and my English teacher applauded me for subconsciously picking up on a French folk belief about these determined arbours. Here by the lake we breathe them in, the atmosphere only given a hard edge by a car in the caravan park blasting out techno in the summer rain.

Rivers and bridges: we pass some in iron, where the metal has been extracted since the misty past, an industrial history that seems to say, this artisanal truth could have been the way if those Northern English capitalists hadn't been so greedy. And we drive on, towards our destination, on a high plateau amidst the sheep. Drezniča is a village in the mountains, with a church that commands respect. Extraordinarily beautiful but extraordinarily recent: the Catholic cult here is full of creative warmth, the frescoes as creamy as the flocks.

Just like the peoples over the northern border, there was suffering here in my grandfathers' time. A totem pole remembers the partisans, and other sculptures on our walk (the next day when the sun returns) speak of wooden pagan giantesses mixed up with scrap metal crucifixions. Catholicism's success was not born from the binary arrogance of the Roman bishops but from piecemeal negotiation in local communities, absorbing much from what came before. One path goes between dry stone walls where the sheep shelter over ruins returning to the woody hillside. Another is full of black, electric blue butterflies, friendlier than ever. A bird of prey starts as we go past, its repose normally guaranteed here in the hill people's place.

Our host welcomed us after the rain with a shot of something herbal, medicinal, and charmingly alcoholic. She's even made us a local version of a minestrone soup and gives us a bottle of white, fermented with a grape we've never heard of. My father has mislaid his hiking stick again - still subconsciously denying the need for it perhaps. An email to a local sports shop tells us instantly where we can get another. None of this seems aimed specifically at making money out of tourists: I feel some nostalgia growing for the Yugo-culture that encouraged mutual support, somehow. I don't yet have a handle on it but I like it here. We walk through what should be a tourist trap, besides the exquisite Soča river, near falls that burst through the limestone Karst cliffs, where I plunge into the waters in my underwear, next to river rafters, and briefly remember the different freedoms and frankness of my Cape community. But it's nothing like Bled: the locals point us to eggs - which have the same name as in Russian and is spoken in a disconcerting KGB accent, here in the aisles of euro prices and Italian and German products - and tangy sheep cheese - and buckwheat, the local staple, delicious and malty. There are tasteful cafés, and there are gentle slopes and lazy campsites. And a big open meadow for lovers and cyclists that takes me back to student days.

Another sunny day awaits. There are cyclists everywhere actually, hardy types given the gradients. We drive up to a mountain overlooking Italy, which has insanity on its crest. Concrete remnants of world war one trenches, now overgrown with the flowers that have reclaimed this, since Rommel's breakthrough a century ago mowed down the Italian positions. The woody Italian hillsides are visible, dotted with tiled chapels and another kind of history. We hear enthusiastic Italian voices, bikers discussing routes and vehicles. Up here in the borderlands, the borders have never made the kind of sense they made in Rome or Vienna. And the wild strawberries still grow for whichever tribe finds them.

In the heat of the afternoon we march up to the Italian mausoleum, starkly remembering all the men that died. To get there one must pass grey sculptures of the stations of the cross, telling us of life's hardships and of the Lord experiencing them too, as well as the odd helping hand. But a lizard suns herself on Jesus's knee. And next to the mausoleum, the beeches tell another story, lead us to cooler, forgiving paths. On the descent we learn that here, of all places, a crazy crusade was once launched, filling in a sacred well and cutting down a sacred tree, a futile medieval metropolitan quest flowing out of the land of Latin law to dam up such pagan reverence for Mother Nature. It is open again now, a sign proclaiming the waters’ health benefits, and in the woods I can feel Pachamama is so clearly always forgiving us, even with our centuries of foolishness.