Yugoslavia and other myths

Central Europe #3: Further tastes of Slovenia

This is a continuation of my first Substack pieces, Above Bad Eisenkappel and Crumbling Borders and is one in a series that includes my pieces on Vienna and Istanbul. Also available on the podcast here or via Spotify/ Apple Podcasts.

The streets of suburban Ljubljana have a texture I remember. Back in 1991, in a small window between the collapse of communism and the outbreak of civil war, I travelled on an exotic tour to Novi Sad, in northern Serbia. We were playing in a youth jazz orchestra, and the locals lapped up our mainstream Western vibes in a way that made our teenage egos proud. I recall the Mediterranean heat, alongside the matter-of-fact high rise blocks and the ubiquitous Eastern bloc cigarettes; evenings in concrete bars, or in the extraordinary night club in the fortress, which is home these days to Exit, a leading European-wide party festival. And yet - art galleries and sculptures and a general sense of something more seeped through the cracks in the pavement slabs.

These suburban bits of this small capital have much of the same feeling, even down to the random graffiti recognising a major Western pop icon that nobody would bother to scrawl on walls in the West. I am back in the Balkan lands, in the cities that have something of Greece, something of Italy, and something of Russia, in a marvellous paradox. The last time I left, Yugoslav Airlines were going on strike (because they could), and we had to get out on any flight with space, meaning my beloved trombone went in a different direction to me for a while. I'd spent the weeks enjoying "Serbian national coffee" (suspiciously Turkish style) or "Serbian national cheese" (suspiciously like Greek feta). The wildly optimistic young man who was my 'penpal' and host for the visit was full of the kind of sentiment that saw many of his generation die soon after.

There's a bit of yearning these days for Yugoslavia across the republics. Perhaps not so much in Slovenia, which escaped almost scot-free. The way our friend describes the pockmarked souls of Croatians, I recognise the shared trauma of South Africa - people always a little on edge, whether for present day landmines or bullet holes from the past; but gritty, survivors with a low rasping accent and a permanent middle finger for authority, even as we do what we can to get along.

Or perhaps I'm imagining that, since we're actually next door, where the Yugoslav Army turned back after a week and the EU welcomed them in with open arms: an extraordinary bit of good luck. It's impossible to really get the hang of a place in such a fleeting trip, though I'm doing my damnedest. Building styles have to stand in for longer conversations; and closer to the centre I notice a theme I'll pick up in Vienna too on a grander scale. There are an excess of fin de siècle buildings, three or four stories high: grandiose statements of the rapidly growing imperial cities of the time, but leaving little room for artistic breath. Ljubljana has plenty of other buildings too, and a medieval district that's another thing I'm getting refamiliarised with on this European trip.

Medieval peoples were undoubtedly similar to us in many ways and utterly alien in others. In Ptuj we witness a hilariously camp statue of St George tentatively tickling a dragon, and a Count of Celje with a sub-disco backing singer hairdo. There and elsewhere we come across many pedestrianised squares, hear many Catholic bells ringing out beautifully, and are reminded of the heartwood of European towns - the medieval cores from a distant age, comparatively empty then of humans but still with such an impact. The layers of history always hit me in Europe: I sometimes long for Africa where there are instead layers of geology, of botany, and sometimes of crackling magic floating free. These flagstones here have been trod by too many scholars. We're part of their number, of course. We eat out, fabulous carb-heavy Slovenian peasant food, but a vegan version suitable for today's metro tourists. We cycle everywhere: one thing I really miss, my usual excuse being that I live in a coastal city with hills everywhere and winds that can throw you into the kerb at a moment's notice.

The grit gets grittier in Maribor, out to the east, the bit of the country that suffered more from the industrial collapse of the war next door in the nineties. We're too late for the annual festival but still in time for some gypsy jazz in the streets, and a burek in the rain. A kind of big fried puff pastry thing, it tastes great and can't possibly be good for me; the Balkans in a bite. A couple of years ago at the Waldorf School I work at we put on a version of Twelfth Night that really was set in Illyria (the Roman name for Yugoslavia, and to Shakespeare little more than myth): I had, as ever, great fun sourcing the music, and in this case I was delighted to discover the brassy depth of Balkan style - at least as hip, actually, as the mainstream American sounds I'd "imported" on that 90s trip.

It isn't only cities that preserve a medieval landscape, however. Smartno is a hilltop hamlet in the western winelands, with narrow alleys, Slovenian waiters serving Italian-style coffee, small boys kicking footballs outside the church, and mammoth fortress walls. This was once the border between the Republic of Venice and the Habsburg territories, and it's odd to think of these peaceful slopes as once the rough edge of disputed lands. Disputed not for any ethnic or religious reasons but for pure mercantile advantage. The Venetians had, for centuries, no reason to believe in or be part of any Italian national enterprise and they often strike me as peculiarly, disturbingly modern. They dealt with anyone and anywhere that would grant them favours; they would have scored pretty highly on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion scores of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, even as they went round creating colonies for commerce. And they had a kind of sham democracy, actually an oligarchy run by business. As for their religious tolerance, well, they dealt regularly with Muslims (Battle of Levanto aside), though Orthodox Christians had plenty of complaints. Those four bronze horses at St Mark's are not on their way to the Apocalypse, but rather once adorned the Hippodrome in Constantinople that the Venetians cynically sacked.

Stanjel is another pretty hamlet closed off from the lands below it. These days offering great Italian style coffee (a theme it seems) with views overlooking the Po valley, which looks very picturesque from here, no hint of the industrial pollution further west. It's a place to forget time, with streets too narrow to drive around, and crumbling stone walls where summer brambles reign triumphant. Hot, dry, dusty. Until now we'd seen a land of dramatic waterfalls and great rivers: for a brief few hours we're in another kind of world. This is of course part of this country's charm - variety. Nova Gorica threatened to provide a different kind of variety, as we raced through it: a new town to replace the one the Italian negotiators took away, apparently filled like many a border town with casinos. I'm not sure how Tito's socialism justified that, which in South Africa was more the remit of canny businessman Sol Kerzner, seeing opportunities in the bonkers border policies of the apartheid state; but I guess gamblers bringing foreign currency has always looked like justification enough for a little hypocrisy. Anyway, like with most Slovenian places, we've passed through it via a few leafy avenues, before we've had a moment to get upset.

Water does return of course, at the most magnificent medieval spot of all. Architecturally extraordinary Predjama Castle is really worth the tourist trap fee. The only irritation is the story trying to shoehorn the local aristo builder into a Robin Hood mould, which smacks of a simplistic Americanised version of history. More interesting is how they worked so creatively with water, making grooves to capture it as it ran from inside the caves, or adding metal contraptions high in the back chambers to source it from stalactites. Here's a castle built of stone, with the trappings of medieval provincial life, but where you can sense how immediate still was the experience of water, of fire, of the earth around the inhabitants, and of the winds that whistled through the cracks.

There are plenty other rivers to come: firstly, in those Kamnik-Savinja Alps we saw from the north in Carinthia. Now we approach them from the south, a beautiful wooded walk towards a glacier-covered peak, its facets better than any crystal goblet. Yet next to the walk is a dry river bed, seasonal only. I didn't think that happened much in Europe, though we see dry beds all over the place in Africa. Another lesson in geography. There is still a raging river further down in the gorge we drove along. And there's fresh water to drink along the way, bubbling up into taps next to animal troughs. These are working farmlands, and the houses for bees are the most striking thing to notice: more like multi storey apartment blocks, multiple hives coexisting peacefully. And here we're back in the conifer worlds once more, on the look out for black squirrels, listening to the birds, greeting fellow day trippers, mostly Slovenian. It really is easy to find beauty here and breathe out.

The river churning through the gorge gets through its exquisite childlike early phase - look at how pretty I am! - and cascades into the flatter east, between more lovely wooded hills with no obvious names. It ends up hugging Celje; another grand river carves its way through Maribor. Both are broader than almost anything I'm used to: even the Orange on its desert journey is nothing like so full. In Maribor there's a new pedestrian bridge next to the precinct they're trying to revamp, where Europe's oldest wine-producing vine is kept and the jazz flows. It's empty and we're wondering if it's closed. I step onto it, and it's like we've broken an energetic barrier: within moments, flocks of teenagers are crossing behind us. We pause to look at the handsome town, and to feel that curious ungrounded feeling of hovering over a large water body. The teens press on regardless, heading to the latest hotspot with determination. Thirty years ago that was me; hopefully they are less naïve than some of those Serbian kids back then. Hopefully they keep, too, a little of that youthful mountain water sparkle on their journeys to come.