Letter from Ljubljana #6
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Dear friends, family and unwary onlookers,

Thursday, June 25, 1998: Midsummer night's bonfire

I'm writing this on one of the two independence-related holidays Slovenia celebrates. This is the anniversary of its declaration of independence; the other one's the day after Christmas, when other states granted it official recognition. It's seven years since Slovenia officially left the Yugonest, and do I detect a seven-year itch around here? Even given the language barrier, there seems to have been a good deal of soul-searching going on lately among politicians, journalists and other pundits as to the direction the nation should be taking.

This goes for me as well. I've recently finished up the school year and returned last week from a memorably great vacation in Dubrovnik and the southern Croatian coast. I've just had occasion to re-read my first letters from Ljubljana; going over the early material, I'm conscious of the shades of gray that I didn't at first notice, or was incapable of noticing. When encountering another culture for the first time, it's all too easy to generalize and see the stereotypes you want to see, even if you're aware that this is a common mistake people make. When I first got to Ljubljana, I lived in an atypical part of the city (working-class, nearly rural) and my perceptions were inevitably filtered through that experience. Life in Ljubljana these days is both more familiar and, yes, more rewarding. I still learn new things every day.

Two nights ago (June 23) I climbed up Roznik Hill on the edge of the city, collapsing with exhaustion onto a wet grassy rise as I approached the summit. The local newspaper Delo ("Work"; what a name for LJ's Paper of Record) was sponsoring a literary award for the best book published in Slovenia last year, the prize being a million tolars (about $6000) and a floral wreath plopped onto the lucky author's head. It was one of the central events of a festival known as "Kresnik '98." Kres means bonfire, and kresna noc is Midsummer's Night. In this part of Europe on this night, bonfires are traditionally lit on hills, and in Ljubljana this goes down on Roznik, and a nicer setting would be hard to find anywhere.

My favorite Slovene folk group, an early-music combo called Trutamora Slovenica gave a magical concert in the 250-year-old church on the top of the hill. This place had exceptional vibes even for 250-year-old churches (around here, nearly as common as McDonald's outlets). Folk music in Slovenia is usually taken to mean polka, which really took off starting in the 1950s -- one of the most popular "Austrian" polka combos is actually Slovene -- but Trutamora plays traditional, pre-polka compositions on original instruments. What really puts it over for me are the weird, off-harmonized harmonies of a Slovene chorus. The group consists of Matija Terlep, a friendly-looking 30-ish man with a moon face and beard, who plays the flute; Matija's former wife Mira Omerzel-Terlep; and Mojka Zagar, both about the same age as Matija. There was also a young drummer of about 20 whose name I didn't catch.

Matija Terlep, at one point, sat down and played the musical saw with a bow (was it a leather strop?). It sounded like a theremin, only even stranger, truly off-planet.

The present church dates from 1747, when it replaced an earlier building on the site. The exterior is built in the characteristic Baroque form of most Slovene churches. The exterior is scarred with carved graffiti. The interior is dusty rose, gray and white; it had the feel of a country church, just the right vibe. In the front rows, on the right, were some of the dancers, a group from Adlesici, clad in the white dresses of Bela Krajina province in Slovenia's southeast corner. As the evening went on, one of the women performers received a floral headdress, symbol of summer; the other woman received hers later in the evening.

The Gostilna Roznik is just down the hill from the church. It's got a great location, but inside it's a total Tito-era dump circa 1975; awful fake- Colonial chairs, don't-give-a-damn orange-and-brown interior, mustard- yellow drapes. Just horrible, renovate soon please. The one saving grace is that not one tourist is to be found (of the non-Slovene variety). Outside the gostilna, two ladies sit at a picnic table and weave floral garlands for women's hair.

Outside, torches burn: there are at least a dozen, stuck into the lawn sloping up to the church, open flames on long white sticks. I see several familiar faces in the crowd; they're all photographers, Bostjan Doma for one, the poor fellow who got killed in a car crash about a month later, and I think I recognize the fellow from Dnevnik , the tabloid daily, who snapped my picture by the landmark Robba fountain in the old town the day the protective winter wooden box around the fountain was removed; the snapshot ran in the paper the next day.

After the concert, three or four ordinary-looking middle-aged folks in the audience stood in a tight circle and sang some more songs in diatonic harmony, or whatever you call it, almost as well as the ensemble. There were recitations outdoors, dozens of torches, and more girls dressed in white Bela Krajina costumes. They wear long cotton dresses, slightly embroidered; most also wear white kerchiefs pulled flat against their heads. A couple are bareheaded and sport pigtails.

Trutamora Slovenica reassembled on the porch of a cottage right across from the gostilna.

The bonfire was lit at sunset, around 9:40 p.m. A professionally stacked pile of wood rapidly went up in flames, to the accompaniment of soft choral singing mixing with the sharp crackling of the dry beams (pine, I think). Sparks ascended vertically and quickly to the heavens. The dancing and singing continued without letup as I descended the hill; lullabye for a bonfire, warmth and song welcoming the warmest season on the longest night.

I feel the blaze's heat, see its light reflecting, flashing onto the faces of my fellow spectators. I realize that my face is illuminated too, and realize that I'm a part of it, just as much as they.

9:51. The entire structure is really going up.

I think I may have been the only non-Slovene at the festivities. Informal, natural, naturalistic. I remembered why I came to Slovenia, and why I decided to stay.

I walk slowly down the hill, turning back every few seconds to fix the scene in my mind. The small crowd spills out along the rise, moving back with the blaze's growth, close to the pink church.

Summer's unforgettable bonfire.

*****

I went to Dubrovnik last week. Terrific place, but the English were inescapable there. I'm not used to understanding the conversations of strangers in the street. I think I prefer it when I don't understand them, 'cause most of the time they're so stupid.

By now I've been in Europe so long that I'm not only following World Cup soccer but beginning to understand the scoring system. I was watching Croatia's victory over Jamaica, broadcast onto an outdoor screen in a square in Dubrovnik, and with every Croatian goal, fireworks would go off and flags would wave. (They won a second time on the day I returned to LJ via a train from Zagreb, and in the streets young guys were honking on by in convertibles with more noise and flags. Croatia's got a decent team. They ended up taking third place in the tournament, and received raves and official receptions at home.)

Monday, July 13, 1998: Bicycle daydreams

Two days after a rather uneventful birthday. Spent a typical quiet day today, downloading travel capsules from AOL's Travel Corner, daydreaming about visiting everywhere from Uzbekistan to Vanuatu (a Dutch translator woman of my acquaintance is going on a three-week jaunt to Tanzania, to view wildlife of every stripe).

At around seven in the evening -- two hours of daylight still promised -- I pedaled my Rog bicycle around the neighborhood and ended up on Ulica Metoda Mikuza, my dream street on which to live -- prosperous, wide avenue, lots of shade trees, nice cars, nice apartments, lots of kids playing -- and ended up parking the kolo at the edge of a park where teens and twentyish guys were playing soccer (France had won the World Cup the day before, beating Brazil by a convincing 3-0 score) and tennis and, I think, hoops.

This is where I want to live, I said to myself. (But do I?) This is where I want to be. It feels like home. (But did it, does it really?)

The POP TV postmodern shed was a five minutes' walk up the road, if that. I would live here and work here, at POP TV. I'd be ten minutes' walk from work...

A perfect day in mid-July. Work is done, people relaxing over a beer at the local log-cabin-style okrepcevalnica. Peace. Peace be unto you. Peace be unto me.

Sunday, July 26, 1998: Return to Rakova Jelsa

I finally returned to my old neighborhood in Rakova Jelsa, the semi-rural settlement on Ljubljana's southern borderlands. There had been a terrific thunderstorm the previous night, and both the Ljubljanica river proper and the Mali Graben creek were sullen, swollen and olive-drab with mud. The corn was high, apples were ripening, and the phrase "the bounty of the earth" came automatically to my mind as I pedaled past the familiar sights. My first stop was the Branka-B store, where I had a nice chat with Branka herself and bought some oranges.

The next stop was Srebrniceva. I bicycled at high speed past my old domicile, stopping only at the end of the paved road, near the willow-lined Ljubljanica. Then I rode back to find Bojana (not her real name), my ex- landlady herself, in the yard. I found that the Slovene I had learned in the interval had pretty much deserted me. I managed to explain that I was living in Bezigrad now. She seemed sad and at a loss for words. I said that I would return. I left speedily, feeling that I had, somehow, let her down. I still can't figure out exactly how.

October 11: Gardens, graves, and Scottish women drumming

The autumnal days of nothing special. Ljubljana je zaspana, or Ljubljana is sleepy, is the saying in these parts (also Ljubljana je bolana, Ljubljana is sick), but with the exception of Sundays, I'd have to disagree. There's such a thing as too much excitement, especially after you kiss your twenties goodbye (which for me was a while back).

I think this is the first day we've had in October without any rain. The wet season has started early. I took advantage of the good weather to go pedaling. I enjoy my accustomed route: across the street, past ugly apartment blocks, light industry, pet stores and pizzerias, up to the architectural showcase of the Zale cemetery, on my left as I head out. The cemetery was designed by Slovenia's most famed architect, Joze Plecnik, who is himself buried there (in a very modest grave, which is appropriate; his true monuments are elsewhere, all over the city and beyond), and the chapels and various other structures in Zale are some of his best work.

On the right of the path are small community gardens, rectangular plots of cabbages and corn with tumbledown wooden gardener's sheds adjacent. I love riding past here; it's an almost too obvious living metaphor of life and death coexisting side by side. Often one of the gardeners, invariably middle-aged to elderly (I've never seen one under 40, and few under 50), is burning leaves in a pile; a man in a Yankees cap might be turning over a compost heap, or a babica, a grandmotherly peasant type in a kerchief, might be weeding.

I stop at the corner where the cemetery ends. A dirt road winds on a downhill slope to the left. On the right are more gardens. But I've stopped to look once again at a curiosity I discovered a while back. As far as I can tell, it's the only grave outside the cemetery wall.

At first I wondered if it might be a suicide, but this wasn't the case. Anton Segelin, born 1891; member of the Liberation Front; shot by the Black Hand on a September day in 1944, when Ljubljana was still under Nazi control. American usage notwithstanding, the Black Hand wasn't the Mafia; it was a group of fascist sympathizers who worked to thwart the underground resistance movement to which Anton belonged.

The letters on the marker, placed directly into the cemetery wall, are filled in with red, probably a Communist-era homage. I wonder: Why is it the only grave outside the wall? Traditionally a symbol of dishonor, the grave must have been placed there on orders of the occupiers. But what about all the other resistance fighters who were "shot by the Black Hand"? Was it possible that Anton was the only such victim? Or was there another reason he was singled out for such treatment? And why wasn't he reburied inside the cemetery after the war? Did the family, if such remained in Slovenia, consider it a badge of honor?

Que pasa, Anton baby? Do you like your spot outside the wall? Ever wish you were inside, grooving at the big party?

Mysteries, enigmas...

It's harvest time; the central marketplace is delightful this time of year. Some kind of 'Slovene fruit exhibition' is going on and barrels of all sorts of apples are on sale everywhere, fresh and dried, not to mention cider, goat and sheep cheeses, chestnuts, pears, even homegrown olive oil...there's also a Biennial of Industrial Design happening, mostly up at the Castle, and a festival called City of Women which today featured 20 Scottish women drummers who form a group called SheBoom (kilted, pierced, dreadlocked, shorn, painted, combat-booted) and their camp followers, marching through the old town's cobbled streets pounding out infectious rhythms on big ol' drums, to the mystification of middle-aged tourists sitting at the sidewalk cafes and delight of the younger tourists strolling alongside. If Braveheart were re-shot with an all-lesbian cast in a Central European city, it might have resembled this. On days like this I really like where I live.

October 22: Oh, shut up and watch some TV

On the other hand, today I'm having one of those moods that come from one too many turns around the same circuit: I've had it with book discussions at the British Council. I've had it with the Brits. I've had it with the Americans...

I'm sick of Expat Nites at Klub Drama. Either I meet the same people I've seen a hundred times before and have nothing to say to, or I meet people I've never seen before and will never see again, and who ask me the same questions I've been asked 12 times before. (How did I find Slovenia -- by way of saying, how did I settle on this place as a place to live? Continuing shortly on to: How do you make a living? How much do you earn from proofreading? What do you pay for rent? Can you find me work?) At times like these, I wonder why I left Boston. Then I get over it.

At least television, of all things, continues to amuse: besides the Slovene version of Wheel of Fortune, there's Izazovi!, the Croatian version of Jeopardy!, and, best of all, Zmenkarije, on Kanal A, based very closely on The Dating Game. Oh, and every morning at 9:30 Kanal A broadcasts Bradyjevi (The Brady Bunch) followed by Laverne and Shirley, then Mannix. (For a more complete listing of what you can get over here, see 20 Favorite Things.) There is no escape from the American cultural hegemony, at least not anywhere nearby. Of course, there's this local fascination with a Mexican soap opera called Esmeralda, which has apparently swept the entire ex-Eastern Bloc (plus Turkey and probably lots of other places Americans hardly ever think about) with its lurid melodrama and emotive emotions. But that, I think, is enough of that.