Letter from Ljubljana #7
More news from Planet Slovenia

Dear friends, family and unwary onlookers,

LFL lives! Herewith the next installment.

October 30, 1999: Ljubljana's long weekend of the dead

Halloween is making inroads in Europe, including Slovenia. People have certainly heard of it, although Carnival is still the main excuse for kids to dress up in witch and Spiderman outfits, and tonight POP TV is running the 1994 'Frankenstein' with Branagh and DeNiro, opposite 'Pet Sematary' 1 and 2 on Kanal A. But the older traditions, thankfully, still obtain.

In the late afternoon of a stereotypically crisp autumnal Saturday, in the last hour of daylight before people turn their clocks back for the end of daylight savings in 1999, the crowds stream through the gates of Zale (pronounced ZHA-leh), Ljubljana's sprawling, ever-fascinating main cemetery. Monday is Dan mrtvih, the Day of the Dead, but why not beat the real rush?

The approach to the cemetery is where the party starts: a two-block lane is chockablock on both sides of the sidewalk with hawkers of grave lights (covered hurricane-style candle lamps, generally made of cheap plastic, some of glass, filled with pasty white wax) and floral arrangements, mostly, but since death and eating go together like New Year's Eve and overpriced nightclubs, knots of customers also gather around stands dispensing pleskavica and hot dogs, cheap wine and brandy, cotton candy and popcorn, chocolates and Turkish taffy (after all, the kids must be placated, and some adults, too), and socially lubricate. Three chestnut vendors are there, stirring up their warm treasures in big metal drums, and I buy a small coneful from the one in the middle.

Today the cemetery is also a place for the living, who don't quite outnumber the ones they're visiting but give them a good run for their money (oops, forgot, the dead don't have any). All generations mix; some dress up, some don't. Down the wide alleys of Zale, lined with four-foot-high evergreen cones, they stroll, their arms and, sometimes, shopping bags laden with offerings, and lovingly place their annual gifts atop the stylish, often impressively artistic tombstones. Every grave I see -- and I mean every one -- boasts at least one lamp, and to see six or eight burning on a single plot is not unusual; the most I counted was 17. (Since I don't live too far away I returned on November 1, the day itself, for the real crush, and counted 26 lamps on one final resting place.) Hundreds have been placed in a semicircle around the chapel near the gate.

I see graves of the famous, at least famous around here: Ivan Cankar, the writer, and Joze Plecnik, the architect who designed not only Zale but much of present-day Ljubljana. Plecnik's tombstone, in a nice shady spot, is a simple rectangle the shape and color of a bar of Ivory soap, and no larger than a small air conditioner; this guy didn't need a fancy mausoleum to impress people. But the best-tended graves are those of people nobody has ever heard of except their family. As always, the dead keep their secrets. Who were those two children, a boy and a girl, who both died in the same year, 1939, a black-and-white photo of them set in the stone? Why are there so many people here who left this earth before their 35th birthday? At this point I remember strolling through the cemetery in Spoleto, Italy, last summer, in an assignment for a writing workshop, and become self-conscious in Zale more than I was in that more celebrated nation: here I am, a visitor surreptitiously scrawling notes on a scrap of paper, a cone filled with warm chestnuts stuffed in his inside jacket pocket. But I'm still glad I came.

...and the inevitable millennial entry?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I spent Y2K eve at a pleasant, but low-key and essentially uneventful house party, given by some friends of friends, in a little village called Dragocajna (near Medvode; you know it, right?) about a half-hour's drive out of town. Right after midnight, we all stepped outside into the refreshingly cold air and the householder -- who had built the house himself, and not too badly -- shot off reasonably impressive fireworks into the clear night sky, as did a good number of his neighbors. And there was some conversation and some music, neither of which was too awful, and I got home at about five a.m. and stayed up another hour to see the ball drop in Times Square via CNN. Very impressive.

So do you really think you have to know everything?