Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Slovenian Way of Life
Slovenes are a sophisticated and well-educated people. They have a reputation for being
sober-minded, hard-working, dependable and honest - perhaps a result of all those years
under the yoke of the Germanic Habsburgs. But they retain something of their Slavic char-
acter, even if their spontaneity is a little more premeditated and their expressions of passion
a little more muted than that of their Balkan neighbours. Think quietly conservative, deeply
self-confident, broad-minded and tolerant. And mostly happy - though the current econom-
ic climate is trying even the most stalwart of optimists.
Slovenes are gifted polyglots, and almost
everyone speaks some English, German and/or
Italian. The fact that you will rarely have diffi-
culty in making yourself understood and will
probably never 'need' Slovene shouldn't stop
you from learning a few phrases of this rich and
wonderful language, which counts as many as
three dozen dialects and boasts not just singular and plural but the 'dual' number in which
things are counted in twos (or pairs) in all cases. Any effort on your part to speak the local
tongue will be rewarded 100-fold.
Srečno
(Good luck)!
Cleveland, Ohio, in the USA is the largest 'Sloveni-
an' city outside Slovenia; other American cities
with large concentrations of ethnic Slovenes are
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, Illinois.
TWO LITTLE MAGIC WORDS
If you really want to understand Slovenes and
Sloventsvo
('Slovene-ness', for lack of a better term), there are two
Slovenian words that will help. The first is
priden
, an adjective translated as 'diligent', 'industrious', 'hard-work-
ing' and - tellingly - 'well-behaved'. Erica Johnson Debeljak, long-term Slovenia resident and author of the semin-
al memoir
Forbidden Bread
, writes that
priden
'comes close to defining the essence of the Slovenian soul'. Doing
a spot of DIY, neighbour? How
priden
of you! Expecting that second child, you two? Aren't we
pridni
!
The second word is
hrepenenje
, a noun expressing a more complicated concept. The dictionary says it means
'longing' or 'yearning' but that's only half the story. In truth, it's the desire for something seemingly unattainable
and the sorrow that accompanies it. '
Hrepenenje
is the exclusive property of the dispossessed,' writes Johnson De-
beljak, citing 'the country's agonising history of border changes, emigration, alienation and powerlessness within a
larger unit.' The medieval tale
Lepa Vida
can be seen as the very embodiment of this 'melancholic yearning'.
