I remember a melancholy conversation, twenty-five years ago
or so, with a dear friend of mine who had spent a large part of his childhood
in Mexico. He was telling me about a
recent trip there, and about his return, standing at the very edge of Texas and
looking south across a rather sparse and forbidding landscape. Thinking of Mexico, thinking, I wish, just once, that God would bless this
country.
There are places throughout the world where that thought
arises, and at the time when we were having that conversation, Slovenia was one
of them. Part of what we called “the
Soviet bloc”, it was lumped with a dozen or so areas in Eastern and Central
Europe that the American schoolchild was hard pressed to distinguish or even
identify—which one, after all, was Estonia among those former republics along
the Baltic? They were the villains in
our Cold War mythology, or at best the unwilling but submissive assistants to
the villain—a villain who wore Khrushchev’s or Brezhnev’s face, and had
promised to bury us just as it had buried them.
You could see traces of a sorrowful history in the small
antique market set up on Sunday morning along the banks of the Ljubljanica:
from the imposing Habsburg architecture to the medals adorned with the SS runes
and the swastika, the Soviet red star.
Surely, after of
centuries of this, God would bless this country.
And sure enough, the signs are there.
Traveling north with Vlado (whom we met before in Prague
[see the January 19th entry] and Rudi, our Slovenian friends, we
watched the landscape change from the dry, poplar-studded Italian terrain to
something more mountainous, thick with evergreens, familiar sights to those
whose vistas include the American North.
A terrific ice storm had struck this region in late winter, and all around
lay the wreckage of trees, and far from the highway, the occasional collapsed
roofs of older buildings. But it was a
healthy land just dealt a punch, by no means a chronic condition.
And that health extends to the human landscape. As we neared the Slovenian border, Vlado,
always one for smart (if prankish) humor, asked us if we had our
passports. As I reached for mine, he
broke into a grin, announcing, “Because you don’t need them!” This not only marked what I really did not
realize until this year—the friendly and convenient fluidity of European
borders—but also was the occasion for our friends’ recounting of times they
passed through checkpoints when they were twenty-five, thirty years
younger. Apparently, those gates were
not manned by Kalashnikov-toting party faithful, but usually boys like they
were themselves back then, sleepy and bored and bribable, Vlado assured us, for
a pair of Levis. He said that you never
knew, the fact that I was wearing jeans that day might end up coming in handy.
Embarrassing as well, I thought.
After my travels in Budapest and Prague, I had suspended
most preconceptions as to what I would find in a Central European capital. Even so, Ljubljana is a fresh and beautiful
surprise. Its central city reminds me of
Dublin’s for some reason—curled around the banks of a quiet river, a wedding of
18th century streets and modern boutique commerce. The weekend we were there was a bit overcast,
but I’ve found that the clouds and the banked sunlight evoke the brighter
colors in older areas of European cities—Dublin and Venice and Prague and now
Ljubljana, all of which emerge beautifully in a grey day. If you take the funicular—one of the inclined
railways you see on occasion in this part of Europe (though this is one of the
nicer ones)—you arrive at Ljubljana Castle, where a once-military view of the
city, where the brick-red roofs of the central pedestrian zones give way to a
modernized, extraordinarily new-looking expanse of cityscape. You wonder how Western attention has passed
by this beautiful place, and part of you suspects that the oversight hasn’t
been the worst thing in the world for the city.
In its central areas, Ljubljana is a community of statues. Poets and artists, for the most part, and it
was humbling to realize that 1) these were exactly the people I always maintain
a city should honor, and 2) that I recognized so few of them. Among them were France Prešeren, a Romantic
poet known for historical and mythic narration as well, and Jože Plečnik, an
architect who virtually defined the look of this city. Prešeren is for another time, perhaps: I’m
ashamed to say I haven’t read a line, and therefore have nothing yet to
say. As to Plečnik, my lack of knowledge
is a hindrance here as well, but the buildings make immediate statement to the
eye, and what struck me was something that lingers in my thoughts of
Ljubljana—its brilliant eclecticism.
Plečnik’s buildings sit side by side with the city’s
Habsburg imposition—the monumental, 18th century Viennese
declarations of dominance and power. I
mentioned to my resident Plečnik expert, the remarkable 17-year-old David
(Rudi’s son and Vlado’s nephew—see again January 19th entry), that
the Habsburgs “had a habit of sticking their nose into things,” to which he
slyly responded, “and we Slovenians have a habit of complaining about
them.” It was David who pointed out the
mix of design and medium that characterized Plečnik’s work—from the wedding of
brick and stone in the National Library to the church Rudi took us to at the
margins of the city.
And this quality, above all others, was what struck me about
Ljubljana, as well. The brilliant,
improvisational nature of its tradition, both historical and contemporary: from
its integrity and artistic rebellions against the cultures that overwhelmed it
by force but not by genius, to its transformations within our lifetimes from a
world where young men bribe border guards with Levis to beautiful, open-air
cafes, where at least half a dozen languages can be overheard at late dinner,
it seems to have wedded tradition and change like Plečnik’s merging of brick
and stone—a young old city in lovely and fascinating transition.
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