Lessons from abroad

I’ve just sent three days in the little county of Slovenia, a place I could not previously have located on a map. It has been its own country only since 1991. Like so many of the countries of this region, it has a long brutal history of being under someone else’s thumb: The Romans, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Nazis, the Soviets. What is it like to not be your own self? To be subsumed by Empires, and later to be sloppily stitched together in a sprawling fabricated political entity, created out of other countries with their own languages and cultures, histories and traditions, ruled over by an even more sprawling political entity?

I don’t know. And as a visitor for a mere three days (even though I sought out and listened to many stories during that short time), I don’t want to pretend to know. But I can pass along observations. What I heard in this country was both pride and humility. “We are such a young country,” they say (humble) “but we were chosen as European’s greenest city.” (pride). And then they laugh, pointing to the three-year-old commemorative flag still flying over a government building. “We just can’t take it down,” they say. (poking gentle fun of themselves)

I learn that the main river in this small country has seven different names because it goes underground through limestone caves and then emerges seven times. Back before much was known about geology, it was thought that each was a separate river. Now they know differently, but still Slovenians refer to this the river by these different names. This city is known as the Dragon city, and I hear two completely different stories that explain the name, both told with equal enthusiasm and mythological depth. Either could be wrong, the teller of these tales says. Or either could be right. Or both.

And I think: How liberating to live in a country where you can say such things without irony or snark. I love how nuance is a natural part of life because it is how you have to live, how generations have learned to live, when your footing is on shifting sand.

A final word about this country: In the main square of its capital, Ljubljana, there is a large impressive statue. It is not of a general or a war hero or a president. It is of a poet.