Slovene culture: the books arrived four centuries before the state

Why a preacher had to print the language first

Around the year 1000 somebody wrote three short religious texts in a Slavic language using Latin letters. The Freising manuscripts are the first continuous Latin-script text in any Slavic language and the oldest surviving document in Slovene, and then nothing comparable follows for five hundred years. Medieval writing in the Slovene lands was done in German or Latin, because the administration, the schooling and the church were Austrian.

The break comes in the mid-sixteenth century, and it comes from the Reformation. Primož Trubar, a theologian in the Lutheran tradition, printed the first two books in Slovene, an Abecednik and a Katekizem, and in doing so had to decide what Slovene was. He and the reformers around him built the written standard out of the dialects of three central parts of the Duchy of Carniola: Upper Carniola, Inner Carniola and Lower Carniola. In the second half of the same century Jurij Dalmatin translated the whole Bible into it, and Adam Bohorič wrote the orthography.

Then the authorities took the other side. The Counter-Reformation of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, driven by the Ljubljana bishop Thomas Chrön and by Martin Brenner of Seckau, expelled almost every Protestant from the Slovene lands. Only Prekmurje in the far east kept a Lutheran community, protected by Hungarian nobles who were often Calvinist themselves. The people were removed and the books were not. Bohorič's alphabet stayed in use until the middle of the nineteenth century, and Britannica's account of Slovene literature records that the corpus Trubar, Dalmatin and Bohorič assembled was the thing the Counter-Reformation could not destroy. It is what the national revival of about 1780 had to work from.

The arithmetic of that inheritance is strange. Protestants were fewer than 1% of the population at the 2002 census, and Catholics were 72.1% in the 2019 Eurobarometer survey, down from 73.4% the year before. The Lutheran remnant sits where it survived: in Prekmurje it is around a fifth of the population, headed by a bishop seated in Murska Sobota. A church with almost no members supplied the language everybody else argues in.

What Slovene kept that other languages lost

Slovene is a South Slavic language with affinities to Czech and Slovak, and it is among the few languages anywhere that kept the dual grammatical number of Proto-Indo-European, a separate set of forms used when there are exactly two of something. Two people do a thing in one form and three do it in another.

It is also unusually divided for its size. Slovene was the native language of about 88% of the population at the 2002 census, in a country of 2,116,972 people as of 1 January 2022, and more than 92% used it at home. Accounts of its dialects range from seven groups subdivided into as many as fifty; other authorities count eight or nine. The eastern dialects blend into Kajkavian forms of Serbo-Croatian, and the written standard is remote from its Croatian counterparts.

The rest of the linguistic map is legally specified rather than left to custom. Hungarian is co-official with Slovene in 30 settlements across five municipalities and Italian in 25 settlements across four, and passports issued in those areas are bilingual. Romani, the native language of 0.2% of the population in 2002, is protected by law. German, spoken by around 4% of the population in 1921, was down to about 0.08% by the 2002 census, most of those speakers over sixty, and Gottscheerish, the German dialect of Gottschee County, faces extinction. The next most spoken native language arrived recently: Serbo-Croatian in its several forms stood at 5.9% in 2002, brought by families from the other Yugoslav republics.

Foreign languages are close to universal. As of 2007, 92% of people aged 25 to 64 spoke at least one and around 71.8% of those spoke at least two. A Eurobarometer survey in 2005 found 61% could speak Croatian, 56% English and 42% German, and about 15% speak Italian, which is in daily use along the coast.

How a poet's death became a public holiday

France Prešeren was born at Vrba in 1800 and died at Kranj on 8 February 1849, at 48. He studied law in Vienna, returned to a Slovene reading public that was small and heavily Germanised, and published in Kranjska čbelica, the literary journal edited by his friend and mentor Matija Čop. Čop drowned in 1835. Prešeren introduced the ghazal, the ballad, the sonnet wreath and pattern poetry into a literature that had never carried them, and his Sonetni venec of 1834 spelled out in an acrostic the name of a well-off young woman he had no realistic prospect of marrying, which scandalised his readers. Krst pri Savici followed in 1836, written for Čop, and the collected Poezije in 1847.

The poem that mattered most to the state that did not yet exist is Zdravljica, written in 1844 and known in English as "The Toast". It is the national anthem. Prešeren himself was refused permission by the Austrian authorities to practise as an attorney until almost the end of his life, and Britannica's biography records that he died destitute and alone.

The anniversary of that death, 8 February, is a national holiday given to Slovene culture, and the central square of Ljubljana carries his name. Slovenia closes for the day a poet died.

Who wrote the first play in Slovene

Theatre carried the same load. A Passion procession play was performed at Škofja Loka between 1715 and 1727, but the first play written and performed in Slovene is Anton Tomaž Linhart's Županova Micka, which premiered on 28 December 1789. Slovene was not then a recognised language and most literary work and business was conducted in German, so writing a comedy in Slovene and staging it was itself an argument about who the audience was. A Dramatic Society was formed in Ljubljana in 1879 to professionalise the business, running a research arm, a drama school and a full repertory season at once.

The structure it produced is still standing. There are four national theatres, and in 1952 the national government and the larger municipalities founded seven more professional repertory houses with long-term funding. Companies work a season of four to twelve plays, and a production stays on the bill for at least a season and often for years. Two national theatres do nothing but puppetry.

What the state did to its writers

Ivan Cankar, whose Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica appeared in 1907, wrote the prose and plays of Slovene Modernism and died in 1918, the year the Slovene lands were partitioned between Italy, Austria and the new Yugoslavia. After the Second World War the pressure came from the other direction. Edvard Kocbek's career was ruined by Strah in pogum in 1951, a book that portrayed the wartime Partisans objectively, and Slovene writing was released from direct Communist Party control only in the early 1950s.

Britannica's survey of Slovene literature closes on the question the whole arrangement raises: whether, after independence in 1991, a literature would go on defining and sustaining the nation as it had done before. Most European literatures are never asked that, because most of them were never the only institution available. Slovenia's thousand years without a state is what put this one in that position.

Who turned a provincial town into a capital

When Austria-Hungary dissolved, Ljubljana went from a provincial city of the empire to the symbolic capital of the Slovenian people, and one architect did most of the work of making it look like one. Jože Plečnik, who lived from 1872 to 1957, rebuilt the city between the two world wars along two axes. The land axis runs from the Trnovo Bridge through the Square of the French Revolution and along Vegova Street, past the National and University Library, to Congress Square and Zvezda Park. The water axis follows the embankments and bridges of the Ljubljanica from the Trnovo district to the Sluice Gate. Transverse axes tie the two together, and outside the centre sit the Church of St Michael, the Church of St Francis of Assisi and Žale, his Garden of All Saints.

UNESCO inscribed the ensemble on the World Heritage List in 2021 under criterion four, as human-centred urban renewal carried out for the purpose of nation building, and named what makes it unusual: a whole system of public spaces, buildings and green areas built to one architect's vision, inside an existing city, in a short period and with limited resources. Modern architecture had been introduced to Slovenia by Max Fabiani; Ivan Vurnik worked alongside Plečnik, and Edvard Ravnikar and his students merged national and universal styles after 1945.

The older fabric is dense. The architectural inventory runs to about 2,500 churches and 1,000 castles, ruins and manor houses, along with farmhouses and the kozolci, the slatted wooden racks built for drying hay that stand out in the fields. Three further sites carry World Heritage listing on their own account: the Škocjan Caves and their karst surroundings, the mercury mining heritage at Idrija, and the prehistoric pile dwellings in the Ljubljana Marsh. Predjama Castle is built into the mouth of a cave.

Design was taken as seriously as building. Niko Kralj's Rex chair of 1952 is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and entered the Danish Designmuseum in 2012. Ivan Grohar's painting The Sower is on the five-cent euro coin. The first art exhibition held in Slovenia was organised in the late nineteenth century by the painter Ivana Kobilca, and the conceptual groups OHO, Group 69 and IRWIN carried the next argument about what Slovene art was for.

What Slovenes cook and where it changes

Slovene cooking is Central European at its base, closest to Austrian and Hungarian practice, with Mediterranean habits along the coast, where Istrian and Italian cooking reach inland. Ethnological work has identified more than forty regional cuisines inside a country of 20,271 square kilometres, and the historical divisions were social as much as geographic: urban, farmhouse, cottage, castle, parsonage and monastic kitchens each cooked differently.

The characteristic form is the one-pot dish. Ričet, the Istrian stew called jota, the minestrone known as mineštra and žganci, a buckwheat spoonbread, are what the ethnologists point to, and soups arrived comparatively late, laid on top of a diet of pots, porridges and stews.

Potica travelled furthest, and it is the dish the Slovene diaspora in the United States kept. Roast potatoes are the Sunday dish in many households, defended since 2000 by the Society for the Recognition of Roasted Potatoes as a Distinct Dish, which runs an annual festival, and the Post of Slovenia put them on a stamp series in 2012. Slovenia held the title of European Region of Gastronomy for 2021, and a grapevine estimated at more than 400 years old is still in production.

What the Slovene year still marks

The calendar keeps two practices that UNESCO has placed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and neither is staged for visitors.

The first runs from Candlemas on 2 February to Ash Wednesday. Groups of Kurenti, accompanied by one or more devils, go from house to house through the villages and now through the town of Ptuj as well, form a circle in the yard and jump around the householders. The bells and the brandished wooden stick are held to drive off everything evil and to bring happiness to the house visited. Men, women and children take part, the groups organise as associations under a Federation of Kurenti Associations, and kindergartens, schools and museums run the workshops and contests that pass the practice on. UNESCO inscribed the door-to-door rounds in 2017. Britannica describes the wider Kurentovanje as a pre-Lenten festival rooted in fertility rites, held in most towns to mark the start of spring and to chase off winter.

The second is beekeeping, inscribed in 2022. The only subspecies kept in Slovenia is the Carniolan bee, and beekeepers hold around 200,000 colonies, breeding queens to preserve the traits they value: gentleness, yield, orientation and resistance to weather. Hives sit in wooden apiaries near the house. The craft carries its own literature, with printed works from the eighteenth century onward, its own architecture in the traditional apiary, and its own painting, because the front boards of the hives are decorated with religious and secular scenes.

Around these sit the Christian holidays. Easter runs for a week, with feasts, processions and caroling, and Christmas is the other fixed point of the year.

How Slovene singing is put together

Slovene folk singing is harmony singing, and the harmony is thick. The tradition is at least three-part, which means four voices, and in some regions it runs to eight parts and nine voices. The songs are seldom in a minor key.

The instruments are alpine: the Styrian accordion, fiddle, clarinet, zither, flute, and brass bands of the alpine type. In eastern Slovenia the fiddle and cimbalon bands are called velike goslarije.

That folk base produced an export. From 1952 the band of Slavko Avsenik began appearing on West German broadcasts, in films and in concerts, and invented the Oberkrainer sound, a polka style that spread through Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Benelux and set off hundreds of alpine orchestras. The band wrote close to a thousand compositions, of which the polka Na Golici, called Trompetenecho in German, is the one everybody plays. Lojze Slak followed the same road.

The written tradition is older and runs beside it. Jacobus Gallus, who lived from 1550 to 1591, wrote church music that circulated across Central Europe, and Joannes Baptista Dolar followed in the Baroque. The first Slovene hymnal, Eni Psalmi, was printed in 1567, inside the same Protestant push that produced the language. The Academia Philharmonicorum Labacensis was founded at Ljubljana in 1701 on Italian models by Johann Berthold von Höffer, a nobleman and amateur composer.

The twentieth century arrived through popular music. The slovenska popevka became the domestic song festival, holding a place in Slovene culture comparable to the one Sanremo holds in Italian. Slovenia was the centre of punk rock in Titoist Yugoslavia, with Pankrti and Niet, and between 1981 and 2000 the Novi Rock festival brought Western rock across the Iron Curtain to Slovene and then Yugoslav audiences. Laibach, an industrial group formed in the early 1980s, came out of the same decade.

What Slovenes play and where they win

Since 1992 Slovenian competitors have taken 59 Olympic medals, 16 of them gold, along with 26 Paralympic medals and five Paralympic golds. Before the Second World War the popular sports were gymnastics and fencing, and the gymnasts Leon Štukelj and Miroslav Cerar won Olympic gold. Football grew between the wars, basketball, handball and volleyball spread after 1945, and winter sport followed from the mid-1970s.

Cycling holds the recent record. Primož Roglič won the Vuelta a España in 2019, the first Grand Tour won by a Slovenian, and Tadej Pogačar has won the Tour de France in 2020, 2021, 2024, 2025 and 2026. In 2021 the climber Janja Garnbret became the first woman to win Olympic gold in sport climbing. Tina Maze took two Olympic golds in alpine skiing, and the ski jumpers Primož Peterka and Peter Prevc, the cross-country skier Petra Majdič and the alpine skiers Bojan Križaj, Mateja Svet and Ilka Štuhec belong to the same winter tradition.

The team sports are collective and old. The men's basketball side has played fifteen EuroBaskets and won the 2017 tournament, and Slovenia hosted EuroBasket 2013. The men's handball team finished third at the 2017 World Championship and took silver at the 2004 European Championship it hosted; RK Celje won the EHF Champions League in the 2003-04 season and RK Krim won the women's competition in 2001 and 2003. The volleyball team has three European Championship silvers and finished fourth at the 2022 World Championship. Footballers have reached two European Championships, in 2000 and 2024, and two World Cups, in 2002 and 2010, and NK Maribor has played three Champions League group stages. The ice hockey team has appeared at 32 World Championships, twelve of them in the top division.

Tennis and mountaineering are widely practised as individual sports. Slovenia has also produced a line of endurance and extreme athletes with international reputations: the mountaineer Tomaž Humar, the mountain skier Davo Karničar, the ultramarathon swimmer Martin Strel and the ultracyclist Jure Robič.