Same Balkans, new City

After a two year hiatus, Lost in Post-Socialist Space is back, by popular (that is, Lizzie's) demand. Now is a fortunate time to restart it as, while I have been back in Eastern Europe a couple of times since I was last writing this blog in Serbia, it was generally back to places I had already been. Now I am once again experiencing the delights of a new (to me, but also new temporally) Balkan country. I'm in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, referred to locally as the 'city of love' thanks to its name (Ljub- being a general slavic root for 'love'). Paris it may not be, but a more beautiful, if sleepy, place to spend a lazy European break probably could not be imagined.

Ljubljana is unusual for a Balkan city - at least the ones I've seen - in that instead of the regular picturesque jumble of architectural styles from Turkish, Austrian and Communist past's, Slovenia's capital is a rather homogeneous collection of beautiful baroque churches with the occasional smattering of fin-de-siecle art nouveau. Apparently, the city suffered two major earthquakes in the last five centuries, one in 1511 and another in 1895. As tragic as the events were, they had a paradoxically happy outcome for the city's urban planning, as they enabled one re-building at the height of grand Catholic baroque style during the early years of the Counter-Reformation, and another part-rebuilding during everyone's favourite period of artistic decadence, the fin-de-siecle. I became a fount of such architectural knowledge on visiting the City Museum of Ljubljana which, though small like the city, was pretty and empty enough for me to spend three hours wandering around soaking up trivia about the site of the hippy counterculture in 1970s Slovenia (a chocolate factory called Sumi) and the design of Yugo-Pioneer hats of childhood notsalgia. Being an uber history nerd, I was also interested to observe that in the national narrative of contemporary Slovenia, Napolean's invasion and occupation of the region in the early nineteenth century = good, and the Austrian imperial occupation = very bad, despite the Habsburg legacy today apparently mainly consisting of forms of cream-filled cake and ornate Baroque curlicues. Fair enough, I suppose, as the Austrians did run this place with an intermittently iron fist for 500 years, but the glorification of the power-hungry Frenchman is rare in Central Europe and seemed somewhat incongruous in otherwise superlative nationalist narrative of the city's museum.

Apart from nerding it up in the museum, I have been wandering about staring at the sky in order to get a better look at the balconies and iron filigree of the buildings crowding the city's narrow cobbled streets, meeting James for coffee breaks between his work, and occasionally doing some reading/work of my own, when the heat outside drives me into the cool marble halls of the city's main library.

James and I trecked up to the Ljubljana Castle, which we are actually living just in front of (literally - one wall of our courtyard is part of the castle fortifications) which was closed when we got there for some swanky party but which nonetheless had a fab view of the whole, pint-sized city. James and I are about to tuck into an approriately Italian themed dinner made from fresh produce from the luscious city market, which is pretty awesome, and along with the good and cheap wine here and half decent coffee highlights why I now think everyone should plan their next holiday to Slovenia....