You May Also Like
The columnist’s family on a trip to Ljubljana, from left Vivienne Neil, Sam Shaffer, Drew Gadsby and Rhys Gadsby. The emus and accordions mentioned below can be found near the pink baroque church in the background, which is Franciscan Church of the Annunciation.
jshaffer@newsobserver.com
Early this month, I flew to Ljubljana, Slovenia, with my family of eight, dropping into a European city half Raleigh’s size that few could pinpoint on a map — a whimsical place fixated on puppets, fairytale architecture and the letter J.
This admittedly off-kilter choice came largely on the advice of travel guru and personal hero Rick Steves, who advocates wading hip-deep into local culture, avoiding tourist sinkholes, seeking the authentic.
So with this in mind, I strolled around people-watching and made the following discoveries, none of them true on Fayetteville Street:
- Around sundown, accordion players occupied every available corner in the Slovenian capital, wearing jaunty hats and playing lively folk tunes. In Preseren Square, they outnumbered police officers 3-0.
- For no reason I could tell, an elderly man brought his pet emu to the square every night and allowed strangers to pet its feathers — an attraction that drew crowds of 50 and spawned numerous TikTok videos.
- Every hour, a pair of puppets popped out of a clock tower beneath the medieval castle, one of them a farmer raising an axe and one of them his nervous-looking horse, and they saluted the city from above while a marching tune played. It is hard to overstate how much excitement this spectacle created.
- One baroque church, The Cathedral of St. Nicholas, contained unspecified remains belonging to one St. Felix — likely a bone or two contained in an urn. For the rest of the week, my brother-in-law sang “Pieces of Felix” to the tune of The Who song “Pictures of Lily.”
To top all of this off, Ljubljana has a dragon as its official mascot, and their green-colored statues sit perched at the ends of a popular bridge, showing fangs.
This wonderment only continued when we moved north into the Slovenian Alps, younger and shorter than their cousins in France or Switzerland, but pointier, more jagged and Tolkien-esque.
There we found:
- Every true Slovene must climb Mount Triglav, which stands at 10,000 feet and keeps snow on the peak even in a record-breaking August heat wave, and is also home to Zlatorog, the mythical goat creature who keeps the secret to a golden treasure inside his horns. We didn’t make it to the top, but we did find a bar at the bottom that serves Lasko beer. It has a picture of Zlatorog on the can.
- Most people would recognize Lake Bled from the popular Microsoft screensaver that features a church steeple on an island in the middle of clear turquoise water, flanked by towering Alps in the background. And while this picture doubles its breathtaking power in person, consider its history. Long ago, a Hapsburg emperor stole the land from farmers living around Lake Bled, forcing them to row boats out to the church-island in lieu of paying taxes. Today, only 11th-generation descendants of those farmers can row the 20-foot flat-bottomed boats that carry tourists like me to the church. “My father was rower,” one told us. “My grandfather was rower. My great-grandfather was rower….”
And now back in Raleigh, where you need a $40 permit to play accordion on the street, my mind turns to the wide and more general differences between daily life in Europe and the USA.
These differences intensify, I think, in the smaller, less-crowded villages that Rick Steves encourages us to explore, where authenticity can sometimes mean horse meat on the menu and a total lack of air-conditioning.
.jpeg "IMG_6078 (1).jpeg")
I offer them now in random order, neither as an endorsement nor criticism:
- As mentioned above, I saw far more accordion players than police officers. I heard maybe one siren in 10 days.
- Most everybody eats outdoors, at least in the summer.
- There are no televisions going in public places.
- You have to pay to use a public restroom, and the coin option almost never works. The debit card pee route is more reliable.
- English is the default language in cities. I had dinner between a group of German 20-somethings and an Italian couple and the waiter addressed us all in English.
- Statues are built to poets, musicians and maybe a few civic leaders. No military figures. In Ljubljana, the poet France Preseren stands in the largest, most central square, and because he drank himself to death over an unrequited love, people place bottles and glasses in his hand. Buildings are made of stone and are never torn down.
- Beds are less comfortable.
- Streets are one-car-wide and very steep, and people just stop in their tracks and expect you to go backward.
- Outside the cities, people have animals that bleat from inside small barns, again, very early, and from your bed it’s hard to tell what kind.
But at least one, I’m pretty sure, was Zlatorog, pointing us to treasure.
.
The News & Observer
Josh Shaffer is a general assignment reporter on the watch for “talkers,” which are stories you might discuss around a water cooler. He has worked for The News & Observer since 2004 and writes a column about unusual people and places.
