JULY 13 - Start today with a march up the steep path to Ljubljana Castle, which dominates the downtown skyline. It is ideally situated to view the town along the meander in the river. There was almost certainly always a fortress here, though the first known building dates from the 11th Century. Its difficult to imagine that the Romans did not have something here, since they built a good-sized town in the floodplain below (at that time, the town was called Emona). Like some of the other castles we’ve seen, for example in Brno, this castle went form being a royal residence to a prison over the centuries. It is almost completely reconstructed in the 20th Century, only a few bits and pieces remaining from earlier times. We take the audio tour, as we’ve found that this increases Odette’s interest. Something about being in charge of the audio device and listening when she wants to.
There was an exhibit in the castle running through all the 20th Century history of Slovenia. We didn’t spend a lot of time in here, but I did get a sense for how the different generations viewed Yugoslavia in the 1970’s until breakup. While the ‘Iron Curtain’ countries we’ve been traveling in universally reject the pre-independence conditions as being oppressive, I get the sense that in the Balkans, there was a different perception among the people who grew up under Josip Tito and the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. First of all, Tito broke politically with Stalin in 1948, leading Yugoslavia away from the communist model and toward a more flexible socialist system. This flexibility allowed Yugoslavia to develop more robust private enterprise and trade with the rest of Europe. The rise in living standards may have helped to quell ethnic discontent, but the real glue holding everything together was Tito. His death in 1980 took the cohesion out of the federation, and ethnic divisions came out again just as they had before WWI.
So, getting back to the generational division, while people who grew up under Tito may have felt a great sense of security and continuity, the new generation that saw his death wanted to move on and become more like the rest of Europe.
On to a bit of the Roman age. They moved in early on, by the 1st Century BC. This part of Slovenia was officially part of Roman Italia, while the eastern portion of the country was Pannonia. While the low mountain passes made it easy for Rome to control the region when they were strong, it proved a real liability by the 4th Century AD, when Ostrogoths and others used the same routes to invade Italy proper.