Deep in the belly of every not-yet-expatriot is the longing for a quality of being found elsewhere which eludes one’s country of origin. My longing for Slovenia begins with being chastised multiple times for bringing the wrong coat. I actually brought two coats with me on my six-day visit – a fleece-lined corduroy jacket suitable for the lower fifties and a down Patagonia parka whose removal from the closet has always been, to me, the first harbinger of winter, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky. And yet, I never seemed to wear the right one and so everyone I came in contact with, friends, colleagues, and yes, even professional athletes concerned themselves with my warmth.
As soon as I arrived at the airport, my friend Marko remarked, “I hope you brought a warmer jacket, the weather will be rather nasty.” (His friend Miran joked about my hopefully bringing the sun with me too.) Usually when friends greet me in foreign countries, they take me to places like museums or galleries, to famous buildings I already know about. But the mission of my Slovene friends was different. They knew that after a year of writing about their athletes I had come to make a pilgrimage, and so first we went to the picturesque shores of Lake Bled for a lovely lunch in lovelier surroundings, as one does, and then we drove all the way to Kranjska Gora near the Austrian border to see Planica, where Primož Roglič, the Slovene cyclist, prematurely ended his ski jumping career after a nasty crash in 2007.
“If you think about it,” Marko said, “This is where it all started. Without this place, you would not be here. So we thought you should see it first.” In the backdrop of Planica is the mountain Triglav, the three peaks, the crown of the Julian Alps, the national symbol of Slovenia. Snow had begun to dust its crest, filtering down into the crevices despite the still-vibrant leaves of the birches and beeches, oaks, and maples.
“After dark, you’ll probably need your other coat,” Miran said.
I’d come to Slovenia for work, arguably. I was there to interview the cyclist Matej Mohorič for the magazine Rouleur, filling the rest of my time with other assignments and interviews picked up along the way, interspersed with visits from friends. Aside from the day I arrived and the morning after, the weather was in fact miserable—foggy with a bitter freezing rain. When I visited Mohorič at his house, he admonished me before I left for not wearing socks over my stockings, something my friend Didrik would echo on my last day there.
“You silly girl,” he teased, “Your feet will freeze.”
We were walking to the train station. “It smells like snow,” I observed.
“It doesn’t snow much here. It snowed more when I was little. But less and less now.”
“Things are changing.”
“They are.”
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My good friend Diana and her father would pick me up from the hotel to return to Bled even though it was raining because there is a wonderful pastry shop there and I had to try kremšnite, which is a flaky cream pastry similar to a Napoleon (but better). Diana’s father didn’t speak English, but he took me to get a COVID test and narrated our travels through Diana who sat in the passenger seat, pointing out Tito’s old villa, the tea room designed by the lauded Slovene architect Jože Plečnik, before we descended into the lush Dovžan valley to walk among the waterfalls and the river, which flooded catastrophically for the first time a few years ago, sparing, so they say, only a sanctuary devoted to the Blessed Virgin. The places we went were important to their family—I needed to see the Tržič cotton plant, once a jewel of 19th-century industry now derelict in the neoliberal era, I needed to see the house her father grew up in a mere handful of kilometers away from where they lived now. When we arrived back there for lunch, I was greeted with a full meal of bean soup and ribs and homemade blueberry schnapps, and even though we could only communicate through Diana, no one seemed to mind a stranger in their house.
Every day my friends thousands of miles away send me things they think might interest me, ask me how I am, teach me words in their difficult language, work tirelessly to make sure that one day soon I will return to them. Slovenia is a country where one is offered tea and slippers at the door, and it wasn’t until I made friends there and visited them that I realized that my own country was a graveyard of interpersonal abandonment scaling all the way up from people I used to drink with to the state itself, a fact I reckon with every time I check the news. It occurred to me almost violently that other than my husband and these friends in a tiny, far-off Southern European country, no one else had been so fiercely protective of my warmth and my empty belly since my mother when I was a child, and isn’t that the problem? Is that not profoundly sad?
I recall very distinctly walking around the streets of Ljubljana at night after Marko and Miran dropped me off at my hotel. I was joined by my friend Miha, who used to play basketball for the Slovenian junior national team but was now studying sports medicine in the city. He took me to see the striking brutalist architecture of the Cankarjev dom and the Republic Square which was gearing up in the lamplight for protests the following day. We turned back towards the streets where Plečnik built his most sumptuous art nouveau baubles, strolled across the three bridges and along the Ljubljanica – a proper if condensed tour, all despite the cold. On our way to a restaurant, a pair of homeless people huddled under a shop awning, bracing themselves for the harshness of winter which would arrive in just a few weeks. Upon seeing this, Miha turned to me, and said, with utter and admirable frankness:
“The more our country becomes like yours, the more we see things like this.”
And he was right. He was right to say it, too.
Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and sportswriter. The creator of the architectural satire blog McMansion Hell, she has served as architecture critic at The New Republic and as a columnist at Curbed and The Baffler. In 2021, Wagner began writing as a cycling correspondent, covering the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España.
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