• June 1994 •

How much wisdom a particular nation possesses is a constant, equal for all, just distributed in very different ways. This theory, unfortunately, does not hold up to the test of history, however attractive it may sound to a two-million-strong nation that has forced its way onto the world stage and is having difficulty playing  an equal role that is not ten or a hundred times less demanding than  those played by countries with ranks of twenty or two hundred million.

Slovenia, whose population would barely fill a fair-sized residential quarter of Mexico City or New York, was a country even before it decided that it also wanted to be sovereign  and independent. In the days when it had to live within the frameworks dictated in the Versailles and Winter Palaces (the formulation with which they coaxed us into the Partnership for Peace) it is true that it did not have its own army or diplomats, nor even its own currency. But in addition to an economy which, in spite of Marxist planning, functioned surprisingly well, it established two universities, its own Academy of Sciences and Arts, two opera houses and the professional theatres. Six thousand scientific researchers are responsible for developing the quantity of Slovenian knowledge, with almost a thousand of them at the Jožef Stefan Institute of Physics alone. And still it seems that Slovenes were not capable of consuming all the knowledge which appertains to them according to the aforementioned equalisation formula, since enough scientists and professors to fill a third university have scattered across the globe, all the way to NASA’s R&D labs and the Space Shuttle which has borne a scientist of Slovene descent, Ronald Sega, up into the stars.

With the ever increasing Anglicisation of world communication, an independent language spoken by a nation of two million seems to be sooner an handicap than an advantage. And still, in a country which has its language to thank for preserving its own identity, with the credit going to its poets and writers and its own awareness and pride, they devote particular attention to it. At least three books are published in the Slovene language every day at least one of these is an original work by a Slovene author. The Dictionary of the Slovene Literary Language is a 5.000-page tome with 107.000 detailed entries. The Great Encyclopaedia of Slovenia is still only up to its seventh volume and the entry Noricum – an old Roman province which began the European historical experience on the later territory of Carantania and present-day Slovenia.

In the hot summer of 1991 when Slovenes decided to bid farewell to the Balkan-Serbian Empire, many, particularly the Yugoslav Army, were surprised to see that they did not lack their own army or their own diplomatic corps. Overnight, twenty thousand armed and trained soldiers positioned themselves in defence of the young, newly proclaimed country and in the days gained peace and security for their nation. The diplomatic corps, which had not existed the day before and was still learning how to take its first steps on the protocol stage, surprised many by just how quickly it was able to obtain international recognition and membership of the United Nations.

Of course, it soon proved that a great deal of knowledge was necessary for the successful leadership of a sovereign country, for all the government institutions, for the parliament and for some ten parties with all their expert apparatuses, at least no less than in countries that can draw on a considerably larger number of minds.

Slovenes are simply convinced that they are not short on grey matter and they have established as many as three ministries for managing their knowledge; the education ministry, the culture ministry and the science and technology ministry. And yet at the same time, particularly when, unaccustomed to multiparty democracy, they follow parliamentary machinations with a certain amazement, they self-critically admit that, following the same logic which acknowledges their claim to an equal amount of knowledge as other, larger nations, to them also falls an equal measure of foolishness – but they have not yet established a ministry for that.

Be that as it may, connoisseurs know that a vine provides the best wine when it grows on the most difficult, steep and rocky terrain. In the mighty effort to survive on the destitute, unfriendly soil, it bears the sweetest and most fragrant of fruit.

In Slovenia, a largely hill and rocky country, vines produce excellent wine. No accident therefore that the annual Ljubljana Wine Fair is one of the biggest and most important wine-tasting events in the world.

Jure Apih