To the Slovenians, who were without their own state, the idea of nation as developed by the German romantics was most attractive, giving as it did ‘to nation an independent life to state.’ Accordingly, during the nineteenth century, Slovenian nationalism was emphatically apolitical and ‘national awakeners’ concentrated their efforts on the cultural field, giving priority to men of letters such as the first Slovenian poet, Valentin Vodnik (1758-1819), the foremost Slovenian poet, France Prešeren (1800-48), and ‘the father of Slovenian literature,’ Primož Trubar (1508-85). The first ‘national monument’ dedicated to Valentin Vodnik and erected in 1889 was instrumental in the process of cultural homogenisation of the Slovenians and in the construction of boundaries between them and others. And, At the end of the nineteenth century in Ljubljana, those who felt Slovenian gathered around Vodnik’s monument, or, as they called it, they were ‘Vodniking’; on the other hand, those with German consciousness gathered around the monument of Anton Alexander Count Auersperg, German poet Anastasius Grün, or, as they called it, they were ‘Grüning.’ However, things changed much in the early twentieth century. Then, Slovenian national consciousness had been fully developed and the idea of erecting a monument to Primož Trubar caused a lasting polemics and was instrumental in polarising the Slovenian community into two opposing political groups: liberals and conservatives. When, in 1910, Slovenian liberals erected a monument to Primož Trubar, conservatives answered, in 1913, with a statue of Bishop Hren, the (in)famous leader of Conter-Reformation in Ljubljana.
COBISS.SI-ID: 45992546
The paper deals with the role of gender in the context of witchcraft. It focuses on the situation in a rural area in eastern Slovenia, where the author and her students researched witchcraft in 2000 and 2001. The meaning of a gender in witchcraft accusations is presented with respect to various levels and types of witch (social level – neighborhood witches, village witches; supernatural level – night witches; counterwitches). Among neighborhood witches (about whom people believe that they perform some kind of magic: placing eggs etc. in the hope that they will hurt neighbors; intentional praise), women are typically assumed to be guilty; men appear only in the subcategory of people with evil eye. Similar holds for all the subcategories of village witches, except for those who earned their reputation because of the assumption of their possession of a book of magic (where men predominate). Night witches (in the form of lights or vague presences which make it difficult for people to find their way) are always female (they are spoken about using the feminine gender; when they are recognized as people from the village, they are always women). In contrast, the ratio of men to women among counterwitches, to whom people turned for help against witches, rises dramatically. The most influential counterwitch whom people visited in this area was a men. The relationship between the sexes can also be seen through an analysis of (migratory) legends about witches whereby many of them reveal a concealed misogyny.
COBISS.SI-ID: 48138850