August 21, 2022
A day in Bovec (Aug. 21, 2022)
For those of you who aren’t up on your Central European history and geography, Slovenia is a small country (population of around 2 million) to the east of Northern Italy and south of Austria. It was part of Yugoslavia after World War 2 when Tito ruled Yugoslavia with his special brand of socialism. In 1989 during the tumult of the Berlin Wall coming down, seven regions that had comprised Yugoslavia broke up. In the case of Slovenia, it took a 10 day war in 1991 for it to break off into its own nation. Slovenia has its own language - similar to Croatian - and cultural identify, due in large part to a few key Slovenes (ie: Preseren, Josef Plecnik) who kept the language and culture alive. Slovenia was the most prosperous and industrialized of the 7 former Yugoslav countries and it feels like Switzerland - very tidy and clean with great diversity in its geography. There is also a cycling culture here; I toured here in 2009 and fell in love with the beautiful varied scenery and history (WW1 and WW2, and Soviet influence). The people were very welcoming and appreciative of Americans taking time to visit their country. In Slovenia, students are required to learn English 4 days a week, the upshot being the English is the common language of tourism which we are seeing now on this visit.
Today we had a special twist at the Hotel Soca breakfast room where they came around with little pieces of tiramisu cake for everyone for desert.
Our plan was to hike down to ANOTHER WW1 historical park, this one called Park Ravelnik, 2 k outside Bovec.
There was a curious similarity to the Parc Termatico we visited in Pontebba, Italy: for example, this park was a camp built by the Austrians whereby they occupied one side of a mountain, while the Italians occupied the mountain across the valley and both sides hunkered down for two years (1915 -1917) and went at it with many casualties. Bovec was destroyed (like Pontebba) and the inhabitants fled. So if it sounds similar to what happened in Parc Termatico in Pontebba, it seems so. What does seem different is that the Austrian army finally broke through the Italian line of defense with the help of the German army in October 2017 when the Germans somewhat notoriously used gas in their attack.
The placards at the entrance of the park assured us we were at the right place and we wandered around and explored various sites at the park. We got lost but eventually found a sign in the woods pointing to Bovec so we hiked through the forest back to Bovec.
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At dinner we split a burger at a local restaurant and we tried another bottle of Slovenian wine (red); our plan is to try a different bottle every night to learn something about these very good, but to us largely unknown wines. Slovenian wine is not exported very much to the USA.
We had two fun conversations; the first with two American women who were hiking around Slovenia before going to Norway. They were the first Americans we have seen or spoken to since we arrived July 31. The second was with two men who worked on the staff at the hotel. It was interesting to learn their stories; one guy was from Northern Macedonia in Greece who said the political situation is so bad where he lives that he had to leave. The other was Slovenian (our bartender) and came back to Bovec from the UK (where he worked for three years) because his grandparents are elderly and needed his help. Both were working on contracts with the hotel that ended on Oct 1 and they didn’t know what they would do after that.
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