Adlešiči and the End of the Slovene Rainbow
For over 20 years, or shortly after I arrived in Slovenia in the fall of ‘96, I’d been obsessed with the Bela Krajina (White Carniola) region. Slovenia’s sparsely populated, obscure southeastern corner had a reputation of being one of the hearths and incubators of its folk culture. I was especially interested in the village of Adlešiči, population about 130, near the Kolpa River that serves as Slovenia’s border with Croatia in that area.
Yet for one reason or another I had never actually taken the trouble to go there. Why not? Can’t really say. Perhaps on a subconscious level, I was afraid that if I actually went to Bela Krajina I’d be disappointed by what I found. In my imagination, BK was a place where pure-hearted people of the land, clad in flowing white cotton tunics embroidered with simple blue and red motifs, passed their days dairy farming, building wooden furniture, painting Easter eggs, occasionally dancing around a maypole, and weaving cloth on heritage looms while singing hauntingly beautiful medieval Slovene folk songs in multi-part harmony.
In the book Handicrafts of Slovenia: Encounters with Contemporary Slovene Craftsmen, which I bought in-country shortly after it was published in 1999, Janez “Champagne” Bogotaj, the ubiquitous prolific ethnologist, writer and interpreter of Slovenia’s folk culture both domestically and to the rest of the world, discusses at length, with copious photos, the various crafts and crafters of his home country. I was particularly taken with a section on an elderly woman named Marica Cvitkovič, from Adlešiči, whom Bogataj represented as “the last weaver of linen and linen-ware…Flax is still sown annually in the Cvitkovič fields and spun into linen threads…(and) later woven into linen on Marica’s weaving loom.”
I had remained fascinated by this, even after more than 20 years. Domača obrt Cvitkovič (Cvitkovič Handicrafts) has a website, in Slovene only, and although Marica had died in the early years of this century, the tradition was being carried on by her relatives. So during my sentimental journey back to Slovenia in June, I decided we had to include Bela Krajina and Adlešiči; my wife and son offered no objections, and one fine day, off we went. After many twists and turns down rural roads, we arrived at an attractive large cottage in the midst of farmland. I readied my Slovene to communicate with them in case nobody there spoke much English.
We were met at the door with the traditional Slovene greeting of schnapps by Marica’s daughter-in-law Nada, now the matriarch of the homestead, who promptly left us in the capable hands of her daughter Kristina, a cheerful, tattooed 30-year-old blonde who spoke fluent English that she kept apologizing for.
During a detailed demonstration of lost-wax method egg dyeing (a small puncture first needs to be made at each end of the egg, and the innards carefully blown out by mouth) and linen weaving, Kristina related that she does it as a part-time side gig, leaving me to imagine what her other job was; I speculated it to be something like web design or event planning, but didn’t ask. She showed us a bundle of unprocessed flax from the homestead, which has to be whacked and bleached within an inch of its life before being placed on a loom and woven. Nobody else in Slovenia, to my and Janez Bogotaj’s knowledge, bothers to go this far along the completely-from-scratch route anymore, or, indeed, has for decades.
After purchasing some of the egg- and linen-related product for sale, we bade our goodbyes, thanking Kristina for a most interesting and special visit. Although they live in a remote corner of an obscure country, Kristina and Nada live in the modern world, not a medieval fantasy. Still, one must acknowledge they persevere in an ancient and honorable craft, their family legacy. Among the ranks of crafters, theirs is an especially notable calling.
So now you know what at least one end of the Slovene rainbow looks like. And so do I.
