Slovenes

By Irene Portis-Winner and Ian Skoggard

Krainisch, Slovenec (pl. Slovenci), Slovenian, Slovenski, Wendisch, Windisch.

The name Slovenec is derived from the common name for the Slavs which is the equivalent of the Greek sklavenos (R. Slavjanin, Cz., Slov. Slovan). There is disagreement about the origin of the word for the Slavs. It is thought to derive either from the word for glory (slava), or from the word slovo (word), referring to those who speak clearly as opposed to the neighboring Germans who do not. (The Slavic root nem, which forms the word for German (nemec) also forms words meaning mute.)

Slovenia is situated in the karst plateau and the Julian Alps. It is drained by the Sava and Drava rivers. It is bordered on the north by Austria, on the southwest by Italy, and by Croatia on the south and east. It also shares a small border to the east with Hungary. Slovenia is located between 13 and 16 degrees east longitude and 45 and 47 degrees north latitude. Its area is 20,251 square kilometers. The largest part of Slovenia is mountainous. Much of the land is karstic, rugged and stony. Only a small eastern section lies within the Pannonian Plain. Summers are short, often cool and sometimes rainy. Winters are cold but not severe.

Compared to Serbia's, Slovenian population increase has been gradual, growing in urban sections and generally declining in rural ones since 1891 due to exhaustion of free land. According to census figures, in 1921 the Slovene population was 1.05 million, in 1931 1,266,604, in 1948 1,439,800, in 1961 1,584,368. The latest population figures (1990) are 1,891,864. Population density in 1990 was 93 per square kilometer. Large Slovene populations also live in southern Austria and in the United States (Cleveland, Ohio; Pennsylvania, and Minnesota).

The Slovene language, one of the South Slavic group of the Slavic Family, is one of the most archaic of the Slavic languages. It includes thirty-six dialects and twenty-nine subdialects many of which are distinct enough to be unintelligible to Slovene speakers of different areas.

In the area that is today Slovenia, early Iron Age settlements attributed to Illyrians, came under Roman control by 14 B.C. By A.D. 650 Slavic tribes, including the Slovenes, were in full possession of Illyria. In the middle of the seventh century Slovenes were included in the Slavic union led by King Samo (617-658). Later the Slovenes came under the domination of the Franks and became the object of intensive Christian proselytizing particularly under Charlemagne (768-814). During the Middle Ages Slovene lands became part of the Holy Roman Empire and by the middle of the fourteenth century Hapsburg domination over the duchies of Carinthia and Carniola was established and continued until 1918, with the brief interruption of the Napoleonic conquest of Carniola (1809- 1813). By the tenth century German lords and the Catholic church represented the feudal order. The peasants were burdened with various feudal obligations.

By the sixteenth century the Reformation encouraged the rise of Slovene national consciousness and the Slovene language was adopted in church services. In 1584 the first Slovene grammar appeared. But the Counter Reformation was successful in opposing Protestantism. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries there were peasant revolts. Problems were mitigated by the enlightened policy of agrarian reform under Maria Theresa (1740-80) and her son Joseph II (1780-90). In 1848 when all serf obligations were abolished, Slovene national consciousness culminated in the call for the creation of a Slovenian kingdom under Austria. The years from 1848 to 1918 saw mixed developments since, in spite of improvements in agricultural practices, taxes increased as did land subdivisions and mortgaging of farms. The agrarian crisis of the 1890s that followed forced large numbers of peasants to emigrate to the US. In 1918, with the end of Austrian rule, the new South Slav state was formed called the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later named Yugoslavia.

World War II saw the fall of the Yugoslav government, and on April 2, 1941 the Germans invaded Yugoslavia giving rise to the Partisan movement. Slovenia was occupied by the Germans except in the southwest which was controlled by the Italians and a small area of Prekomurje which fell to the Hungarians. On November 29, 1945 the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was formed and Slovenia gained a part of the Istrian Peninsula and the territory surrounding Trieste as well as certain regions west of the Italian city of Goricia. More stringent land reforms followed that did not greatly help the situation in Slovenia where there were not many rich peasants with enough land to be distributed as a result of expropriations. The program of collectivization of the land was introduced in 1948 and, while the bulk of the peasant holdings have remained private, the peasant economy became strictly regulated by the communist program. In 1948 Yugoslavia broke with the Cominform and introduced regional autonomy culminating in the Constitutional Law of l953 giving to local government bodies, the Peoples Committees (narodni odbor), considerable authority. In 1955 the Law on Organization of Communes and Districts instituted the communal system. In April 1963 the constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia became law. In 1971 the decision was made to establish a collective presidency, which President Tito encouraged. In 1974 a new Yugoslav constitution was introduced. Since Tito died, on May 4, 1980, economic and national problems have increased.

On January 22, 1990 the Communist party of Yugoslavia renounced its constitutionally guaranteed leading role in society and called on parliament to enact political pluralism leading to a multiparty system. In the spring of 1990 the Slovene communists lost in the first multiparty election. A referendum for independence was held in December of 1990 and 90 percent of the population voted for independence. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia declared its independence from Serbia and on December 23rd adopted a constitutional parliament. The first popular election of the new state was held nearly a year later on December 6, 1992.

In the most typical settlements, called planned or long villages, houses were lined up close together on either side of the road with the narrow end of the house facing the road, or houses were built only on one side of the road, or houses faced a central square with a church. In areas where the topography permitted, land surrounding the village was divided into open fields or sections, which were in turn subdivided into long parallel fields or strips. Traditionally each peasant possessed one or more strips in each section of the village land, and all villagers cooperated in a village-wide system of crop rotation (kolobarjenje). After the harvest the fields were opened for pasturing the cattle of the entire village. Houses were made of stone with attached sheds for animals, which contained a stove to cook food for pigs (kuhinja). Detached wooden barns were for storage of hay and cattle fodder. Houses were one-and-one-half stories with two rooms and no cellar. In the kitchen was a raised hearth on which an open fire burned vented by a hole in the ceiling. Meat was stored in the attic. Roofs were thatched. The second room was the main room, heated by a large tiled stove. Tile roofs date from after the Second World War. Today modernization has proceeded with revenues from factory work and from remittances from family members who have migrated to cities and to foreign countries. Electrification, piped water, electric stoves and refrigerators, and house enlargements are among the improvements. Apartment buildings have grown up around factories and in urban centers. Tourism and urban development has given cities a very modern appearance.

Farming, livestock raising, and forestry have been the traditional rural occupation of peasants. Agricultural land is limited by rugged mountains, stony valleys and karstic soil. Only at high altitudes are alpine black soils found. Slovenia does not produce enough grain for its own needs and must rely on imports. The main crops are wheat on the flat areas; rye, barley, and oats on higher elevations; and maize, clover, and potatoes. Turnips, carrots, beets, and cabbage are cultivated for animal as well as for human consumption. The animal economy includes milk cows, beef cattle, pigs, sheep in the mountains, and poultry. Horse and oxen for draft were sources of power only replaced in the postwar period by tractors. Forest exploitation has been important for Slovene peasants who owned 90 percent of the woodland by the period between the two wars. Furniture factories and sawmills are often close to peasant villages.

Traditional methods of distribution included exchanges in r egional markets. Industrialization began in the nineteenth century aided by the construction of a railroadline connecting Trieste and Ljubljana. Slovenia's resources include natural gas, oil, mercury, coal, lead, silver, and zinc. Iron, steel and aluminum are produced. Slovenia produces considerable electrical energy. There are also paper, textile, wood, and chemical industries. While in 1900 75 percent of the population was engaged in agriculture, by 1960 this figure was reduced to 32.3 percent and a large portion of these worked part-time in factories. Of all the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia is the most industrialized and urbanized and has the highest per capita income.

The traditional village included craftsmen such as tailors, weavers, cobblers, smiths, carpenters, and millers and their products provided for most of the villagers' needs.

Village-wide and regional markets once dominated local trade, where cattle were traded and textiles, tools, rope, sweets, etc. were sold. There are inns and stores in the countryside providing for the village needs. Horse smuggling was common in the interwar period when horses were bought in Croatia and sold in Italy. In the modern period much of the rural trade has been controlled by cooperative farms to which cattle, hogs, potatoes, lumber, hay, etc. are sold at prices the peasants consider unfavorable. Consequently rural areas have attempted to develop their own specialties not demanded by the cooperatives such as breeding hogs and selling young pigs, thereby circumventing official channels. Today Slovenia imports wheat and industrial products from the West and exports wood and textile products, nonferrous metal products, livestock, and numerous other commodities. Slovenia is attempting to increase capital- intensive and specialized industries and reduce exporting of lumber and meat in order to compete on the world market.

The traditional Slovene family was patriarchal and extended. Division of labor by sex was clear but not rigid. Women carried the main burden of the fieldwork, cutting and raking hay, digging potatoes, planting, weeding, hoeing, and caring for the crops throughout the year. Women also milked the cows, cared for the pigs, made everyday clothes and linen, prepared the food and cared for the children. Men scythed or mowed, fed the cattle, plowed, repai red buildings and tools, lumbered, and carted wood, etc. But today both men and women may work in the factory and divide up the fieldwork more informally. Other activities also divided the sexes. Thus only men and boys played ball in the balina fields. Young boys, but not girls, could sleep in barns at night. Men peopled the local inns. Typically boys helped the father and girls the mother. Village specialists had far less land and engaged in weaving, forging, carpentry, etc.; some villagers owned saw mills and were millers.

Various traces of evidence suggest ancient land holdings may have been held jointly by brothers. The joint family, or South Slavic zadruga, it is suggested, was then modified and equal division was practiced. When land became increasingly scarce by the fourteenth century, partible inheritance was replaced by impartible inheritance with a preference for primogeniture. Disinherited brothers, unless they married women who inherited land, were forced to emigrate, to turn to specialized village crafts, or become day laborers. In the modern period, primogeniture has broken down since many sons prefer to leave rural life for factories or specialized training, leaving only a younger son or a daughter to maintain the land and homestead. However, the rule of impartibility is generally maintained since land holdings are too small to be further subdivided.

Kinship is bilateral with a patrilineal emphasis. The typical kin group was the stem family composed of the patriarch head (gospodar), his wife, their children, various unmarried collateral relatives of the gospodar, and the wife and offspring of the eldest son. The presence of common surnames, archival records, and legends suggest that lineage relations existed between dominant joint families.

Traditionally, village or regional endogamy was preferred. Marriages were arranged by parents and involved bargaining over dowry and inheritance. Preferred residence was virolocal, but sometimes uxorilocal if only a daughter was the inheritor of the land. The aim was to gain land in a marriage and thus a peasant with little land might try to marry his son to an inheriting woman. Weddings were the occasion of a veselica, a celebration with feasting, music, games, etc. and might extend over three days. Civil marriages in the postwar period have not replaced religious marriages which, however, are much briefer than formerly. Divorce, while permitted by civil law, is still relatively rare in rural areas.

The large stem family with many children has become smaller, increasingly being replaced by a small extended family or a nuclear family composed of parents, one, two, or three children and one or more members of the older generation.

Land is inherited by the rule of impartibility and primogeniture when possible. Women are granted dowries and could inherit land if there is no son. The son also inherits money and animals. While status is not inherited, a son of a craftsman tended to follow his father's occupation, but in the modern period education and factory work have opened opportunities to all strata and both sexes.

Children are welcomed, with sons preferred. Swaddling is no longer practiced but a restraining nightgown may be used the first year. Schooling is universal and education beyond high school is desired by the younger generation.

The family is tied to other families by relations among kin, relations to godparents and neighbors. Village-wide activities were organized by the church, by singing societies, by firemens' organizations, which included other activities such as dramatic productions, and by vesilicas at many occasions such as weddings, threshing, and the kolina festivities when a pig was slaughtered. Additionally, regional markets were centers for social interaction of all kinds. All these activities have declined in the modern period. Traditionally there were clear differences in social status in the peasant village. The highest status was occupied by the largest landowners and in some areas by the millers who owned larger forest reserves. Middle peasants were next and the landless craftsmen occupied the lowest status. In the postwar period peasants who became political functionaries occupied an ambiguous status, having a measure of power but often coming from the landless class. Furthermore status became far more fluid as factory work and educational activities expanded.

The post-1848 village was ruled by an elected village council under the village head (podzupan), who was subordinate to the obcina, a council representing a number of villages, which in turn was subordinated to the district. This structure was successively altered under the communist regime and the communal system. Local village government lost much of its autonomy being replaced by Peoples Committees (narodni odbor) at the obcina and district level. After 1955 the communal system was instituted. The commune, replaced the obcina as the basic political unit and local units were further consolidated. Full-time peasants had less rights and were less fully represented than others.

In the traditional village social control was informally exercised through face-to-face relations, gossip, social ostracism, the power of the local Catholic church and the village council, and only secondarily by the legal mechanisms of the state. In the postwar period local methods have been largely replaced by official ones.

Traditionally conflicts between villages over such issues as boundary disputes, inheritance, rights to forest land, and road construction were settled by the village council or local courts. Postwar conflicts such as those between the village and the cooperative farms are no longer settled locally. Ethnic antagonisms between Slovenes and the representatives of the southern nationalities have been sources of tensions.

The main religions beliefs of the Slovenes are those of the Roman Catholic church. While legends relate activities of witches and magical forces, such themes are intermixed with Christian dogma.

In the prewar period the parish was supported by a church tax administered by the village council and the priest was paid by the state and received remuneration from parishioners for his services, which included hearing confessions; religious education for children; and officiation at masses, baptism, confirmation, marriages, and funerals.

The religious calendar was full and well observed, including pilgrimages to large churches with stops at wayside shrines and with general celebrations on religious holidays. In the postwar period the activities and power of the Catholic church were seriously curtailed although the priests have attempted to continue to offer their services and the Catholic religion remains a strong moral force. In the post-communist period, of course, the church has considerably greater latitude.

Traditional arts included decorative motifs on buildings such as barns, gravestone decorations, and religious carvings and paintings in churches following central European styles. In peasant houses one saw colorful tile stoves, wall stippling giving the impression of wall paper, woven cloths, wooden carvings on boxes and other items, and hand-carved simple furniture. Local folk art declined during the communist period becoming commercialized and standardized and sold primarily in tourist-orientated state-controlled stores but there has been a rich growth of modern architecture and painting in urban centers.

Modern medicine has penetrated the rural area. Children receive inoculations, chest X-rays are available to everyone, and most children are born in hospitals. Peasants receive health insurance, although coverage has been limited as compared to that available to workers. While local cures and traditional herbs exist, the primary curer is the medical doctor.

Funerals follow traditional Catholic customs. The body is placed in an open coffin in the house for forty-eight hours while friends and relatives pay a last call and sprinkle the body with holy water or salt. After the coffin is closed, it is placed in the open door, and the priest invokes a benediction and leads prayer. There follows the funeral mass at the church, a grave-side benediction, the burial, and then the funeral feast. For eight days thereafter friends visit the family of the deceased and pray, eat, and drink together. Finally there are additional requiem masses thirteen and eighteen days later.

Documents referred to in this section are included in this eHRAF collection and are referenced by author, date of publication, and eHRAF document number.

The Slovenes file consists of three English works. Two are ethnographies on Slovene peasant society and based largely on fieldwork carried out in the 1960s and 70s (Winner 1971, no. 1; Minnich 1979, no. 3). The third work summarizes in English a Yugoslavian study of a suburban working class community outside of the Slovene capital of Ljubljana (Kremensek 1983, no. 2). Minnich's study is the most narrowly focussed, but theoretically sophisticated, work on the social reproduction of peasant farmsteads. Winner's study is a more comprehensive look at the persistence of Slovene peasant culture and society from the 1840s on. Krememsek's article is a review of a much more complete study of the cultural and social changes within a suburban community between the 1850s and 1970s. For more detailed information on the content of the individual works in this file, see the abstracts in the citations preceding each document.

This culture summary is from the article, "Slovenes," by Irene Portis-Winner in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Vol. 4. 1992. Linda A. Bennett, ed. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co. Information on population and political organization was updated and the synopsis and indexing notes were prepared by Ian Skoggard, June 1996. We thank Gerald Creed for suggestions regarding possible sources to include in this file.

• ARONDACIJA -- enclosures carried out by agricultural collectives -- categories 423 and 425.

• BAJTAR -- a cottage/cottager -- category 592

• DOMACA GRUDA -- "home ground," the nuclear family farmstead, -- categories 592, 241 and 594

• FUREZ -- a household sponsored pigsticking celebration and feast -- categories 231, 527, 574 and 788

• GOSPODAR -- a male head of household -- category 592

• KOMBINAT -- an agricultural collective -- categories 474 and 241

• KMET -- a peasant-farmer -- categories 592 and 241

• KMETIJA -- a traditional peasant holding -- categories 423 and 592

• OBCINA -- a commune in the postwar collective period (until 1953); afterwards, a town-level administrative unit -- category 632

• ZEMLJA(K) -- land unit of approximately 60 acres, which traditionally supported one peasant family -- categories 423 and 592

• ZUPAN -- elected elder of a patrilineal settlement -- category 622

Grafenauer, Bogo (1954-62). Zgodovina slovenskega naroda [History of the Slovene people]. 5 vols. Ljubljana: Kmecka Knjiga.

Hocevar, Toussaint (1965). The Structure of the Slovenian Economy, 1848-1963. New York: Studia Slovenica.

Mal, Josip (1928). Zgodovina slovenskega naroda: Najnovejsa doba [History of the Slovene nation: The modern period]. Celje: Druzba sv. Mohorja.

Melik, Anton (1963). Slovenija: Geografski opis [Slovenia: A geographic description]. Ljubljana: Slovenska Matica.

Slovene Studies (1979-). Journal of the Society for Slovene Studies. University of Alberta. Edmonton, Canada.

Winner, Irene (1971). A Slovenian Village: Zerovnica. Providence: Brown University Press.