The Frosts of Babno Polje

The road to Babno Polje, a village of a little more than 200 inhabitants, leads through Cerknica, the supposed birthplace of Martin Krpan, the hero of the first Slovene authored fairy tale. I like to imagine that its author Fran Levtsik took evening walks by the Cerknica Lake, an ephemeral lake that floods after the autumn rains and the spring thaw, whereas in the winter and summer, it changes into an arid basin. Well, when I visited it, this karst field was somewhere in the middle, more of a damp swamp than a lake, but it was beautiful nonetheless, especially with the sun setting in the distance. In fact, it was so beautiful that I had to avoid a car parked on the shore, in which a young couple was admiring the view, but considering how quickly they drove away after I came there, they might have been doing something else. Additionally, Cerknica is the center of otherwise meager industry in those places, where economy is limited to farming and forestry, with its largest industrial facility being the Kovinoplastika Lož (a metallurgy company), which once was the only company of its kind in Slovenia. Even people from faraway Gorenjska came there for material. 

Slovene legends are seldom politically correct and even the story of how Babno Polje got its name (literally meaning the Broad's Field) will insult at least one Altaic nation and the entire female sex. The stories tell of a village called Sveti Miklavž (after St. Nicholas) where a woman lived with her family. Of course Slovenian fables absolutely mustn’t be happy and so one day the Turkish army invaded our lands and beneath their swords people died all the way from Dubrovnik to Ljubljana. It was said that they came to avenge the death of their noble Ali Pasha, whose grave can still be seen on the Croatian side of the Field. They slaughtered the poor woman's family and she alone managed to survive, as she hid in a dung pit. After that, she escaped far away to Idrija, before finally returning to an empty land next to her hometown, Babno Polje, which is named after her. The St. Nicholas church has long since been brought down, but its elements were used, in honor of their history, in the Babno Polje church. An interesting ethnological fact is that there is to this day something Idrija-n in the accent of the older people from Babno Polje, so the stories are probably true. Since this is a small village, all the people know each other, and they love to praise their heroes, their neighbors who accomplished great things. So I heard of a man of letters Frank Troha of the Rihtar family, an emigrant writer who went to seek his fortune in the United States of America, and about one Saša Apostolovski, an athlete who broke the record in high jump at the Universiade.

Babno Polje is situated at the far south of Slovenia, where the continental and marine air streams mix, which causes a heat inversion, and with it ensue the inhumanely low temperatures during the winter days. Generally speaking, these are geographically very interesting lands. Due to severe floods of rivers and lakes, people built miles here in the Middle Ages, around which castle and parish fields of the aristocratic and ecclesiastic masters of our people were kept. One of the darkest testaments to their hegemony is the Gavgar Hill, whose name speaks of its purpose. There stood the gallows, or gavgas, with which the serfs who disagreed with their masters were killed. Beyond the Croatian border, lies the spring of Ljubljanica, where it is known under the first of its seven names – Trbuhovica. The border crossing is small and even though during the times of the socialist Yugoslavia, it was a popular entry point for drug and car-parts smugglers, today, the only contraband that crosses it is an occasional refugee from the war-torn Syria.  

During my travels across Babno Polje, I had the extraordinary privilege of visiting one Mirko Troha, a man in his ninetieth year, who offered me a couple of wartime stories. As a young man during the Second World War, during the time of collaboration with Italy and the White Terror, he was taken captive by the Italian army. So he told about the massacres and prison camps from Italy to Austria, and inspired by his tales, I took a look at the Yugoslav barracks on the slope of the hill Vražji Vrtec (literally the Devil's Kindergarten). There we can see the graves of 48 people who fell beneath the gunfire of the fascists on the night from the 29th to 30th of July in the year 1942. The old man Troha told me how he, as a prisoner of the enemy forces, spend years in various concentration camps, how, on several occasions, he only managed to keep his neck due to luck, and even today, after half a century, he could remember the German and Italian, with which his prisoners barked orders at him. He told me of the hard life in the camps and how they meet Slovenians from all corners of the motherland there. Together, they starved in Italian hospitals and Austrian prison. He was 1.8 meters tall then, and he weighed a meager fifty kilograms, when he met some kind men from Bela Krajina in the Italian Military Hospital, who kindly offered him some dried pears. 

 

Babno Polje is a small, small village on the south of Slovenia, who, despite being located far away from anything and its absurdly low winter temperatures, has a lot to offer. People are kind, the hills beautiful and the fields, even when burned by frost, gorgeous. Here one can taste the bitter history of our nation, for the stories of the horrors the Slovenian people inflicted upon each other and the cruelties of war still reside in the living memory. People are fond of sharing stories about our medieval masters, about the Turks and the Italians, and yet more than about our hegemons, they speak about our connectedness. Here, far to the south of the country, there is something western, something from Primorska in their accent and with that we can remember how strong we are when facing hardships, how we stand united against distress. And if that alone is not a sufficient enough reason why visit these places, then go there for the romantic view over the Cerknica Lake, so that you can cuddle at the sight of a setting sun set as well.