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Wednesday, July 9, 2025

For politicians to consider: it is time for a central monument

By: Borut Korun

After April 27th, a series of commemorative days marking events from the revolutionary past are observed in Slovenia each year. Yugoslav flags bearing the red star are flown, and government representatives demonstrate their ideological loyalty by laying wreaths and delivering speeches about who was on the right side, and about fascism, which is still portrayed as a present danger. They are reviving a past that was part of their grand utopia. Naturally, these events are not an end in themselves.

All nations desire a glorious history and to remember that past with pride. What would the Serbs be without the memory of the Battle of Kosovo? The Macedonians have turned the centre of Skopje into a hyperdimensional sculpture exhibition, where alongside Tsar Samuel and Saints Cyril and Methodius, Alexander the Great reigns. Albanians revere their Skanderbeg. All these nations have found a path to their past, to their own truth.

Slovenians, on the other hand, are not allowed to have a glorious national history – except the one that is prescribed. There exists, therefore, a permitted and a forbidden Slovenian history.

The forbidden history is that part of the national past marked by grand, significant periods and events: Carantania and everything associated with it, the Battle of Sisak, peasant uprisings, the struggle for the northern border… We have even had our name erased: Slovenes are not allowed to exist in historical eras. In current historiography, our early medieval ancestors are simply referred to as the (Alpine) Slavs. Yet other peoples of the time have their names preserved: Serbs, Croats, Moravians, Czechs, Poles… (That Primož Trubar already used the name “Slovenes” is something our historians ignore without a second thought.) So: goodbye Carantania, the first Slovene state; goodbye enthronement ritual, written about by Pope Pius II and later by French humanists; goodbye Freising Manuscripts, the oldest Slovene and Slavic texts. (Even Miklošič acknowledged that the Freising Manuscripts were written in an archaic form of Slovene, but Slovenes, we are told, still were not “there.”)

History with a capital H, the one that is allowed to exist, that is celebrated and honoured, only begins in 1941. To keep this historical image “pure,” even the TIGR fighters had to disappear. Their memorial was renamed the Peace Memorial. The prescribed history culminated in the founding of the communist Yugoslav state. This historical episode had its own “Skanderbeg” or “Alexander the Great.” He was called Tito. Slovene communists turned him into a mythical figure – so they will not renounce Tito or his monuments, just as they have not renounced Yugoslavia. Tito and Yugoslavia are inseparable parts of the same mythology.

That is why we are not allowed to have our own history, a history in which the events of 1941–1945 are just one episode. Mythology serves revolutionary power; it provides a metaphysical and enduring justification for its authority.

There is only one remedy for this: fight fire with fire. We must revive real Slovenian history, bring back forgotten heroes and suppressed battles. We must create a mythic landscape where all of this has its place – including the events of 1941–1945 and, of course, independence, as the most important event. Resistance is inevitable. (As I experienced myself when I undertook part of this project and wrote the book Slovenes, Our Ancient Ancestors. I was denied the opportunity to present it at the Ljubljana library.)

A central monument should be erected, one that presents all the key milestones of our history, something like the Germans did with their Walhalla. Independence would be the crowning point in the historical narrative. Such a centre could become the main venue for official ceremonies, a kind of temple of Sloveneness. We have many ruined castles, one could be restored, and its interior decorated with frescoes and statues, a library, a lecture hall. Let’s found a foundation, collect funds, and begin – under the guidance of a group of “normal” historians, of course.

If we do not do this, our only “glorious” history will remain the one symbolically marked by the red star, the one that sees Kumrovec as the centre of the world, Tito as a mythological hero, and Yugoslavia as an eternal project.

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