Today's episode of the Anthems podcast delves into the story behind Slovenia's national anthem, "Straulitza," a song rooted in themes of unity, freedom, and national pride. The anthem, which draws inspiration from the ideals of the French Revolution, was composed by poet Franz Preseren in 1844 and later set to music by Stanko Premrl. Patrick explores Slovenia's rich cultural history, including its tumultuous past under various empires and the evolution of its national identity leading up to independence. He highlights how the anthem symbolizes a collective call for solidarity among Slovenians and reflects their aspirations for peace and cooperation. As we journey through Slovenia's history, we also discover the personal stories of the individuals who shaped its literary and musical landscape, culminating in a celebration of national spirit.

If you've come here then hey, hi, how are you. Here are the notes

1. https://archive.ph/20120805163738/www.slovenija2001.gov.si/pot/kronologija/ 
2. https://www.muzej-nz.si/ 
3. https://physics.fe.uni-lj.si/members/iglic/history/uporaba_slovenscine.pdf
4. http://ezb.ijs.si/fedoragsearch/rest?operation=gfindObjects&query=%2Bauthor:Kotnik,%20Fran+dc.format:text+AND+project:nrss&hitPageSize=5000 
5. https://www.slovenia.info/en/plan-your-trip/facts-about-slovenia 
6. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gentilic 
7. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Semantics_of_Nouns/n0ypDgAAQBAJ?hl=en 
8. https://www.altitude-activities.com/slovenian-food-10-dishes-you-have-to-try 
9. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Slovenia/JQV6kAwT4v0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Zdravljica++French+Revolution&pg=PA24&printsec=frontcover 
10. http://www.dvajset.si/prvih-20/pregled/prej-in-zdaj/drzavni-simboli/ 
11. https://www.dlib.si/details/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-UZDTC6FY/?=&language=eng 
12. https://web.archive.org/web/20110410123608/http://www.zgs.gov.si/eng/slovenian-forests/forests-in-slovenia/forestation-and-variety-of-forests/index.html 
13. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042811012857 
14. http://www.preseren.net/ang/2-6_kdo_je_kdo/julija_primc.asp 
15. www.esi.utexas.edu/files/Whatiskarst.pdf 
16. https://web.archive.org/web/20160304031116/http://www.zgodovinskicasopis.si/_pdf/Digital-archive/ZC_2007_3-4.pdf 
17. http://www.preseren.net/slo/2-1-1_ziv-otrostvo.asp 
18. https://web.archive.org/web/20131111231229/http://nl.ijs.si:8080/fedora/get/sbl:2298/VIEW/ 
19. https://journals.tsu.ru/en//rusin/&journal_page=archive&id=1886&article_id=42565 
20. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Yugoslavia_the_Former_and_Future/Ia3XMdZ2bOkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22United+Slovenia%22&pg=PA20&printsec=frontcover 
21. https://www.jskd.si/glasba/zborovska/novice_zborovska/premrl_20_spomenik.htm 
22. https://www.momus.si/monument-to-stanko-premrl/# 
23. https://walkerhomeschoolblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/21/stanko-premrl-and-zdravljica/ 
24. https://www.nasizbori.si/stanko-premrl-petdeset-let-pozneje/ 
25. https://web.archive.org/web/20120117183414/http://www.svz.gov.si/si/zakonodaja_in_dokumenti/osamosvojitveni_akti_republike_slovenije/ 
26. https://www.muzej-nz.si/ 
27. https://ced-slovenia.eu/presernova-zdravljica-dobila-znak-evropske-dediscine/ 
28. https://www.gov.si/novice/2020-04-01-presernova-zdravljica-prejela-znak-evropske-dediscine/ 

https://nationalanthems.info/si.htm 

Hello, and welcome to the Anthems podcast. I'm Patrick, and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

It's a distance that would cost me $1,110 based on my vehicle's 20 miles to the gallon average, and a current average gas price here of $3.5 per gallon.

It sounds like a lot of money, but it's an amount of money that would get you a quarter of a way around the globe to a country that's because of its location on the globe, has been in many an empire.

The country has been part of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Carolinian Empire, the Roman Empire, the kingdom of Hungary, the Republic of Venice, Napoleon's empire, the Austrian Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire, the state of the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, the kingdom of Yugoslavia, a triply occupied state in world War two, then back to a new communist Yugoslavia after the war, finally becoming an independent country. And if youve guessed from that list that I was talking about Slovenia today, then you knew more than I did.

I landed on Slovenia because my wife randomly requested it when I was looking for a next country. She isnt sure why, but the name is nice to say. Etymologically, it means land of the Slavs.

And knowing that Slavic means the the people speak a slavic language are two things that don't actually tell us all that much at all. But this is the very beginning of a podcast that I will use to tell you about straut, or, in English, the toast. So at least that tells us something.

It's a song and a story that you might be surprised by. I know that I was. Slovenia is another country that I was fairly blank slate on before starting the reading for this episode.

One of the first things that I learned was a new word that I rather like called deminem. It's also called a gentilic, and it identifies a group of people in relation to a particular place.

For example, I am a New Englander, and people that are from Slovenia are slovenian, literally from the land of the Slavs. I gotta tell you folks right now, sitting in a cafe there, enjoying some of the delicious looking slovenian food I've seen that I'm gonna be making.

At least some of it sounds pretty good.

Perhaps I'd even get to raise a small glass of schnapps in appreciation of my surroundings during the vintage two minute and 32nd rendition of Straulitza that is very close to what you are about to hear. I saw some my initial reaction is a little bit of a smile because it sounds kind of like a happy song.

Given the specifics, which we will get to once I lay a bit of groundwork, this kind of proclamation of happiness makes some sense. It's a good song, and I've registered my approval with my music algorithms.

It's also, I think, a good song to play in the woods, which sounds weird now that it's out of my head and I said it, but I'm going to run with the connection. I grew up in a part of the world where nearly 60% of it is forested, so I spent a lot of time playing music in the woods.

Slovenia has got about the same coverage, and most of it is good timber, although I don't really know what makes good timber grow in a certain place. So more to read about in the future for me someday. For now, I want to put this forest on a map and get moving here.

Countries that are very near to Italy are not terribly hard for me to locate, despite not actually knowing where Slovenia was before this episode. Find Italy on a map looks like a boot and move up the coast from the heel and keep going until you run out of adriatic sea.

There you'll find the tiny bit of coastline that Slovenia has in the Gulf of Trieste. It's sandwiched in between San Bartolomeu on the italian side and Conegra on the croatian side.

There are obviously exceptions, and one of them is significant enough that it's inspired its own geographic terminal. The karst plateau is the namesake for the karst topography, and it is a proper, new to me geology term.

Some of those consequences are extremely cool caves due to erosion and caverns that we civilians can sometimes even visit, as well as very pretty stuff that you can hike through or see from a boat. Only occasionally do you get a massive swallowing sinkhole from a karst.

But the sinkhole that I'm worried about is the one that meant it took me literally twelve days of writing and editing and pondering and reading history to get to this sentence. So I'm going to talk about that for a second. Nothing dramatic about my life is getting shared. This is not that kind of show.

It's just that this is a tough one for me to coherently narrate because of history and when the writer and the poet were alive. Clearly you are hearing this. So I have gotten through the writing block that I was facing, but it was a longer than usual stretch time.

I write an episode for this show. I feel the machinery that I've built up getting a little bit better.

And this particular writing experience has resulted in what feels like more growth than usual because it was less easy than usual to write the episode for Slovenia. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, and I do this because I love it. And I think effort is notable in its own way, especially if it's hard.

Plus, it's a year that happened for so many reasons and had so much happening in it that it's always helpful to get an ever wide look at the thing from a historical perspective. But we're not going to start there.

And this guy actually left a bit of narrative about his life.

He was at what I would call an elementary school in the US, and then moved on to study at the state gymnasium, which is what I would call a high school.

But around this time, Francis was also fired from a teaching position at a jesuit institute for lending out banned poetry to people. My guess is that had something to do with him not wanting to be a part of the Catholic Church, but that is purely speculation on my part.

His motivations for choosing law instead are not super clear in the sources. And to be honest, he was not a terribly successful lawyer.

In fact, he did not achieve a law office of his own until he was 46 years old, and he died three years after that of a liver disease, because our poetical had a very troubled love life and he hid from it in his cups. He also had three children from a relationship with Anna Yalozovic that he supported and lived with.

They never married, though, because of his deep and unrequited love. Francis met Julia primick at a church function, and he fell head over heels for her.

His unrequited love was, in reality, him completely failing to tell her how he felt. So who knows what I'd be talking about if he'd managed to speak up and ended up marrying the rich merchant's daughter.

Despite his failure at love and his just being all right at lawyering, he was actually an instrumental part of creating the formal literary structure that helped to create a cultural throughline for the slovenian people. So, in all seriousness, Francis is a non trivial figure in the history of his country.

Because of his poetic prowess, he was involved a bit in something called the slovenian Alphabet war, which I, you know, based on that name, I had to bring it up, right? It has no bearing on the story, no real bearing, anyway.

And it's actually a mostly ukrainian orthological controversy wherein some people were trying to latinize the tongue, the russian tongue, and the ukrainian tongue. But I wanted to bring it up because I might be the only time I ever get to say orthological controversy.

And it's a fun thing to say, so go ahead and give it a try. See, I told you. The Alphabet war.

The censor in Vienna at the time objected to the third verse in Straulitse, and it was removed before publication. It did get to become the most important thing he wrote towards the end of his short life, which was maybe also a tragic life.

But Francis did get to be a figure in history and one of the more fleshed out poets that we get to hear about on the show.

All this momentum led to the idea of a nation of all the slavic speakers. So we get the early seeds of Yugoslavia.

It was rough for the people in the area, and it resulted in slavic speaking people mobilizing against each other and sometimes killing each other.

His parents I have zero information about, so I'm sure somebody knows. Stanko is another guy who became a catholic priest and started young in his catholic education.

When he returned to Vienna, he completed and formalized the piece, which was a feat that others had tried before him and failed to produce something that caught people's ears. From there, our composer just sort of deeply immersed himself in the musical landscape and structure of the future slovenian nation.

Stanko had essentially all of the important musical jobs in the Ljubljana diocese. At the same time, he was the head of the organ school, the musical director organist of their cathedral.

He was the head of the regent's choir, as well as a writer for and the musical editor of the publication Church Musician, which was Slovenias first official music journal. The man maintained these positions for 28 years.

One source called it a manifest departure from sicilian dictates that allowed for artistic expansion that was not seen prior, so not famous, but important in his own way. Now, to be clear, I didn't look up what sicilian dictates are, so mileage might vary there. I have no idea what that means.

My narrative is fortunate in that I am able to entirely skip the world wars this time with the last bit of history that we are going to delve into being the fall of communist Yugoslavia.

At this point, cultural pluralism was already in Slovenia, and the Yugoslav Communist Party had begun the slow march toward reforms that likely would have been too late had they ever even got there.

Couple that societal change with the ongoing economic problems in the area, and the slovenian people were well on their way to deciding that they were through with the whole thing.

At the time, the country had something close to 10% of the population of Yugoslavia, and yet they were producing a fifth of the GDP and a quarter of all the exports.

All of this was mostly boilerplate democratic civil rights and voting, national independence, stuff like that. But it was also a thing that the Soviet Union wanted no part of it all. But we should recall that ideas are hard to kill.

So the resistance to independence continued.

And from there, it took the legislature less than eleven months to craft most of the government and offer a vote to the people. That had more than a 93% turnout, with 88% choosing independence within six months of the vote.

So, of course, a poem in Slovenian that is a literal toast to the ideas of a pivotal revolution was interpreted as a call for a united and independent Slovenia. Once paired with stankels choral piece, it was apparently irresistible to the writers of the slovenian constitution.

And I can't really find any information other than that this is what we picked, because obviously that is the song we chose. Now that we have the anthem, im going to go on and discuss the song itself.

Musically, we have a composition that almost seems to be written by a guy that knew this was going to be anthem music 88 years later.

This was composed as a melody to a popular patriotic poem, so it was made to be as accessible as possible to the people, were given a kind of simple and supportive harmony with common chord progressions and a fairly tame range.

Using a diatonic melody in a major key and following the quatrain structure of the verse, marries the words nicely to the melody, and it makes for an uplifting sound. It has a stately feel to it, played at a moderate four four, so it also feels kind of like a march, even though it's not actually a march.

It was originally written as a choral piece. Typical arrangement is a four part choir, which is soprano, alto, tenor and bass, because I didn't know what that was. But now it's a national anthem.

So of course it gets performed by brass bands, orchestras and everything else depending on the occasion. Poetically, it's actually a pretty interesting piece of writing.

So I'm going to discuss the broad strokes about it, and then I'll do a read through and discuss the overall content and the anthem specifics. We have a note that I sort of mentioned already.

Francis wrote the poem as nine verses originally with slightly different language, and was forced to adjust things in order for the censors to allow it through. I'm going to talk about the version that got through as published.

It might not be his original vision of the piece, but it is the one that inspired people to use it as a symbol of their country onto talking about the writing. The structure of the poem is notable because it combines traditional forms with a little bit of innovation.

He was actually a brilliant poet, and it kind of makes me wish I could really understand it in Slovene and not just a translation.

Stralica has eight verses as published, but each verse stands alone as an individual quatrain in a trochaic tetrameter with a short, long, or stressed unstressed syllabic pattern that repeats four times. What that means is, in English it would be a dum da dum da dum da dum da cadence gives it kind of a musical quality before we even get a tune on it.

Each stanza has a consistent ab rhyming scheme in Slovene, of course, so everything feels unified and is way easier to memorize for recitation. There is no refrain in the poem. That's more of a song thing. And this was not written as a song. It's a poem.

Before I say more, let's hear the words to this drinking song that toasts pan slavic nationalism in the spirit of the French Revolution. This is the translation I found that makes the most sense lyrically, and it gets the feeling for the piece across pretty well.

The vintage friends is over and here sweet wine makes once again sad eyes and hearts recover puts fire in every vein drowns dull care everywhere and summons hope out of despair. To whom with acclaim and song shall we our first toast give. God save our land and nation and all slovenes where they live.

Who owns the same blood and name, and who one glorious mother claim. Let thunder out of heaven strike down and smite our wanton foe now as it once had thriven.

May our dear realm in freedom grow, may fall the last chains of the past, which bind us still and hold us fast. Let peace glad conciliation come back to us throughout the land, toward their destination. Let Slavs henceforth go hand in hand.

Thus again will honor, reign to justice pledged in our domain, to you our pride past measure our girls, your beauty, charm and grace.

There surely is no treasure to equal maidens of such race, sons you'll bear, who will dare defy our foes, no matter where our hope now our to morrow the youths we toast and toast with joy, no poisonous blight to sorrow your love of homeland shall destroy with us. Indeed you're called to heed its summons in this hour of need.

God's blessing on all nations, who long and work for that brighten day when our earth's habitations no war, no strife shall hold its sway, who long to see that all men free, no more shall foes but neighbors be at last to our reunion, to us the toasts let it resound, since in this gay communion by thoughts of brotherhood were bound, may joyful cheer ne'er disappear from all good hearts now gathered here. The poem's draulita evokes a sense of joyous celebration and unity.

It begins with an invitation to raise a toast and sets a convivial and hopeful tone. The poem reflects on the power of wine to bring people together, lift our spirits, and revive our hopes.

It speaks of a shared identity and common heritage among Slovenians, calling for solidarity and national pride. The verses emphasize the desire for freedom, justice, and the breaking of old chains that have held the nation back.

There's a sense of resilience and determination as the poem progresses and encourages people to stand together against any adversities and work towards a brighter future.

Francis really liked imagery and symbolism in his poetry based on the stuff that I've read, and here he is specifically using accessible images in his symbols that will resonate with the slovenian people. It explains part of why this was a natural choice for the anthem.

As the poem progresses further, it broadens its scope to include a universal wish for peace and cooperation among all of the nations. The verses express a hope for a world where war and strife are absent and where all people live as neighbors rather than foes.

It highlights the importance of youth as the bearers of future hopes, emphasizing their role in the continued pursuit of freedom and unity. The poem continues with a celebration of brotherhood and joy, underscoring the importance of togetherness and shared purpose.

Throughout, there was an overarching feeling of optimism and a deep love for the homeland and its people. Throughout Francis writing, the verses have a theme of unity, peace and brotherhood, with the stanzas building on each other in a steady progression.

Pressurevans language is very careful too, you know, censors and all that, but moreover, it's accessible and intelligent at the same time. He's able to manage an elevated style that can appeal to a wide audience.

I actually prefer a shorter anthem, even though as a whole this is a pretty not bad poem.

This particular verse, though, captures the essence of the poems broader themes of unity and peace and expresses a desire for harmony among nations, advocating for a world where people no longer see each other as enemies but as neighbors. This is a universal message and it is timeless. It resonates with Slovenias history and aspirations as a nation.

By choosing this verse as the anthem, Slovenia is emphasizing its commitment to peaceful coexistence and mutual respect among nations. It reflects the countrys values of freedom, justice and solidarity not just within its borders, but also in the international community.

It serves as a reminder of the importance of striving for a world where all people are free and equal. The use of Straulitza as the national anthem also honors the literary and cultural heritage of Slovenia.

Showcasing the profound impact of Francis Preserin's poetry on the national consciousness. The anthem is a symbol of national identity and pride, encapsulating the slovenian spirit an enduring hope for a better future.

All in all, I think we got a good story out of it and I've learned that Slovenia is a place that I want to go and see. Of course, my biggest hope here is that we have all learned more.

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