photo of Marjan Krebelj  profound thoughts  Subscribe to RSS
feed  Posts tagged with "politics"  Narod Hlapcev or An Essay on
Traditions  , , , ...  This is a post about my fellow
Slovenians.  Lately I've been thinking a lot about traditions
and especially our own cultural heritage here in Slovenia. To
tell you the truth, I have never been much interested in our
folk music, dances or even architecture and it was mainly my own
ignorance to blame.  But not entirely. Because, as I see now,
the problem lies in the way we - as a culture and as a society -
perceive our tradition and how we teach it to the kids. Here
lies the problem which was often pointed out by thinkers like
Cankar or Bartol, but never fully understood by their readers,
except by those who got it themselves.  As a result a term
"narod hlapcev" (a nation of hinds, servants or slaves) was
coined as a pejorative for a lowly nation of Slovenians. I don't
know enough about history to judge if that term is statistically
correct in a literal sense, but