Irene Portis-Winner is a Visiting Scholar (2002–2003) at the Philosophy of Education Research Center, Harvard University.

Semiotics of Peasants in Transition

Slovenia Villagers and Their Ethnic Relatives in America By Irene Portis-Winner

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Irene Portis-Winner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822328278

Chapter One

A Glance at the Village and Its Sister Ethnic Communities in Cleveland and Hibbing

Early Impressions of the Village: Zerovnica from the Sixties to the Present

Zerovnica is located in the Notranjsko area in the administrative district (obcina) of Cerknica in southwestern Slovenia. Its land abuts the Cerknica basin (Cerknisko polje) where the periodically disappearing karstic Cerknica lake (Cerknisko jezero; the phenomenon is called presihajoce jezerox) an extremely important dramatis persona in village lore is located. The Cerknica area is bordered by mountains to the northeast and southwest.

In the 1960s, when we (my husband, our two teenage daughters, Ellen and Lucy, and I) first stayed in the village, Slovene peasant villages appeared relatively isolated, and Zerovnica was no exception despite the proximity of the Brest (“Elm”) furniture factories and the impinging Marof cooperative farm (zadruga), both visible as we drove toward Zerovnica.

The outside observer, standing at a distance from the village, perceives what appears to be a harmoniously bounded whole. Yet I soon learned about a long tradition of emigration to the United States that began in the 1880s and was believed necessary for the survival of the village. In spite of appearances, the village had porous boundaries, and the distance did not break the ties between migrants and the villagers back home. However, endogamy or marriage to partners in neighboring villages was common and preferred, and the history of the village supports the conclusion that much of the feudal economic structure and value system survived in spite of the long period of communist domination. A look at a relief model of Zerovnica exhibited at the Ljubljana Geographic Institute, the legend of which describes the village as “a typical road village on the southeast side of the [Cerknica] basin,” also supports such a perspective. The caption locates Zerovnica in one of the most typical traditional Slovenian regions, an area in which land is still divided into the same strips as during the Middle Ages. The town lies in a large triangular area, with the Cerknica basin at its center. The caption continues: there are “narrow, impossibly divided strips that compose clearly dened land complexes…. In each complex the most signicant families each have one piece.”

I gained my first perception of the village in the summer of 1964 as my family and I drove our Volkswagen minivan along a straight, dusty, then unpaved road leading south in the Cerknica plain. Two striking landmarks come to view as the traveler approaches the village from the north. The first is the partisan monument, a large, rough-hewn stone placed at the entrance of the village, standing next to a wooden bridge over the Zerovniscenia stream near the building of the re brigade (gasilski dom) and the balina field. On the monument the names of fallen heroes, the partisan ghters against the Germans and Italians, are inscribed. The second dramatic landmark, at the far southern end of the village on a sizable hill occupying the highest ground, is the village church crowned by its red (now painted green) onion-shaped bell tower and surrounded by the village graveyard overlooking the village. Fifty-nine peasant houses, half on each side of the road, all resembling each other with red tiled roofs and lined up closely, occupy the space between these two landmarks. And on a path branching of to the east at the northern end of the village stand the five larger and more imposing millers’ houses and their mills, all strung along the Zerovniscenica stream. To the south, in the surrounding mountainous terrain, stands another landmark on the highest peak: the ruin of the former feudal castle Steberk from where the count, now a mythic figure in village lore, once ruled over the villagers, owned the land they cultivated as well as the forests and to whom they once owed corvee.

Circling the village are the until recently well-kept, symmetrically laid out, narrow strips of land that subdivide seven large fields. They were tilled following a system of crop rotation (kolobarjenje) inherited from the feudal period. Crops included wheat, rye, barley, oats, clover, potatoes, and various kinds of vegetables for animal and human consumption. The hay fields of the villagers, laid bare when the Cerknica lake drains in summer, abut the strips of land and reach all the way to those of the cooperative farm Marof, the Cerknica lake, and the highly valued forests.

I did not then realize how deluding the ideal, normative view of the villagers was, expressed by common comments such as, “We are a friendly village, we are all alike, and everyone has the same amount of land.” Today it would be hard to nd a peasant who would agree that such statements had ever been accurate. And even in the sixties, as I was soon to learn, such assertions concealed the realities of inequities of wealth and power and complex, often tension-ridden social relations in the village. They also masked ideological differences between the majority of anticommunist peasants and the minority of poor or landless peasants, some of whom identified with the communist bureaucracy, the impinging state-run institutions, and the Slovene state apparatus in general. The following passage from my original study describes how the village appeared to me and my family in 1964:

The road from Grahovo leads to the northern entrance to Zerovnica, marked by a bridge over the Zerovnisca River, which here borders a small village green, the only common gathering place today. The green is shaded by the wide boughs of a linden (lipa) tree, beneath which there are a few benches and a table. Alongside the linden tree rises a partisan monument. Next to the monument is the balina eld, where a few men and boys meet on evenings and Sundays to play the balina game, a form of lawn bowls. It is found everywhere in this area and is a recent introduction from Italy.

The central road leading from the green is faced by houses of plastered stone, many of which need paint. To each house is affixed a shiny red plaque bearing a number. Villagers, however, have never learned the numbers so convenient for the tax collector; their dwellings are still identified by traditional house names, registered in the earliest church records. Houses are fronted by wooden benches and some by small, fenced-in flower and vegetable gardens. Behind each house are attached sheds for fowl, pigs, cattle, and horses, next to which are storehouses…. The manure pile, used for fertilizer, is close by. Generally, there is another shed that houses a special stove on which to cook feed for pigs, and, with few exceptions, there is an outhouse. Then come the fruit trees-apple, plum, and pear-and finally the detached storage barn (skedenj) where hay and cattle bedding is stored. Behind the homesteads are paths leading to the fields, where wheat, maize, fodder crops, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables are grown. On a spring afternoon a few elders sit on benches in front of their houses. Small children play along the road, in the stream, and under the linden tree on the green. A villager with his ox-drawn cart, carrying his wife and children and perhaps one or two grandparents with their hoes and rakes, leaves for the fields. All but the very old and very young are at work, and the village is quiet and empty. The road leads through the village to the hill on which the church stands and near which is the oldest structure in the village, a traditional storage barn (skedenj). Anyone climbing the hill is rewarded with another excellent view of the area. In the churchyard, enclosed by an old stone wall, are the family graves of the villagers as well as a collective grave of seven partisans. The bell in the baroque, red-painted steeple no longer rings, but the church itself is freshly whitewashed. Until the autumn of 1964 Sunday masses were celebrated in Zerovnica. Now they are celebrated only in Grahovo. (1971, 23-27)

Such an immediate impression of a bucolic and peaceful scene is misleading. A more realistic portrait of the village in the sixties would have noted that the castle on top of the highest peak, once inhabited by the local feudal lord, is a neglected ruin, a signal of the past. The church of St. Paul (Sveti Pavel) on the hill was no longer allowed its own parish priest but had to make do with the priest from Grahovo, the neighboring village, and who came to Zerovnica for a Sunday mass that the youth rarely attended.

The neighboring cooperative farm (zadruga) Marof did not receive a favorable review from me even in 1964. The villagers regarded the concentration of power such units had as a menace to their private land because it affored the sole outlet for essentially all the peasants’ products, leaving them with little bargaining power. The unenthusiastic laborers on the cooperative farm from the southern republics of Yugoslavia were viewed with considerable contempt by the villagers who thought them lazy, inefficient, and less civilized than themselves. They despised the Communist Party members from the city who had little knowledge of farming and held the administrative posts on the cooperative farm. The precommunist traditional private markets were no longer held, and Marof and the Brest furniture factory controlled the prices, although the peasants still traveled many miles to sell piglets privately, albeit for meager returns. Brest controlled prices for logs and boards, and of the five village saw mills that lined the Zerovnisca stream only one was allowed to function, and that only marginally. In the 1980s Marof went bankrupt in spite of its large holdings and modern equipment. Yet the hardworking peasants, laboring under discriminatory policies, with their primitive equipment, ox-drawn plows and wagons, and little mechanization continued to be productive. The swollen bureaucracy of political functionaries running Marof and the wage workers’ lack of motivation was the villagers’ disdainful explanation for the failure of this ambitious government project.

After the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation, the furniture factory Brest in nearby Martinjak also went bankrupt, but another branch in the district center Cerknica survived. Both, within easy commuting distance by bicycle or moped from Zerovnica, had complemented emigration as a supplementary source for economic survival since the end of the nineteenth century. In the postcommunist years other means of making a living such as learning a skill or profession and taking part in the plans for tourism have gained prevalence.

Notwithstanding first impressions, the houses that had all appeared so much alike turned out not to be so similar at all. Indeed, the interiors of the larger millers’ houses by the stream, where the waterwheels once powered the saw and our mills, were furnished with rugs and heavy, carved furniture, evoking the former wealth of their owners. Furthermore, while traditional crop rotation inherited from feudal times was still largely followed, it did not mean that all villagers could participate. For not only was land unevenly divided, but some villagers remained essentially landless and occupied themselves with village specialties such as carpentry. On average, a family held a quarter zemlja (fifteen hectares) of land, and their owners were called cetrt zemljak (quarter lander). But a small number of peasants, who claimed to descend from the original founders, still owned a half zemlja (thirty hectares). At the same time, some held less than a quarter zemlja or no land at all.

Inequalities of political power accounted for village factions as much as did inequalities of wealth. After the demise of communism, this structure, as will be described in chapter 5, changed dramatically.

Historical Factors, Slovenia: The Official Record in the Communist and Postcommunist Period

As World War II concluded, Tito’s Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia was formed. For a short time after the war, before its break with the Cominform, the communist regime tried to collectivize the peasants. But the peasant families strongly resisted this policy, and consequently only a few large cooperative and state farms were organized in Slovenia, generally located on confiscated large landed estates and employing landless workers from the southern republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo). State policy concerning private peasants shifted to various attempts to obliterate their autonomy and traditions, dissolving local units into larger administrative formations controlled by urban bureaucrats. However, even before Slovenia achieved independence in 1991, some positive changes for peasants were introduced. In 1972, they were finally granted the right to take part in the health insurance and pension plans of the Slovene Republic, although pensions for peasants did not equal those of wage earners.

Revolutionary changes for Slovenia came as Europe entered the new age ushered in by Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost and by the collapse of European communism. The Yugoslav Federation turned to civil war involving all the republics of the federation. Yet Slovenia attained its independence from Yugoslavia with only a limited degree of violence when the Serbian forces briefly attempted to stop this movement during the ten-day war in the summer of 1991. This raises the question why Slovenia was so privileged as compared to Croats and Albanians in Serbia, Serbs in Croatia, and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all of whom have been suffering from the violent aggression of “ethnic cleansing.”

Answers to the question why Slovenia escaped most of the struggle and yet won its independence involve factors of geographical location, language, and cultural traditions that mark Slovenia and the Slovenes as somewhat different. Slovenia itself is the westernmost and northernmost of the former Yugoslav republics, sharing borders with Austria, Hungary, and Italy. The Slovene language, though South Slavic, is distinctly different from Serbo-Croatian, which is essentially one language in spite of the ideological investments on the part of both Serbs and Croats in minor distinctions of a lexical and orthographic nature. In addition, the Slovene language is highly valued, having a strong role in self-identity in this small republic of only two million inhabitants. The Roman Catholic religion, which the Slovenes share with the Croats, is not practiced in the rest of the former Yugoslavia, where Eastern Orthodoxy is the traditional religion of the Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians; and many inhabitants of the former southern republics, Serbo-Croatian-speaking Bosnians and Herzegovinians as well as Albanians, converted to Islam after the area fell to the Turks in the battle of Kosovo Polje (Ravens’ Field) in 1389. Most importantly, Slovenia, unlike the other republics that formed the Yugoslav federation, is ethnically quite homogeneous, with only a limited number of non-Slovene groups, primarily Italians. The inhabitants of the few small Serbian enclaves in Slovenia have not identified with the Serbian nationalistic drives. And practically no Slovenes live in the other republics of the former Yugoslavia. The fact that Slovenia has the richest natural and industrial resources of all the former Yugoslav constituent republics has proven a double-edged sword for the country. On one hand, it was of considerable value to the Yugoslav federation, but at the same time the Slovenes, who often characterize their republic as the Switzerland of the South Slav lands, expressed resentment at what they considered exploitation by their poorer neighbors.

Continues…
Excerpted from Semiotics of Peasants in Transitionby Irene Portis-Winner Copyright © 2002 by Irene Portis-Winner. Excerpted by permission.
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