isoglossia — pending reconstruction

With apologies to one sister, who has already seen this, and at least two nieces:

In the bit of realness that follows, I reveal my deep ignorance about my adopted home. I strongly encourage any (and all) of the handful of local readers to correct my mistakes, enlighten us all, and help my far-off niece with her homework. But hurry. Presumably this project was due yesterday.

On 12/10/07, [Niece] wrote:

Dear Uncle John,
First of all, it is great to be able to contact you.
Secondly, my class is doing a project on holiday customs in European countries. I picked Slovenia to do for my country and I was looking on line and found a holiday bread called a potica. Do you ever make this, or do you know anyone who does? Do you have any other recipes or traditional folk tales for the holiday season that I could use? If so please contact me at this address as soon as possible.
Thanks so much,
[Niece]

Hi [Niece]!

How nice it is to hear from you. I think it’s great that you’ve decided to study Slovenian traditions for your project. Probably there are some students in the class who don’t know where Slovenia is, and maybe have never even heard of it, but it is a real place, all right.

You asked me about potica, and I can tell you a little something about that. There are various traditional cakes that Slovenes eat at different times of the year, or in different regions of the country (yes, even a country as small as Vermont has regions, and even regional dialects that vary greatly). Potica is probably the most famous one (and that ‘c’ is hard, you know, right, so it’s pronounced ‘Po-TEET-suh’?). Potica is associated with the Christmas holidays, but as one of my students once told me, “The PRIMARY function of potica is Easter.” That is when you can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting some potica, but it is also going to be found in most homes around Christmas. You refer to it as a ‘bread’ but it’s really more of a cake or struedelly thing, rolled up into a log so that it makes a snailshell shape when you slice it, and filled with ground walnuts (called ‘orehi’ here). I visited a friend from a Catholic family for Easter one year in the center of the country, where traditions seem quite strong. (It was near the town of Laško, which your father will remember visiting, and can perhaps tell you a funny story about a particular lunch we ate there.) My friend’s name is Jože (the ‘ž’ is pronounced like the ’s’ in ‘treasure’), and Jože’s mother, Marija, made potica. After we came home from Easter Sunday mass our breakfast was potica still warm from the oven, cold sliced baked ham, and hardboiled eggs that had been dyed in home-made vegetable dyes. The eggs and ham we ate with freshly-grated horseradish root, which will knock you down if you’re not careful.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to make potica. BUT: way back in 2001, when I was trying to decide whether to leave Argentina to come to Slovenia, I found this web site called “SLOVENE FOR TRAVELLERS” that has lots of interesting information about the country, the language, and the food. Here’s a link to a page that includes a potica recipe:
http://www.ff.uni-lj.si/publikacije/sft/appendix.htm

As I’m sure you know by now, Slovenia is bordered by Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, and Magda, Adam, Alek, and I live directly on the Italian border. We can see Italy from our bedroom windows, and in fact the region we live in was a part of Italy for many years, and so lots of Italian words are in the regional dialect, and some Italian customs are observed here, too. (The region is called ‘Primorje’, which means ‘by the sea’, the Adriatic Sea in this case. Interestingly, Magda comes from a region of Poland called ‘Pomorze’, or ‘Pomerania’ in English, which ALSO means ‘by the sea’, but in Polish, and in that case it’s the Baltic Sea. Anyway…) At Christmastime in this region a very (VERY) popular cake is called panettone. It is a tall, round loaf of yeasty golden cake full of raisins and ‘citron’, or candied citrus fruit peel. (It reminds me a little bit of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, but in a good way and far more delicious.) This is a northeast Italian invention, and has been popular at holiday time for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years — it’s unclear when and where it was invented, but it seems to date from Roman times, and the northern Italian cities of Milan and Verona both claim it’s ‘theirs’.

Wikipedia has an article about panettone, and they even say that it was pictured in a painting by your father’s favorite artist. Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panettone

Also on the topic of food, it is very common for families to have a special Christmas Eve meal of fish (makes sense from a Catholic viewpoint). I didn’t know about this until Magda came to live here, and then learned of it because they do the same in Poland. At our first Christmas together as a family, she asked me to bring home a carp on Christmas Eve. It turns out that you have to RESERVE YOUR CARP WELL IN ADVANCE, it is so popular. Carp, by the way, is ‘krap’ in Slovene. TEE HEE (grow up already).

Santa (or a variation thereon) comes three times during the holidays. Slovenia is predominantly Catholic, at least nominally, so every day is associated with a name; this way you get to have your birthday and also celebrate a ‘name day’, whichever day of the year your name is matched with — I suppose that in olden times they used to use the calendar to decide the name of the baby, but no one seems to do that anymore. Anyway, the 6th of December is the day of Miklavž (there’s that ‘ž’ again, and the ‘v’ works like a ‘u’ in this case), the local version of Nicolas. On the evening of the 5th, Miklavž (St. Nick) goes door-to-door, accompanied by a few angels and several devils, as many as 15 I am told, called ‘Parkelj’, who rattle chains and ring bells. The roles are usually played by the older teenagers in the village or town, or maybe students from a drama society, etc, and they make the costumes and masks, and so on, have a good time doing it and maybe drink some schnapps and get into mischief as the night wears on. St. Nick questions the parents of each house, asking whether the children have been good (or, in a more religious version of this skit, if they know how to pray). If the answer is yes, the children get a small present or some candy; if no, you can guess who gets them.

I understand it can be a bit traumatizing, more so than sitting on Santa’s lap at a department store, one would think.

Also on the evening of the 5th, the children clean their best pair of shoes and put them outside the door. If they have been good, they find them filled with fruit and nuts in the morning. (If not, not).

Christmas is called ‘Božič’, and Christmas Eve and Day are much like ours; Santa (here called ‘Božiček‘ — the ‘č’ is pronounced like ‘ch’ in ‘church’, and the ending ‘-ček’ or ‘-ek’ means ‘little guy’ or similar) comes and brings presents, and people exchange presents as is usual in the U.S. Both Christmas Day and the 26th are official holidays, as are the 1st and 2nd of January.

During the socialist era, when Slovenia was part of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav Republic, religion was semi-frowned on by the socialist state, so Miklavž, Božiček, and Christmas celebrations in general lost some traction. Parents turned to a non-denominational character called ‘Dedek Mraz’ — ‘dedek’ means ‘grandpa’ and ‘mraz’ means ‘frost’, so I suppose you could compare him to Jack Frost, except that I don’t know whether Jack Frost has any particular function… Anyway, not even Tito could find a reason to denounce Dedek Mraz. Dedek Mraz comes on New Year’s Day and brings presents, too. He is represented as a tall, old, white-haired man with a long silver beard and white robes — quite a bit like our representations of Father Time or whatever we call him, you know, the Old Year that is departing to make way for Baby New Year.

So those are the three main characters associated with Christmas. I learned a lot of the details here from my Slovene students this morning (by the way, we use ‘Slovene’ to talk about the people and the language, and ‘Slovenian’ to describe anything else). They were happy to talk about Christmas traditions rather than study de-mining efforts in Bosnia.

I don’t have any Slovenian folktales to share with you, but here’s a Christmas story about your cousin, Adam, who speaks both Slovene and Polish in addition to English. Adam LOVES panettone. One day last Christmas his babysitter brought him home with a panettone in his hands; they come in a distinctive, festive, cube-shaped box with a ribbon carrying-handle. Magda said, “where did he get that panettone?” Babysitter explained that as they were entering our apartment building, a woman was carrying in a panettone, and Adam, recognizing the box, ran to her and grabbed and/or demanded the cake. Seeing that he would have a howl-meltdown if she took it away, the woman just let him have it.

Magda was appalled, of course, that her two-year-old had EXTORTED a festive Christmas cake from some neighbor just a few days before the big day, and when I came home she told me the story. Our building has over twenty apartments, and we don’t know most of our neighbors, so I had to go door-to-door, ringing bells and asking each of our neighbors, in my best (meaning ‘crappy’) Slovene, if they had been extorted of a panettone anytime recently. I never did find the victim, so now ALL BUT ONE of our neighbors think that I am a crazy man, and the one remaining neighbor probably hates us and thinks of us as ‘those panettone-stealing foreign freaks’.

It was the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER!

I hope this helps! Merry Christmas and much love to you and your family from all of us,

JDS/MABS/AHS/AJS