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This paper analyzes the role of Mladina – a Slovenian weekly that entered the collective memory of the nation as an important actor in the processes of democratization and achieving independence – in terms of its contribution to the rearticulation of the Slovenian integrative discourse in the interregnum of the 1980s. By employing the theory of the cultural memory (Aleida Assmann, Todor Kuljić) the author analyzes all editions of Mladina published in the 1980s to examine the role of Mladina in the processes of democratizing interpretations of the Yugoslavian (recent) history, but also taking into account – in relation to Slovenian ‘sites of memory’ (Philippe Nora) – Mladina’s reflections of the possibilities and pitfalls of the unification of Sloveneness on essentialist foundations. The paper is based on the thesis that Mladina in the 1980s had indeed taken maverick role in the processes of democratization of Slovene society, but it entered the collective memory also due to establishing itself as an open forum in which the Slovenian ‘sites of memory’ were being reflected and transformed. Therefore, the author first analyzes the various approaches with which Mladina’s writers acquainted their readers with inconvenient, even silenced topics from Yugoslavian recent history, then focuses on the process of transforming the identification points of Sloveneness, as reflected in Mladina’s articles, which is further elaborated by an analysis of the discourses of unity and disunity within then Slovenian and Yugoslavian political and publish sphere. Since the situation in the 1980s also required from a liberal weekly such as Mladina to reflect upon the contents of integrative discourse, the author spirally connects his findings with the theses of those social theorists, who claim that nowadays problems with ‘self-image’ and collective memory in most of the Eastern European and Western Balkans countries – often taking forms of unresolved trauma – stem from the antagonistic as well as insufficiently reflected understanding of the relationship between democracy and identities in the societies of the 1980s. On this basis, in the conclusion the author addresses the theoretically challenging and topical question of the ability and disability of liberalism as a political philosophy in the reflection of those aspects of community discourse that are grounded in pre- or post-Enlightenment doctrines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issue of memory and oblivion in socialist Yugoslavia after the Second World War, with a special focus on the case study of the Borovnica camp in Slovenia. The prisoners in the camp were arrested during the liberation of Trieste and the Julian March (they were the so-called deportees from the Julian March). After the camp was shut down it was gradually destroyed and a settlement was built on its foundations. Local people who lived in the immediate vicinity have memories of this time, but have never spoken publicly about what happened there. This paper analyses the memory and oblivion of the Borovnica camp over a long period of time, from the end of the war to the present day. The memory of the camp is placed into the broader, Yugoslav and European context of the culture of remembering and the “amnesia of national experiences”, as defined by Tony Judt. During our research, we found that already during the camp’s operation, a regime of fear was established over the locals, through which the guards tried to prevent any assistance to the prisoners, while at the same time silencing rumours. This fear persisted even after, since in the years and decades that followed, the camp and what took place there were not, or only rarely, spoken about. The silence was partly due to the general desire that prevailed throughout Europe to forget what had happened, but mainly due to political pressures and fear of the regime, as well as the fear of disrupting relations within the local community. As a result, despite the change of socio-political circumstances after 1991 that favoured narratives that contradicted the previous official narrative of pure partisan struggle, the camp remained largely unspoken about even then. The article thus shows that breaking collective amnesia is not a unilateral process. In addition to the favourable socio-political circumstances, the desire and need to break the silence must also arise within the community that has had oblivion imposed upon it. In 2021, the remaining foundations of one of the barracks were cleared and they are now evidence of a camp that now has a story and a history. Although some people are still reluctant to talk about this time, it can be said that the memory of the Borovnica camp has become an integral part of the local collective memory. The question remains how many similar situations and cases of post-war amnesia still exist in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For well over a century now, the enigmatic kosezi (in Slovene), or Edlinge (in German), continue to excite the imagination and create agitation in Slovene and Austrian national histories and cultural memories. While Austrian historiography largely advocates for a Germanic origin of this free medieval social stratum, in the Slovene they are established as an integral part of Carantanian society, said to have persevered until the sixteenth and, to a degree, even the nineteenth century. Hence, in the Slovene national imagination, the kosezi provide an important continuity with the ‘first Slovene state’, as Carantania is erroneously regarded in the cultural memory. This paper focuses on the (re)construction and reception of the word kosez (singular) and the social stratum it allegedly designated in Slovene science and cultural memory, while also surveying Austrian interpretations. The analysis shows that the kosezi entered the Slovene national imagination especially due to their key role in the enthronement of the dukes of Carinthia. The role of free Slovene peasants in the medieval enthronement ritual was discovered only two decades before the (re)construction of the word kosez in 1912/13 from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century toponyms and surnames, as the supposed old Slovene or Carantanian original for the German word Edlinger (singular), attested in earlier sources. The word kosez was unknown in folk memory and its (re)construction was too late to be included in nineteenth-century nation-building, which was the most prolific time for the construction of national myths. Thus, it was only in the interwar period that Slovene historiography and philology made the kosezi, through their role in the enthronement ritual supposedly originating in Carantania, an integral part of one of the key elements of Slovene nation and state-building. After World War Two, the kosezi were further established in Slovene cultural memory, particularly through the reception of popular-scientific works and school textbooks, predicated mainly on the interpretations of the leading post-war Slovene medievalist Bogo Grafenauer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors who marked the Baroque literary production of Kotor, their poetic, aesthetic and noetic commitments formulated in accordance with global ideas of the times in which they arise on one, and according to the characteristics of the existential climate to which they belong, on the other side. It is not unusual that in such a cultural ambience in which to mix the expressiveness of a Croatian idiom and western influence, there is a conceptual plurality, which insists on the interaction between literary texts and culture and leads to interference of various semantic content, indicating a high degree of assimilation of different cultural values. This applies particularly to the traditional story of the Blessed Ozana, known as another protector's town of Kotor, besides St Tryphon. It represents an entire cultural reality, but also a kind of symbolic sublimation of the fundamental cultural values of the area of Boka Kotorska. The first poets from Kotor were astonished by Blessed Ozana of Kotor, which had already, for life, become a kind of ideological, cultural and literary phenomenon: the noblemen Ivan Bona / Boliris / (whose work Vita Della Beata Osanna to Cattaro was lost) and Vicko (Vicenzo) Bolica Kokoljic (The Life of Blessed Ozana). She has been an inspiration to numerous authors since the 16th and was mentioned in many historical sources and documents. Except in Boka and Dalmatia, the cult of the Blessed Ozana or Ozana Crnogorkinje spread in the sixteenth century to Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, although the Vatican released the confi rmation of her beatifi cation only in 1927. In the document, the declaration of Ozana Beat - blessed, it was stated that it is respected granted not only because of the life she had lived - according to the Christian principles, but also because of her commitment to point to the possibility of the unity of the Orthodox and Catholic Christians giving her own example. Shaping the character of the Blessed Ozana of Kotor in the form of a strong semantic core in the system of Montenegrin collective memory, the results show that literary texts are not only about the culture they belong to, but that they represent a kind of transmitters of culture which, by their nature, shape the cultural matrix and thereby affect social values and expectations, and their own identity and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]