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At the end of World War I the world was in the grip of the Spanish flu, which in the Slovenian territory claimed around 6000 lives. The epidemic here was of short duration, perhaps also due to suitable measures taken. To prevent the spreading of the infectious disease, the government of the newly founded State of SHS issued a decree in mid-November 1918, ordering those returning from the front line and those who had already returned but had not been examined yet to undergo obligatory physical examination. The duty of enforcing this state decree was assigned to local authorities. Public proclamation of one such authority, the Ljubljana Town Hall, is preserved by the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.

In 2018 the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia purchased a small, but extremely interesting collection of archival material, which is believed to have been preserved at the Vransko Manor. Although the collection includes no more than eight pieces - all of them written on parchment and paper - the records themselves actually span over a longer period of time between 1239 and 1831. The most interesting and most revealing record about the Müller-Hörnstein family is a charter which was written as a proof of ancestry (the so-called Ahnenprobe) in Vienna in 1806.

Slovenian folk tradition has preserved a number of “efficient ways of protection” against various misfortunes and one such "weapon" was also Kolemonov žegen.The original is believed to have been written in Latin. It spread across the German territory and as a translated version found its way from the present-day Carinthia across the entire territory of today’s Slovenia. It contained a collection of protective prayers, formulas and magic words, superstitions and instructions on how to get the favour of supernatural beings so as to avoid any misfortunes and be successful in acquiring earthy material goods.

Ivan Cankar has up to now been the focus of two articles in our online series Archivalia of the Month; in March 2011 we presented the report on censorship in regard to the staging of Cankar's play Hlapci, and in August 2013 we published the court document, revealing how Cankar's lecture Slovenians and Yugoslavs earned its author a week in prison in 1913. This month's archivalia focuses on one of his muses, to whom the writer wrote an original dedication, although the actual written media on which he chose to write this dedication (a postcard depicting St. James's Church in Ljubljana) seems somewhat less original.

Head physician Dr. Mirko Černič established himself in the world of medicine as a physician, organizer, scientist, professor and a publicist. His greatest achievement, though, was the first purposely built sanatorium in Maribor, whose construction he himself planned and financed. Ninety years have passed since the opening of the sanatorium.

Bojan Adamič is one of the most celebrated Slovenian composers of the 20th century popular music. He was also a keen amateur photographer and filmmaker. Preserved at the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia are over 60 of his films; recently Adamič's daughter Alenka donated to us also 1559 of his slides which are very diverse in content. Taking into account the number and excellent quality of the donated slides, we decided to arrange them in a separate archival collection, and some examples of Adamič's photographic creativity are presented here as this month's archivalia.

Archival records are priceless and are as such treated as cultural monument. Over the course of the years their appearance changed, diligently mirroring the time and the environment that created them. Today, due to widespread use of information and communication technology, we are constantly faced with a challenge of having to deal with various forms of electronic archival records (eAR) produced by public archival records creators. Electronic archival records are selected out of the entire body of current records produced by an individual records creator during the course of its work. This selection is carried out in close cooperation between public archives and creators of such archival records. As part of e-ARH.si project we are currently developing a number of key solutions intended for records creators and aimed at controlling the risks in a document's life cycle, taking into account the entire life span of a document from its creation to its transfer to archival institution.

One of the key objectives of the Slovenian public archival service is providing access to archival records. As part of our e-ARH.si project, we took up a major challenge of digitizing our reading room procedures and creating the Virtual Archival Reading Room (VARR) to facilitate our users and enable them to get in touch with archival cultural heritage.

The request written by the city archivist Vladislav Fabjančič in September 1935 and addressed to the Ljubljana mayor Vladimir Ravnihar is interesting in two regards. Firstly, it is a story of Fabjančič's work – he himself calls it »a matter of a city archivist«, which far surpasses the faith of any ordinary city clerk. His dealing with issues ever since the start of his employment in 1923, but particularly the complications he needed to face up to after the year 1933, dictate his distinctly personal tone of record, which a reader may find appealing, but still needs to critically review.

Defeat is usually difficult to accept. In Europe as well as in Asia many soldiers from the ranks of the defeated armies found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that the war was really over. During the first post-war months and even years there were a number of such individuals, and in some cases even entire military units, fighting their own “private” wars long after the actual hostilities formally ended, either by launching their own guerrilla attacks or just by hiding and refusing to surrender. Well-known example are Japanese officers and soldiers; the last ones among them surrendered themselves in Southeast Asia in 1974. The former member of the Home Guard Janez Rus was in hiding even for a couple of years more.

The online column Archivalia of the Month has been published since January 2011. Its purpose is to promote the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and its archival holdings. Presented in the column are archival documents that are interesting visually and content-wise, as well as newly acquired documents or the ones that have so far been overlooked. Also published are documents relating to various anniversaries, current events and many more.

Below you will find the Archivalias of the Month of 2020.

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the opening of the Carniolan Founding Institution for the Deaf in Ljubljana, but care for and education of deaf children can be traced back to as early as the1820s. In September 1829, the first four pupils, two from Carniola and two from Carinthia, were accompanied to Linz and in August the following year the director of the school Michael Bihringer sent a report to the Carniolan authorities, describing the progress the pupils had made in their first year at school.

The online column Archivalia of the Month has been published since January 2011. Its purpose is to promote the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and its archival holdings. Presented in the column are archival documents that are interesting visually and content-wise, as well as newly acquired documents or the ones that have so far been overlooked. Also published are documents relating to various anniversaries, current events and many more.

Below you will find the Archivalias of the Month of 2019.

As part of the ongoing e-ARH.si project, the 4th e-ARH.si International Conference was held at Austria Trend Hotel in Ljubljana on November 20-21, 2019.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the stopping of the "rally of truth" in Ljubljana. The rally was planned to take place on December 1, 1989 and was organized by the Committee of the Association for the Return of Serbs and Montenegrins to Kosovo - Božur. It was officially announced on November 6 and on November 20 it was prohibited based on the decision made by the City Secretariat of the Interior. Since despite the prohibition the rally organizers insisted on coming to Slovenia - according to some estimations approximately fifty to sixty thousand people were to participate - Slovenia was forced to take special measures.

While during the early post-war years the Yugoslav trade unions were actively involved in rebuilding the demolished state and assisting people devastated by the war, as well as helping workers complete their planned tasks later on, the implementation of self-management limited their activities. From then on their primary purpose was to provide rewards for workers and help employees hold their elections or organize their work. Their educational role took central stage and this new direction of thought can clearly be seen also in the here presented report of the union branch office, which operated in the old and respectable crown jewel of Slovenian hotel industry – the Hotel Union in Ljubljana.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Žiga Zois, a member of the Enlightenment movement, patron of arts and literature, natural scientist and economist. Two of the most important collections kept by Žiga Zois at his house in the Breg in Ljubljana were his collection of minerals and his library, which at the time was one of the richest and largest private libraries within a wider Slovenian territory. His library holdings were catalogued several times, and occasionally he compiled such catalogues himself. Some of the lists of his books are today kept also by the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.

The transition under Italian military authority in the occupied territory west of the demarcation line can be studied through numerous reports of the local population, officials, politicians and other reporters, who addressed their correspondence to the National Government for Slovenia, the National Council or to the Office for the Occupied Territory in Ljubljana. The problems faced by officials, teachers and other members of Yugoslav intelligentsia in the occupied territory are well illustrated by the minutes no. 242 of December 1918.

On June 21, 1919, after long and painful negotiations, the Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Conference decided that the Carinthian issue was to be solved by means of a plebiscite conducted in two zones. Zone A was to be until plebiscite occupied and managed by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, and Zone B was to be managed by German Austria. In accordance with this agreement, Yugoslav military troops had to retreat behind the demarcation line.

Protocols on the plenary sessions of the Ljubljana Credit Bank management board for the period between 1926 and 1932 contain caligraphically recorded discussions, reflections and findings of the members of the management board of the first "truly Slovenian" bank. Unlike printed annual reports, which were stuffed with numbers, these records reveal a more personal and direct testimonies and witnessing of the events. Reading them can easily take us 90 years back. We find out, for example, that the management of the bank at the start of 1930 was more worried about "abnormal weather" of the past year than about the American stock market crash.