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Slovenia, a green boutique destination offering five-star experiences, can pride itself on a multitude of flattering titles, including the most beautiful, the safest and the most hipster country. Five Slovenian municipalities have more beds for tourists than they have for local people, and every year records are broken in terms of visits to the country on the sunny side of the Alps, which is also one of the cleanest countries in the world. A question that is often asked around here is how long Slovenia will be able to fly the green flag and, on that basis, top sustainability lists.

Painted beehive panels are an essential element in the history of Slovenian beekeeping and even in the history of Slovenian folk spiritual culture. These panels are the same to the fine arts as songs and tales are in literary folk art. But the images from beehive panels tell a special story of Slovenian history, ideas, beliefs and customs. They are unique historical records.

The confirmed age of the Old Vine, which grows in Maribor, is over 400 years and it is entered in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest noble vine in the world. It still bears grapes from which a very special wine is made.

The World Expo hosted by Dubai in the United Arab Emirates will commence at the beginning of October 2021 and last until 31 March 2022. Among the 192 participating countries, Slovenia will be featured with its national pavilion under the slogan, Slovenia. Green Smart Experience., as a sustainable, modern, creative and future-oriented country.

The beginnings of mass motorization in Slovenia go back to the 1960s and coincide with the construction of new road sections and the planning of the first few kilometres of motorways. As a result, this increase in traffic, along with some other causes, led to an increased number of road traffic fatalities. One of the major issues at that time was the use of high beam headlights, which dazzled drivers in the preceding vehicles and other traffic participants alike. To prevent such behaviour, a campaign was launched, the purpose of which was to put a stop to such dangerous behaviour and to raise awareness among the drivers that they were not alone on the road and that for safety’s reasons they needed to switch off their full beam headlights. The emphasis here was particularly on the night driving.

On December 27, 1936, after the performance of his choir in Podgora, the Gorizia patriot, composer, organist and choir conductor Lojze Bratuž (1902–1937) was forced to drink a mixture of machine oil and petrol by a group of fascists. Less than two months later he was dead. Although the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia does not keep documents about the actual horrific attack, we do keep documents that may shed light on some less known reactions of the Italian local authorities to his death. Namely, the preserved documents reveal the plans of the Gorizia Office of Quaestor to secure Bratuž's funeral, which points to a fact that Italian authorities feared that the funeral may lead to riots. The authorities also supervised Bratuž's grave, because they were afraid that the so-called "cult of Bratuž" might be developing.

The first "Yugoslav" Himalayan expedition (I. JAHO) was the longest Slovenian expedition. It lasted from March to August 1960 because the team travelled to their destination and back by ship. The expedition included seven Slovenian climbers and managed to reach the summits of Baraltoli (5720 m), Trisul II (6690 m) and Trisul III (6270 m). Preserved by the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, among its records of the Alpine Association of Slovenia, are documents and photos from the expedition. This month's archivalia presents the journey of the expedition and provides a glimpse into the everyday life of the climbers.

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.