I spent last weekend in Ljubljana, where I was talking about comics at the invitation of Slovenia’s biggest publisher of graphic novels, VigeVageKnjige, and everything about it was delightful: the tarragon ice cream (no, really), the streetlights (mounted on Ionic pillars), the buildings designed by the great Jože Plečnik. But I was also struck by the number of American tourists in this lesser-known corner of Europe. Were they here to trace their roots? Or were they perhaps fans of the Slovenian basketball player and NBA star Luka Dončić?
There was, of course, a remote third possibility, which is that some were inspired by Melania Trump, who grew up in a town called Sevnica, and still has the accent to prove it. Over dinner, my hosts grimaced. They hoped fervently that this was not the case, but, since I was interested, had I seen the wooden statue of Melania, crafted by a chainsaw, that was erected outside Sevnica in 2019, only to be burned down by arsonists soon afterwards? On her mobile, my host Zala produced a picture. “She looked like a Smurf,” she told me, and she was right. The Venus de Milo this was not. The man who commissioned it, Brad Downey, a Slovenian-American artist, has since exhibited the charred remains in the US. It seems he regards them as a warning of burgeoning political tensions in Slovenia – an interpretation somewhat at odds with the one offered to me over the coffee and baklava.
