Images of daily life in Slovenia’s past, pt1
The film Images of daily life in Slovenia’s past introduces the Slovene Ethnographic Museum’s permanent exhibition. It offers a brief insight into important aspects of daily life in the past, covering the migration of the Slavs onto the territory of the current Slovenia, their dwellings and farming methods, the appearance of castles and towns, peasant revolts, the publication of the first book in Slovene and the development of new transport means in the Early Modern Ages. There are few archeological finds, frescoes or books bearing witness to this time, so the film also makes use of animations and reconstructions of farming and handicraft tasks.
*The Venetic peoples lived in the first millennium A.D. and even today many places all over Europe remind us of them. They were one of the oldest people in Central Europe, one of the nations whose inheritance even today forms the major base of all nations in Central Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea. It is known today, that the Veneti/Vends/Wends were the fathers of the Lusatian culture and the later Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age transitional culture that spread widely across Europe and the Mediterranean. The migrations that took place between this transitional period were caused by the Veneti in the 13th century A.D. and was the largest religious revolution at the time. The homeland of the Veneti peoples was Central Europe. Their quests reached all the way to Holland, Britain, France and Spain. They even reached the Apennine Peninsula and Scandinavia. The opinions are more or less undivided about where the Veneti were located. However, the question who they actually were is a different story. In historical sources from the Middle Ages the name Veneti was used only for the West Slavs, including Slovenians/Slovenes, and the sources also tell us about the distinguishing differences between the Venetic group of the West Slavs and the South Slavs (Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians) that settled in the Balkans in the 6th century. Among the Slovenians in the Alps and the Southern Slavs, there has always been a clear border in language, history, culture and social settlement (with Slovenians, the word “vas” (village) never only meant just a settlement, but an actual territorial community, with West and East Slavs — “selo”). But the thought, that the ancient Veneti were Slavs was too much for the Germans, because that would mean that the Slavs were in Central and West Europe far before the Germanic peoples. What was the fate of the Veneti during the Roman Empire? Let me quote Jožko Šavli: “The Venetic people in Northern Italy were Romanized, but the Venetic people in the East Alps, especially in the more remote areas, survived the fall of the Roman Empire. We, the Slovenians, are their descendants. The only difference is that with the West Venetic peoples more Venetic influences — including in the language — were preserved, while with the East Venetic peoples not so much. From one and the other a new nation emerged when other Slavic nations from the Eastern part of Europe started settling here — Slovenians, and it is exactly this mixture of components that give them their specific seal. Their ethnogenetic identity.”*
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yO78QGV0j4
Duration : 0:6:29
[youtube 4jDUoA6bzZ0]
