| Introduction to Slovenian Mythology |
| Mythology of Venets |
| Korant, Vodin, Zemla, Ziva, Svetovid, Sreca, Vodnar, Hrust, Orjak, Bog, God Belin, Zmaga, Junak, Catez, Dogana, Vesna, Noreia and Carontan, Svarog, Kresnik, Maya, Baba, Jarnik, Triglav |
| Goldenhorn |
| Goldenhorn Tales |
| The Friulian Goldenhorn |
| Beautiful Vida |
| King Matthias - And the Tradition of the Slovenian Historical State |
| Marcus Tanner: 'Did you know that Dracula's best friend was a warrior bookworm?' |
| Mythology of Venets |
| A Slovenian Tale |
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| The dramatic moment, when Zlatorog (the Goldenhorn) descends the Wild Hunter into the precipice, because he commited outrageous deeds, i.e. he injured God's divine nature. |
| (Der dramatische Augenblick, in dem Goldenhorn den Wildjäger in die Tiefe stösst, da er frevelte, d.h. die Natur und die göttliche Welt verletzte.) |
| Once upon a time there was an Alpine paradise in the northeastern part of the Julian Alps beneath the peak of Triglav. The place was inhabited by the so-called White Ladies, who were the benefactresses of the people in the valley, but they made sure that no strangers entered their mountain territory. White goats pastured on the mountain ridge that rose vertically above the valley of the Isonzo river . |
| In case that a stranger should try to approach them, they made rocks fall down, so that the intruders would fall into the precipice. |
| The white goats were lead by a white steinbock with golden horns named Zlatorog, whom the White Ladies made invulnerable to every lesion. When a hunter fired at him and caused to spoil a drop of his blood, a plant with mysterious balm, called the Triglav rose, sprang up and a leaf of this plant healed Zlatorog immediately. Moreover, his golden horns had a divine magic all of their own in sense of forgiveness and redemption. If someone succeeded in plundering one of the steinbock's golden horns, instead to punish him, he would obtain the keys to the gold and silver chamber, watched by a three-headed serpent on Mountain Bogatin. |
| In the suburbs of Bovec, on the junction of the rivers Isonzo and Koritnica, there used to be an inn in those days, which was frequently visited by merchants, travelling on horseback. The innkeeper's daughter was the prettiest girl in the whole valley. Many suitors wanted to marry her, but she gave her love to a young man from the Trenta Valley. He was considered to be the best hunter as far as the eye could reach, and therefore, he was called the Trenta Hunter. |
| It was a sunny Sunday when the young girl danced with an Italian merchant. The Trenta Hunter asked her to dance with him, but the girl replied that the Italians were much more refined gentlemen than her lover. For he, even though he knew all the treasures of the mountain, he never brought her a single Triglav rose. |
| The young man, deeply offended, left the inn. On his way he met the Green Hunter, who told him about the treasures guarded on Bogatin mountain. The same night, they both climbed the mountain and the next morning they met Zlatorog. The Trenta Hunter fired at him, but the buck, healed by the Triglav rose, charged them, making the Trenta hunter fall into the precipice. |
| The next summer, when the shepherds returned to the Alps, instead of an Alpine paradise, they found desolated rocky grounds. The White Ladies had left the mountain world and Zlatorog had ruined all the beautiful meadows in his anger. The marks of his horns can still be seen on the rocky ground today. |


| K. Deschmann, Die Sage vom Goldkrikel (Zlatorog), Laibacher Zeitung (20. 2.), Ljubljana 1868 |
| R. Baumbach/A. Funtek, Zlatorog - Eine Sage aus den Julischen Alpen (German-Slovenian edition), Munich 1968 |
| L. Kretzenbacher, Die Sage und Mythos vom Zlatorog (accompanying word to the German-Slovenian edition), Munich 1968 |
| R. Wildhaber Das Tier mit den goldenen Hoernern, Alpes Orientales VII, Muninch 1975 |
| W. Lucke, Die Situla in Providence (Rhode Island). Ein Beitrag zur Situlenkunst des Osthallstattkreises, Berlin 1962 |
| (cf: Slovenska Znamenja) |



| Popular Slovenian lyrics present other female figures, like Mlada Breda (Young Breda) or Mlada Zora (Young Zora)... The Slovenian mythological king, Kralj Matja, who is also a hero in the battles with the Turks, takes a bride called Alencica. - The heroine figure of Miklova Zala has been preserved since the battles with the Turks. She was captured by the enemy and led off to Turkey. But she escaped prison and walked to her village on foot . She reached her home at the moment, when her fiancé Mirko was to be married to another girl. |
| (cf: The Carantanian Lady) |

| A King Matthias' motif from 1876 on a painted beehive front (celnica, in Slovenian) kept in Slovenian Ethnographical Museum in Lublana. - Matthias is sitting at a stone table holding a sceptre in his hand. He already arose, and the bread is no longer wound around the table. The linden on both sides are green. Because of the peoples sense for symmetry, there are two linden trees. |

| Drawing by Fr. Drobnikar, published in the Slovenian magazine "Dom in svet" in 1903. - The grand mother is telling the children King Matthias stories: A wayfarer can be seen through the perforation in the cavern, in which King Matthias and his army sleep. But the linden is already in blossoms, and the little bird with its voice (symbol of God's voice) is calling Matthias to awake. |
| His legend is full of symbols from the early Christian and the Romanesque period: The linden (tree of life), the scent of its blossoms meaning God's intervention; the shadow (God's protection); the dry linden or dry tree is the Cross, and the fact, that the tree (cross) became green, means Salvation... It is obvious, that Matthias sagas need to be revised in their explanation. First, the revision should be done in the same Slovenia, where Matthias is still shown as a "Hungarian" king, and where the very value of the Slovenian tradition has been concealed. |
| Marcus Tanner: 'Did you know that Dracula's best friend was a warrior bookworm?' |
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| Marcus Tanner reveals how he uncovered the gripping subject of his new biography: the warrior, book-worm and friend of Dracula known as the Raven King |
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| Marcus Tanner: correspondent and chronicler of worlds in various states of dissolution |
| By Murrough O'Brien |
| Sunday, 20 April 2008 |
| Carantha's observation: |
| In his last days, his conquests behind him, his glory assured, Matthias Corvinus ("the Raven King"), the 15th-century ruler of Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Transylvania, eastern Austria, Slovakia and Ruthenia, decided to build a library. Perhaps this great devotee of astrology was showing some prescience: perhaps he knew his greatest legacy would not be his conquests or his castles. His library, said to rival even the Vatican's, was a wonder. But of the 5,000 volumes he is said to have amassed, only 214 remain. What happened? The Turks happened. What was not squandered by his heirs or destroyed by pillage ended up in Europe's cultural cemetery, Constantinople, and was grubbed up by Europe's grave-robber, Venice. |
| Corvinus was the son of Janos Hunyadi, the great Transylvanian crusader in the wars waged to contain Turkish expansion in Europe. He had a lot to live up to, but was given a lot to trade off. He halted the Turks in Bosnia, humiliated the Holy Roman Empire, built palaces, forged alliances, was hailed as the saviour of Christendom, and died without a legitimate heir. Forty years after his death, the Turkish invasion of Hungary brought all his achievements to dust. All but one. |
| It's a deeply stirring story and Marcus Tanner, the Balkan correspondent at The Independent from 1988 to 1994, responds to it with an engaging mixture of passion and breeziness. Awarded the MBE in 1995 for services to literature, he has written on the Celts, Ireland, Croatia and Latvia, but with The Raven King, he has hit upon a fascinating yet little-known true-life tale that has all the hallmarks of gripping fiction. |
| In Central Europe, at least, Matthias Corvinus possesses the combined mystique of Pericles, King Arthur and Father Christmas. "I had no notion of the library I only knew of him as a person that children sang nursery rhymes about," says Tanner. In Hungary, he's a philosopher king, a Renaissance sage. "In Slovenia, he's remembered as a fairy tale; he has a long beard and lives in a mountain. The cave in which he sleeps is guarded by ravens. And there's an annual festival held in his honour where they make these 'Matthias castles' out of snow. The villagers say he will come again to restore everything. When the apple blossom comes one year, Matthias will ride out. His wife, too, has completely changed. From being this Italian battle-axe, she's now this gracious beauty with flowing gold hair." |
| That this great figure of folklore should have been in life a profoundly modern and Western figure is not the paradox we might imagine, for Matthias was a great unifier of nations. After the failed uprising of 1848-9, a bitter, humiliated Hungary re-invented him as a Magyar patriot (that he was part- Romanian was ignored). Now there is some hope that his true status will be restored. |
| "He looks both forward and back," says Tanner. "You don't want to exaggerate the extent to which he was a modern European. But in a sense he was. Hungary then was amazingly confident and progressive. It wasn't based on one nationality at all. There were no anti-Semitic purges. No wonder he was beloved by Jews: they serenaded him in the city." This can be seen as a moral and intellectual victory over unpropitious origins. "He transcended his background. He was capable of retaining what he wanted from his roots without being encumbered by them." |
| This paragon of tolerance and magnanimity had some unlikely dinner guests Vlad "the Impaler" Tepes (perhaps better known now as Dracula) being one. When I suggest that Matthias kept him as a sort of anti-mascot, a lightning rod to draw off divine wrath, Tanner hits me with an astonishing fact. "For an awful lot of what we know about Dracula, Matthias is the source, and he had a wicked sense of humour. There was the papal nuncio sitting there and Matthias would be saying: 'Of course, I haven't told you: he puts babies on spikes, he really enjoys cutting pregnant women to pieces and stuff.' Now the papal nuncio was writing this all down. I think Matthias got a real buzz out of that... he obviously didn't take it seriously. After all, he allowed his own cousin to marry Dracula... Matthias could say he had a Dracula at the end of the garden." |
| Any student of Balkan politics must enter a menagerie of contending national myths. In his time as Independent foreign correspondent, Tanner covered Bulgaria, Slovenia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia, Romania and Hungary, and warring claims have left him sceptical about assertions of ownership when we just don't know who arrived where first. "You'll meet Albanians who will tell you, 'Under that Serbian monastery is an Albanian Catholic church.'" |
| His book Last of the Celts showed a world in dissolution. I ask him if he's attracted to cultures whose abiding characteristic is delicacy. "True of the Celts, certainly: gossamer threads dissolving under harsh light. But with the Balkans what interested me was the question of national identity, its fluidity the incidental way in which it arises... Most people would say the Croatians and the Celtic nations were in a very similar situation in the early 19th century. Those parallels interest me." He observes that a national language was re-forged in the Balkans while it was lost in the Celtic lands. Political will in the former case had much to do with it, but there is something else. I suggest the sheer difficulty of the Celtic languages, their eccentricity from the linguistic mainstream. |
| "Absolutely. I asked a Gaelic enthusiast in Scotland: 'Why have you never considered a revolution in your spelling, to make it simpler?' The response was outrage. 'In the Balkans there were these ruthless language reforms...' It seems that just as English was imposed on the Celtic lands, so were Slavic tongues re-imposed on the western Balkans. |
| Authors in the flesh rarely reflect the spirit of their writings and this is true of Tanner. The magisterial, sometimes sombre author is hardly discernible in the jovial, puckish figure opposite me. The subject of Matthias, I suggest, must have come as a relief after his work as a Balkan correspondent. "Absolutely. I don't regard him as a saint, I don't believe he wanted to save the world. I think he wanted to rule over a very big state. He took tons of money in taxes and spent it in a way which many would regard as pretty outrageous, but I did find his story incredibly optimistic. I enjoyed writing about Matthias because I did find him inspiring. He had a profound belief in the West if you want to put it that way optimistic, always fiddling around with crazy inventions, giving everything a go. It sounds ridiculous, but writing about his death left me in tears." |
| The story of the Raven King has itself all the lineaments of epic. His family arose from obscure Transylvanian origins; Matthias brought both his family and his nation to a simultaneous apogee. Then the nation fell, and its ruler's works were levelled. Then the light of his heritage began to glow again. |
| The story of the Turkish occupation remains a bitter one, however: "You could have been a child in the time of Matthias and grown up to see the annihilation of everything he built. Everything went the churches, the palaces, even the towns. There's almost nothing in Hungary dating before 1680." |
| Tanner is not squeamish on the subject of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans: "It was a disaster. On the edge of the Ottoman empire, it was a catastrophe: whole towns deported, churches destroyed, whole histories wiped out. Further in, it was a bit better." |
| In his book, Tanner highlights the paradox that of all Matthias's works, only the most delicate survive. "I found it so odd that the flimsiest of all his creations was still around. You hold this book and you know that Matthias held this little thing, like holding a little baby, and it's still there. The journey of these books is almost biblical." |
| He laughs when I ask what drew him to the Balkans: "I was sent there!" But before he became a journalist, Tanner trained as a priest (he studied theology at Cambridge). "I was taking these evening services for four, five people, sitting in this building that had been full in its heyday. It was all a bit much. It might have been different had I been a bit older, but in your mid-twenties... I would have been a disaster as a vicar. Also, I wasn't very sympathetic! |
| Well, Marcus Tanner is certainly no sentimentalist but I can't stamp my seal on this last self-assessment. |
| Carantha's observation: |
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| King Matthias in the cave under Mt. Peca, a sculpture by Niko Pirnat (1932), which had been destroyed by a Yugoslav adherent during the German invasion of 1941. |
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| In 1962, a new sculpture was placed into the cave of Peca. It is the work of the skulptor Marjan Keric Belac. |
| Please read also: King Matthias (Kralj Matjaz) and the Tradition of the Slovenian Historical State |