History, theirs and ours

I love the historical aspects of tourism. It is hard for me to pass a museum, old edifice or monument without stopping. I’m the guy who irritates his children by holding up the whole family while I read every word of the historical marker.

But the history I enjoy most in my travels is the history that comes from experiencing the places and people we visit.

Cecile and I recently had a guided tour of the current exhibit at the Museum of the Press in Ljubljana. The exhibit - which coincides with the 60th anniversary of the national newspaper Delo -  displays a remarkable collection of newspaper front pages that reflect key events in recent history.  The front pages from the decades appealed  to my love of history. I could follow the headlines of the history of Slovenia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the socialist era as part of a cobbled-together Yugoslavia and on to modern independence as a small but intriguing country.

Because the exhibit's focus is international, I also rediscovered newspapers from the U.S. and beyond that I know well and stories that were part of my life both as a journalist and a citizen.

The joy of joys in our tour, however, was our reunion with the man who assembled the collection: Ali Žerdin.

In the U.S., we'd say Ali Žerdin and Tadeja Jelovšek are one of the power couples of Slovenia. Both have Ph.D.s and both are well-known in their professional circles. Tadeja is an appeals court judge, currently on special assignment directing the Slovenian Judicial Training Center, which offers continuing education for the country’s judges, prosecutors and court officials. Ali is an author, pundit and the well-known editor of the Saturday political and cultural special section of Delo, Slovenia’s leading newspaper. My students here are far more impressed that I know Ali than they are of any American journalistic notoriety I tried to brag upon.


But to us, they are just two of the most generous people you could call “friends.” We met Ali and Tadeja through her sister, Urska Jelovšek Lenart, who at the time was a student advisor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Urska introduced us to the you’ve-got-to-experience-it to-believe-it Slovenian tradition of all-out hospitality. We stayed with her parents when we visited in 2012, had an eager and knowledgeable tour guide in her brother, Martin, and of course quickly connected with Tadeja and Ali.

It was Ali who in turn introduced me to Marko Milosavljević at the University of Ljubljana’s journalism program, which - seven years later - led to my Fulbright fellowship here.

Ali and Tadeja came to our Columbia home during a visit to her sister, but you would think a friendship with minimal contact over thousands of miles and many years would be awkward. It isn’t. We recognized each other’s smiles, were equally excited by the fresh produce at the market and were eager to engage in the children-food-shopping banter of people who are comfortable with each other.

That’s exactly what I look for when I travel. I truly love ancient hunks of stone and cobbled streets from another era. But it is the people with whom we build our own histories who make travel, as Mark Twain said, “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”