16: Dol pri Ljubljani // Following in the Footsteps of Erberg and Vega

The birthplace of Jurij Vega in Zagorica, Slovenia // © WikiMedia Commons

I’ll cut right to the chase; I was taken in by an old lady for coffee with her family, an old lady who found me looking somewhat lost somewhere in Dol pri Ljubljani. That is an achievement in itself, what with Dol being a tiny village of 200 or so people not too far from Ljubljana, a logical settlement just a metaphorical stone’s throw away from the confluence of three rivers.

There isn’t a huge amount to see either, in truth. The ‘200 or so people’ of that previous paragraph should have given that away. Dol pri Ljubljani was once a bustling town of trade but the bustle has gone, replaced by the tranquillity of the Slovenian countryside. That isn’t a bad thing, far from it. There are few things as enveloping as the tranquillity of the Slovenian countryside.

All good and well, but I was in Dol pri Ljubljani to fill a tourist guide, so I needed something to look at, something to write about. There are only so many ways to write ‘tranquil’, after all.

Which is where the old lady comes into it all. I was struggling to get to grips with this tiny village and decided to ask the next person I saw, making the assumption that this mythical person was going to be familiar with the village. I also made the assumption that they were going to speak English. 

This old lady didn’t speak English but she seemed to get the gist of what I was asking her or at least the language in which I was. She beckoned me towards her house, an unfortunate choice of phrase but the only one available to me at the time of writing, where she sat me down in the kitchen and made a brief phone call. 10 minutes and a cup of coffee later, her 14-year-old granddaughter had arrived, ready to tell me all about Dol pri Ljubljani. 

That’s how it works, truth be told. If you need something, ask. If the person asked can help, they will. If they can’t, they’ll find someone who can, and they’ll make a nice cup of coffee in the meantime. 

A postcard of Dol pri Ljubljani // © WikiMedia Commons

So, Dol pri Ljubljani, what have you got? An abandoned manor, mainly. It was constructed in 1540 and went through the hands of wealthy noble after wealthy noble before being taken over by Jožef Kalasanc baron Erberg, a Ljubljana-born patron of the arts who lived the actual dream. 

Being born into tremendous wealth helps, but plenty of men are born into wealth and use that privilege for mediocre means. Most of them, really, but not Erberg. He was a prodigiously clever chap, intelligent enough to make a name for himself in Vienna and get a plush job teaching the children of the Emperor, but such things can’t last forever. Erberg’s wife fell ill, his kids the same (he had seven of the things), and it was back to Slovenia for the baron. He moved into the manor in Dol pri Ljubljani, often referred to as the Versailles of Carniola. For the rest of his life, he rarely left. 

Erberg spent his excess money how we should all spend our excess money; collecting books and cultivating a fantastic garden. He wrote books about culture. He lived the actual dream, all in a magnificent mansion that now lies in ruins.

Despite rarely leaving Dol, Erberg needed to keep up to date with events around the empire, so he hired a man to keep on top of all of this and write letters to his mansion in Dol, detailing everything from weddings in Prague to cholera in Bosnia. The man was magnificently-named Franz Franz and he wrote some 1800 letters to Erberg, several a week over an eight-year period, a collection that gives tremendous insight into pre-revolutions life and thought in Slovenia. 

But that doesn’t lessen the ruins of his mansion. The Partisans burned it to the ground in 1944.

The story of Jožef Kalasanc baron Erberg was something, but the wealthy baron wasn’t even close to being Dol’s most famous son. Not even close. Not even close to being close.

Jurij Vega was born Jurij Bartolomej Veha, a farmer’s son in a little village called Zagorica. An intelligent child, Jurij’s family had no interest in indulging the young man’s desire for further education, so he left the village in search of something more, something better. He found the Jesuits, embarking on a lifetime of education and academic excellence that hit great heights but ended in a horse-related argument. Vega became one of the region’s great engineers and mathematicians, a major voice in reforming ballistics and technical education, and a man who calculated logarithms to the 10th decimal. That’s right, the 10th decimal! 

I’m not going to pretend that I know what that means, but it definitely meant something. Jurij Vega was the type of person who couldn’t find good enough textbooks so he decided to write his own, a man who asked to be sent to war once Austria found itself doing battle in the late 1700s, albeit to make calculations while cannonballs flew over his head. It was Vega’s work that helped the Austrians take Kalemegdan Fortress (Belgrade) in 1789, the same year he managed to calculate π to 140 places, a record at the time. He returned to teaching in the years after the war but the lure of the battlefield was too strong. Luckily for Vega, the French were up for a scrap. That’s as good as it all got, really, and France consistently smashed Austria in battle. Vega himself was involved in many individual victories, but it was frequently a case of winning the battle but losing the war.

Worse was to come. In 1800 Vega lost both his wife and his daughter (to death, he didn’t just lose them somewhere). Two years later, Vega lost himself, going missing on September 17 before his body was found a few days later. Rumour has it that he was murdered by a miller during a potential horse transaction, but the likely reason for his death is that most mundane of ways to go; an accident.

Vega’s life is remembered in and around Dol with a trail, an educational path that snakes through verdant nature, in typical Slovenian fashion. Did I make the trail? I did not, but I did manage to head back the old lady for another cup of coffee.