19: Kranjska Gora // Crossing the Vršič Pass
Julius Kugy looks over his beloved Julian Alps // © Reimar / shutterstock
I tried again the next day. Not for jellyfish, not for faded beauty, not for fishing villages. For the early bus to Kranjska Gora. The Brian Molko-looking geek wasn’t going to fool me twice in two days. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Go fuck yourself. I woke up extra early, got to the bus station extra early, got my ticket extra early. Mama’ didn’t raise no fool, at least not today.
The journey was too misty to enjoy, a trembling bus edging closer to the mountains, eventually giving leave of what little lowland Slovenia has and immersing itself in altitude, passing through towns new and old before ending its run in Kranjska Gora. Some journeys are beautiful but don’t require in-depth detail. This isn’t all about bus journeys in Slovenia, after all.
A town of fewer than 1,500 people, Kranjska Gora exists for skiing. Okay, that isn’t entirely true, this place has been settled for centuries after all. A 12th-century possession of the Counts of Ortenburg, a trade route to Tarvisio, the attention of the Counts of Celje, issues with the Ottomans, a railroad in 1870. The usual boxes, largely ticked, benchmarks met with visual evidence as I wandered around. Winsome houses, languid air, unhurried streets snaking around a centuries-old church. Dedicated to Our Lady on the White Gravel, the tower of the church was definitely of the gravelly kind, while the body touched closer to mustard. It contains a few paintings by Leopold Layer, an 18th-century artist best known for beehive paintings who shares a birthday with none other than me. The last Slovene artist of the Baroque. Layer, not me. All true, but this place isn’t known as Slovenia’s most popular ski resort without good reason.
Beautiful Kranjska Gora // © WikiMedia Commons
My visit to Kranjska Gora had nothing to do with Leopold Layer, nothing to do with churches and nothing to do with skiing. I was here to get a bus. Maybe this is about bus journeys in Slovenia, after all.
The Vršič Pass is the highest mountain pass in Slovenia. It is difficult to explain just what that means because the literal description of its status does nothing. It goes up 1,611 metres into the air and then back down again, via 50 hairpin turns that aren’t bestowed that descriptor by accident. Long U-turns, tight bends, the sorts of twists that buses should be actively avoiding, especially buses that are manned by blokes preoccupied with phone-calls and talk of evening plans. Still, lemons is lemons, and if I was to die on turn 22 of the Vršič Pass, then so be it.
If I did, maybe my family would come and pay their respects at the Russian Chapel, a peaceful little church found at 1,200m, a monument to the many Russian prisoners of war who died in the construction of the road during World War I. The road is also called the Russian Road (Ruska cesta), a macabre doffing of the cap to the slave labour that built what started out as a way to access the war and has become a way to access the many hiking routes of these hills.
Russian POWs building the Vršič Pass // © WikiMedia Commons
They aren’t hills, by the way, they are mountains, towering peaks that have clouds for collars, jagged ridges that entice and intimidate in equal measure. I’d never been climbing in Slovenia, a confession that may well see my Slovene appreciator card revoked, depending on the veracity of those who read this entry. I went up Vogel once, although yes, I got the cable car, and I was mostly there to hang out with goats and drink a beer at altitude. I succeeded on both counts, but my Slovenian hiking cheery remains un-popped. There is no Triglav in my future.
In that way, I am the anti-Julius Kugy. Born into relative wealth in 1858, Kugy was a pioneer of these parts, a multi-lingual lover of the mountains who dragged Slovenian botany into the 21st century and created mountaineering literature along with it. He was a doctor of law but you can insert your own ‘Doctor of the Mountains’ quip there, the sort of guy that got a call in World War I because of his expertise and was respected enough to have his request to avoid any and all fighting agreed to. Kugy assisted the Austro-Hungarian Army during that miserable conflict, helping them get the upper-hand on the Italians in a number of skirmishes during one of the war’s most wretched battles. Needless to say, he paid more attention to writing and living than working once it was done.
Julius Kugy © WikiMedia Commons
A monument to Kugy stands on the 48th (or was it the 49th?) hairpin, a bronze sculpture made by Jakob Savinšek that lovingly looks to the west and the peak of Jalovec, the sixth-highest peak in the country and the one with the most miserable name (its moniker comes from the Slovene word for ‘barren’, if you were wondering). Kugy’s mind was anything but barren, as he committed his life to help men and women get a better understanding of the mountains that surrounded him his entire life. He wrote books, he created new hiking routes, he implored people to respect the nature that they were so lucky to enjoy, rejecting competition in favour of enthusiasm. The sort of bloke that deserves a statue in the mountains, in short.
But I didn’t deserve a statue here, nor anywhere else, and I was happy enough to survive the 50 hairpins without anything approaching a scratch, not even mentally. Sure, we only seemed to come across oncoming traffic at the bends, but that was neither here nor there. Kranjska Gora was behind me and Bovec in front, the monolithic Vršič Pass in between, a hulking achievement of willpower and prison labour.
