25: Laško // Drinking Laško in Laško

I won’t waste any time. The train sidled into the train station in Laško in the early afternoon, and I thought about how weird it was that I only use the word ‘sidled’ when talking about trains. That’s more often than you’d think, too. In my brain, the two go side by side. Was there a line in Thomas the Tank Engine that used the word? Did Diesel sidle up next to Bill and Ben that one time?

That internal dialogue was precisely the wasted time I was trying to avoid. I got off the train, lingered around the timetable in search of a route back to Ljubljana, and pondered. Not much to ponder, truthfully. People only visit Laško for one reason.

I’ll raise that to two reasons. The view from the train station side of the Savinja River was a real sight to behold. Hum Hill provided the backdrop, somehow managing to slope and stick at the same time, but that hill would have been borderline anonymous were it not for the white buildings standing guard at its feet. Those same buildings reflected back off the Savinja like a mirage. All river reflections come with the word ‘mirage’.

My attention was diverted from the view by a quite absurd monument, plonked in front of Laško’s cultural centre. It was a face, that much was true, but it was distorted and elongated like a poor attempt at resizing a jpg. Was it pretty? No, but it was more interesting than 90% of the monuments in the region, through idiosyncrasies alone.

The face in question belonged to Anton Aškerc, a Laško-born poet noted for his epic works. I say Laško-born, I mean Rimske Toplice-born, but the seven kilometres between the two represent little obstacle. Actually, nobody really knows if it was even Rimske Toplice. Aškerc’s family was frequently on the move and records weren’t exactly efficiently kept, but then why attribute so much importance to where an individual escaped the womb? Huge swathes of life are built upon this random fact.

So, Aškerc. Slovenia’s most noted ballad poet? Quite possibly. Aškerc wrote epics that dealt with love and doubt, although show me an epic poem that doesn’t touch on one of those two subjects. Like many youths, he found his way into the clergy and was ordained as a priest, although equally predictable was the disapproval his faith showed towards his poetry. Were you even a turn of the century poet in Slovenia if you didn’t butt horns with the Catholic Church?

Unfortunately for the man celebrated in almost pixelated fashion, his poetry worsened as his Catholic ties loosened. He was a noted poet around Europe but was increasingly viewed as out of touch by the new generation of modernists in Slovenia. Ivan Cankar himself wrote sarcastically about Aškerc, a bitter pill for the romantic to swallow, and the end of his life was flavoured with jaundice and vexation. It was a stroke that got him in the end.

A more standard bust of Primož Trubar stood opposite Aškerc, although the orthodox nature of the book reading man was alleviated slightly by the presence of a sky blue surgical mask, a sight becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the modern age. The monuments continued with a World World II structure nearby, all straight lines and unwavering angles, topped with the classic star. It didn’t leave much of a mark on my subconscious, a fate I put down to the peculiarity of Aškerc and a keen understanding of why I was in Laško.

Which brings me back to the ‘people only visit Laško for one reason’ point made earlier. This town is synonymous with beer. It goes beyond that, actually. The word ‘Laško’ in Slovenia is more closely tied to the beer than the town, outside of this part of the country. That isn’t a knock on the town, because Laško itself is actually quite beautiful, especially on a deathly quiet Saturday afternoon.

But still, beer. They have been brewing golden magic here since 1817 when bell-maker Ivan Steinmetz set up to make the most of the area’s noted healing waters. Fast forward less than a decade and gingerbread man Franz Geyer set up what became the Laško Brewery, Yugoslavia’s biggest brewery at the time of the country’s collapse. Geyer’s initial brewery was housed in the Hotel Savinja, but the humble walls of today’s bed and breakfast couldn’t keep the beer secret forever. By 1838, it was being enjoyed as far as way as Calcutta.

Despite this initial success, the brewery went bankrupt in 1889. The future looked bleak for Laško and its beer, but that future didn’t reckon on the Slovenian god of beer turning up to save the day. Simon Kukec swooped in, purchased the brewery, and set in motion an ethos that saw Laško grow and grow.

I say that, but the brewery was eventually bought by Union (its main rival in the Slovenian market), shutting down in 1924. Not to worry, as a group of innkeepers clubbed together to start a new brewery in the town. It reopened in 1938, just in time for the damn Nazis to come in and take over, directly leading to its brewery being bombed during World War II. The brewery was actually razed to the ground by the Allies towards the end of the war, by bombs that were supposedly off target. That does make sense because no sober British person would dare bomb a brewery. Either way, it was all a struggle for the brewery, made worse by economic problems in the region in the middle of the 1950s.

With all that in mind, when were the good years for Laško? In short, the 1970s. Investment finally came in the ‘60s and the fruits of that labour paid off a decade later, although not with explosive expansion and bells and whistles. In that way, it was a typically Slovenian story, a success without sensation. Laško developed because it brewed better beer than its rivals. End of.

I didn’t learn this from the brewery itself, because everything in Laško was closed on a Saturday afternoon. I say ‘everything’, I obviously don’t mean everything, but my visit was reduced to a handful of pubs and a quite marvellous conversation with the conductor at the train station. He was adamant that Slovenia was the best country in the world, and I wasn’t about to disagree with him. He even eschewed the usual ‘Tom Jones’ or ‘Gareth Bale’ by using Ian Woosnam as the Welshman of preference. For that alone, I salute you.

It turns out that there is a lot of time-wasting involved in drinking Laško in Laško. I sat in a pub on the banks of the Savinja, ordered a large one, and sipped my way through a sunset and more, stopping only to consider the statue of Gambrinus before heading back to the train and back to the capital, where they may or may not have been more Laško waiting for me.