28: Velenje // Tito-Approved Tourist Information
A World War II memorial in the heart of Velenje, Slovenia // © John Bills
Velenje gets a bad rap among Slovenes. It is usually described as being a ‘sad’ town, an industrial centre that has lost its industry, a once-proud model town left to fight over scraps. The town doesn’t have the quaint architecture of its older compadres, and its famous relationship with Tito and Yugoslavia hinders it further. It isn’t pretty, it isn’t sweet. Among international observers, that reputation gets worse.
I’m happy to inform all of these people that they are 100% wrong. Sure, Velenje isn’t going to take hold of the heart like Lake Bled or Piran, it isn’t going to fuel swathes of poetry like Ljubljana or the Soča Valley. Why should it? Leave that flowery stuff for other towns, for cities in need of acceptance. Velenje is a town with its own ideas, with its own creativity, with its own charms and with the friendliest people in Slovenia, at least in my experience.
That’s what I gathered within about five minutes of asking questions at the tourist information centre, housed in an exquisite building off the main road, the charming Vila Bianca. Pretty buildings are ten a penny in this part of the world, however, and my attention was always going to be drawn to the bespectacled and moustachioed gaze of Dr Karel Verstovšek, a pro-Slovenian politician born in Velenje back in 1871. Being pro-Slovenian back then was putting yourself on the line, and Verstovšek came through with flying colours.
The service at the tourist info centre passed similarly, proving once again that cities should staff such spots with enthusiastic young people that are happy and confident to talk to strangers humanly, as opposed to pointing anyone and everyone in the direction of maps. The woman at Velenje’s tourist information centre was a breath of fresh air on a day full of the stuff, a fountain of information surrounded by advice, options and recommendations. Exactly as someone working in tourism should be, quite frankly.
I asked her about Velenje, its curious reputation, the past and the future. Velenje is a relatively new city, developing into its current form in 1950 after centuries of being little more than just another town. Industry did the job, and a bevvy of towers was thrust up around town to house workers who came to work in the mines. The tourist info lady took on the rest of the story, with excitement and enthusiasm; “It took many, many workers to build the town, of course, so people were brought here from all over Slovenia. It still wasn’t enough, so Tito sent workers here from all over Yugoslavia and beyond, from Bosnia, Macedonia, even Ukraine and other places. They still needed more, so the government made the decision to release some people from prison to work here, a sort of slave labour. When the work was finished, the criminals were allowed to stay here and were even given housing and work, as a reward for helping to build Velenje, and their children live among us today. Of course, Velenje has one of the lowest crime rates in Slovenia today. If you treat people like people and not as criminals, you never know what will happen”. Yes, yes, 1000% times yes. I wasn’t in Velenje to have long discussions about the treatment of people convicted of a crime but I was in all in on this, all in I say. My new hero continued;
“Velenje is struggling today, but that is how it goes. The city was built on industry, and they recently passed a law saying the mines must close in 15 years, I think. Companies were bought by Chinese companies, who moved the work away, to China, to Bosnia. Unemployment is rising. It is good for the environment, of course, but the working people of the city are, for want of a better word, fucked”. Now, the use of the expletive might turn some off, but those same people should likely grow up and wake up to the world around them. If the death of industry continued apace, the working people of Velenje may well find themselves on the wrong end of all the expletives. The conversation continued, touching on Wales, history and more before it was time to take my leave and wander around Velenje.
The simplicity of an efficient tourist information centre is not rocket science, but so many towns really struggle on this front. The advice is that that a child could follow; staff your centres with positive, enthusiastic people, who speak the popular languages of the world. They certainly don’t need to speak all of them, but a basic command of English and German is a must. In any other country, this might be asking too much, but Slovenia isn’t any other country; this is a place teeming with multi-lingual young folk who love their towns and have no problem telling you about it. Staffing a tourist information centre with disinterested monolingual staff is little more than a cowardly and lazy act of self-sabotage.
And thus, Velenje. The walk from the tourist info centre to the town’s main square was a short one, aided by a convenient underpass that did a fine job of shielding my skin from the sun, although I wasn’t in Velenje to hide underground. I was there to look at one of the few remaining public statues of Mr Yugoslavia himself, Josip Broz Tito.
Not just one of the few remaining, but the tallest. It isn’t hard to find, 33 feet tall as it is, a hulking monument to a century-defining individual, a sculpture capturing Tito at his most ‘Tito’, arms behind his back, in full military garb with a lot on his mind.
If I had been visiting Velenje between 1981 and 1990, there would have been a glitch in the matrix. I was only born in 1985, after all. But let’s say there was a glitch and I was indeed headed this way, I’d actually be making my way to an industrial centre by the name of Titovo Velenje.
Why did it take so long for Tito’s name to be added to the town? Each of Yugoslavia’s republics had a town renamed in honour of the big man, but the final eight only numbered four in Yugoslavia’s early days of socialism. Only those municipalities that had been involved at the heart of the Partisan struggle were involved. In 1945, Croatia’s Korenica became Titova Korenica. A few months later (1946), Serbia’s Užice became Titovo Užice, Macedonia’s Veles became Titov Veles and the Montenegrin capital (Podgorica) was renamed Titograd. Tito Veles sounds like a flamboyant rock guitarist from Puerto Rico.
And then, in 1980, Tito died. He died in Ljubljana, of all places, a shell of a man, bereft of a leg after failed surgeries and clogged arteries rendered his left leg useless. The amputation initially held off the threat of gangrene but it only bought Tito a few months. At 15:05 on May 4, in Ljubljana’s University Medical Centre on Zaloška, Josip Broz Tito.
I used to live a five-minute walk from there, not counting the time spent in the elevator.
Immediately following Tito’s death, Yugoslavia’s republics entered a grieving contest, seeing who could show that they mourned the dear leader the most. More towns were named after him; Drvar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (where he had escaped death during WW2) was renamed Titov Drvar. Vrbas, a small town in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, became Titov Vrbas. Kosovska Mitrovica, a town of defiance and division in the north of Kosovo, became Titovo Mitrovica. And Velenje became Titovo Velenje.
All those words for one tiny part of history. I could have written about the other monuments on the main square, the sparkling new promenade, the delicious craft beer, the collection of African art in the castle or the nearby lakes, the perfect place to spend a sunny afternoon in August. But no, Tito. Velenje really does get a bad rap.
