13: Vitanje // A Village of History, A Village of the Future
The Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies in Vitanje, Slovenia // © David Saracevic / shutterstock
Getting to Vitanje isn’t easy. Slovenia’s public transport network is more advanced and efficient than its neighbours, but that doesn’t make it any more convenient if you need to visit a small village in the northeastern corner of the country. If you were relying on the aforementioned network (from Ljubljana), you’d have to get to Celje, and from there jump on the rare buses that head into the rolling hills that accompany the Hudinja River.
As it was, I got a ride to Vitanje. Easy enough. Call it a perk of the job. Actually, visiting Vitanje was a literal part of the job, another of the five municipalities that made up the hugely underrated Rogla-Pohorje guide. Vitanje didn’t have the reputation and infrastructure of neighbouring Rogla or Slovenske Konjice, but reputation and infrastructure hasn’t stopped me before. Actually, it quite literally has, on a number of occasions, but that’s not so important here.
It was a day of Vitanje, hours spent in a small village that gained market rights in 1306, giving it 700 years of community construction and security, at least in a market-town sense. My guide was a local chap called [redacted], a convivial bloke with a keen interest in his town and all that it had to offer, despite the inherent contradictions in us starting our tour outside Vitanje. That beginning came at Beškovnik’s Granary, a 19th century farmhouse that had been restored to its former glory, or at least as close whatever counts as former glory for a 19th century farmhouse. It was a living love letter to all things traditional, a nod to a past that has plenty to teach us when it comes to communal living and respecting the land. It was also somewhere to learn how to sort ant eggs, if you’re into that sort of thing. I am not.
An early 20th century postcard of Vitanje © WikiMedia Commons
So to Vitanje we went, to explore its centuries of history, its churches, its castles. The Church of St Peter and Paul headed up the former, the so-called ‘winter’ church, the centre of spiritual existence in the area during the colder months, a mantle it passes in summer to the Church of the Mother of God Hriberca, an 18th century construction that took its architectural cues from the Baroque and its transcendence from the good book.
Vitanje also has two castles, although that did feel somewhat greedy for a small town of less than 2,500 people. The old castle (Stari Grad) was romantic but inaccessible, a combination that makes far more sense than it should, rubble that once stood as a creation of the Bishops of Krško, a proud castle that went through many different hands before it was taken over by neglect and spurn in the 17th century. Very little remains. The new castle (Novi Grad) doesn’t far much better, itself little more than a collection of difficult to find ruins and bad memories.
All of which paints Vitanje out to be little more than a pleasant little Slovenian village, a sleepy in a good way town surrounded by hills and green, a quiet part of the world defined by community, history, trust and certainty. All of which is true, of course, undoubtedly so, but there is a square peg in this round hole of history, a sore thumb that shimmers and shines in the face of pastel surroundings. Vitanje is a village of history, but its most beloved son was a man of the future.
It might be a bit of a stretch to describe Herman Potočnik as the first theoretician of space, but I’m happy to extend my limbs in that direction. If nothing else we can give him that honour, as his life was pockmarked with misery and ended before his 37th birthday. He was ignored, lambasted even, only for his ideas to help drag humanity into the space age.
Potočnik was born in Pula but it wasn’t long before the family was Vitanje-bound, looking for safer ground after the death of his father. Like millions of others he had the misfortune of being born just in time to fight in World War I, his bridge-building expertise being put to good use, although tuberculosis saw him pensioned off in 1919. Post-war, Herman lived in in miserable poverty in Vienna, a difficult time but one that pushed the boy in the direction of his calling; rocket science.
Herman Potočnik // © WikiMedia Commons
Saying that, the emphasis should be on ‘difficult’. He was always ill, he never had any money, he never had a job and he never married. He spent his years living with his brother, working on the single book that he published in his lifetime, a book called Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums: der Raketen Motor (The Problem With Space Travel: The Rocket Motor). 188 pages of planning, paving the way for humans to eventually live in space, plenty of whom would live in a space station that would orbit the Earth. It was all space architecture and exploration, full of detailed illustrations marrying wild imagination and concise science, ways to overcome gravity and to use space technology in aspects of every day life. It was all sorts of outlandish, dismissed as pure fantasy, but it eventually became a sort of reality.
But yes, he died when he was 36, his lungs finally giving up on him on a balmy August day.
Recognition took time but it came. The people of Vitanje wanted to doff their own cap in their own way and thus the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies (KSEVT) was born. The building stands out from a mile away, a faithful rendering of Potočnik’s space station, a circular concrete monolith that houses a number of exhibitions detailing both the life of Potočnik and the world he helped create, that being our exploration of the world outside of our world. Slovenia’s history of space, an in-depth look at our moon, images of Earth and plenty more fill the rooms, in a building that doubles up as Vitanje’s cultural centre.
Which of course it does, because this is a slice of the future in the very heart of a village that is otherwise a picture-perfect example of Slovenia’s countryside communities.
