9: Vrhnika // An Important Man and An Important Beer
It didn’t take long at all. That sentence is true in all sorts of ways, some of which I’ll outline henceforth. The decision to visit Vrhnika was a simple one, what with the promise of genuinely important beer and a writer whose importance arguably trumps the pivo. Arguably? What a silly point. Literature over alcohol, obviously.
Anyway, digression, as usual. Vrhnika is famous for its beer, famous for its moustachioed-writer, and increasingly famous for begrudgingly becoming a Ljubljana satellite town, a commuter city just 25 minutes or so from the chaos and noise of the capital city. That sentence is dripping in sarcasm but that doesn’t make it any less true. When I say it didn’t take long, I mean it literally didn’t take long to get from Ljubljana to Vrhnika. 30 minutes, max.
That statement is also true when it comes to finding Ivan Cankar, Vrhnika’s favourite son and Slovenia’s greatest ever writer, or at least the country’s greatest writer that wasn’t Vitomil Zupan. There, I said it.
I stepped off the bus and was immediately faced by a tremendous building, the sort of structure that positively screamed ‘primary school’. The school in question is named after Cankar, because of course it is, small towns must cherish those who grow beyond their boundaries without stepping over the memories that made them.
A brief but cheerful visit to the tourist information centre followed, a visit focused on the two great facets of the humble TIC; information gathering and souvenir purchasing. The former involved directions to Cankar’s house, the latter a bag of coffee and a fridge magnet in the shape of his famous moustache.
It really is a tremendous moustache, the sort of lip-tickler that the youthful dream of. Nobody dreams of growing a standard moustache. There should be a statue of it and it alone, next to the school that takes his name. Or maybe even next to the house in which he was a born, a comfortingly humdrum affair on a small hill next to the town’s central church.
But ‘humdrum’ really isn’t fair, because Cankar was the eighth child of a family on the bottom rungs of society, mired in poverty from beginning to end, a family soon bereft of a father who decided to chance his artisanal skills in Bosnia. Mother Cankar was left to raise the children, which she did, but it wasn’t easy. Ivan famously made her beg for a cup of coffee that he soon decided he didn’t want to drink, although he came to think of this as his great regret.
Cankar’s life wasn’t boring. His was an existence of extremes, of jumping from one idea to another, one political focus to another, one writing style to another. He wrote poetry, novels, essays, short stories, plays and more. He lived in Ljubljana, Vienna and Sarajevo, although it was the middle of those that shaped him. Actually, no, scrap that; it was Vrhnika and Ljubljana that shaped him, Vienna that took that shape and gave it a focus. Cankar wrote about the fringes of society, and was so beloved in his own life that he is widely regarded as the first professional Slovene writer, the greatest writer the language has ever produced.
I didn’t learn any of this from his birthplace museum in Vrhnika, because it was closed.
So off I went, down the heart of Vrhnika once more, in a style that could probably be best summed up as ‘moseying’. Vrhnika’s main street is now given over to traffic, with buses and cars heading to and from Ljubljana, work done or work to be done. Both sides of the street are littered with charming buildings, none more impressive than the imposing Vila Kunstelj, a house that looks for all the world like a villain’s castle placed in the heart of a town. The house was built by a timber merchant, unsurprisingly called Josip Kunstelj, constructed in 1910, there or thereabouts.
I didn’t learn any of this from the villa itself, because it was on the other side of the road.
All of which makes me seem like a second-hand explorer, a reputation I have no interest in cultivating. It was time to get some first-hand information, to learn history from the horse’s mouth, although I dearly hope that Matt doesn’t think I’m referring to him as a horse. He isn’t a horse. He’s a man.
Slovenia’s craft beer industry is booming. Say it loud, say it proud. Pelicon, Loo-Blah-Nah, Mali Grad, Bevog, Reservoir Dogs, the list goes on and on, but the list begins with Human Fish. Founded in 2008, the country’s first craft beer was the brainchild of an Australian expat (the aforementioned Matt, not the horse), originally located near Slovenj Gradec but since moved to this old dairy farm in Vrhnika, Human Fish is the gold standard in a frequently-saturated genre.
More importantly, it is a damn good pint. Fish has a delightful little taproom located at the brewery itself, a place where the thirsty can sample everything from Classic Fish to the new Responsible Fish, an alcohol-free beer that soon found itself placed number one on my list of Alcohol-Free Beers, a surprisingly long list. You can drink Human Fish beers at a whole host of bars around the capital, but the horse’s mouth mentioned a couple of paragraphs back should really be used as a metaphor for the brewery. The fish’s mouth, so to speak.
The taproom wasn’t too busy, it was a Wednesday afternoon after all, so I was able to sit and talk with Matt for an hour or two, discussing the history of the beer, the present of the country and the future of Slovenian cricket. Why the name? Well, the fish in question is Slovenia’s informal national animal, an aquatic salamander found in the caves of the Karst, actually called an Olm but known to all and sundry as the Human Fish (because of its colour, not because of its inability to form lasting emotional relationships and well-documented issues with trust and anxiety). The conversation flowed as smoothly as the beer but time waits for no man, by which I mean the bus timetables aren’t devised to match my whims, and it was time to head back to Cankar’s school and pick up the bus back to Ljubljana. It didn’t take long at all.
