It’s an unexpectedly emotional experience to leave one farm for another. You say a formal round of good-byes and offer thanks in registers of sincerity that would normally make an American cringe. After all, you’ve shared someone’s home, and the intensity of Slovenian hospitality is such that the memory of it can make you teary-eyed months later. Silva sends us off with pots of fig jam. She’d have made sandwiches for us, too, if we hadn’t been heading just down the road to the restaurant Gostišče Pri Lojzetu.
It’s true that we’re only 45 miles from the Adriatic, but Slovenia’s coast is short and crowded. So after lunch we drive toward Govc, our next farm, along the Karst, that gigantic hump of limestone that hems in the Vipava Valley, and we breathe in the honeyed scent of flowering lime trees. Only in Europe can you travel so far in two hours. After passing through acres of hops, their pale green tendrils coiled around tall wire fences, we’re driving directly toward the Alps. The architecture has changed, too. The rounded terra-cotta roof tiles of the Latin world have given way to shingles, and weathered brown timber replaces masonry. German, not Italian, is the second language here.
Our rooms are simple yet comfortable, and look north toward the mountains, still snowcapped in late May. The cool air outdoors smells of cow pies and clover. Starlings are going mad, and there’s the distant roar of the swollen stream that powers an old sawmill just down the hill.
Marjana Vršnik, our hostess, can’t understand why we don’t eat all the delicious sausage, juniper-berry-cured fatback, and cheese she brings out for us to nibble on before dinner. She raises her eyebrows and scuffs back to the kitchen. Not that she’s been deterred. She returns with beef bouillon with vermicelli; a green salad; veal breast stuffed with hard-boiled eggs; and little mesni žlinkofi (meat-filled ravioli) served with krems. Dessert is štruklji z brusnicami, boiled sautéed curd-cheese dumplings (Marjana makes the curd cheese from the milk of the five cows in the barn next door) sprinkled with toasted bread crumbs and dribbled with melted butter, with a side of tart wild red berries.
In the morning, we drive six miles to Logarska Dolina, one of the Slovenes’ favorite national parks. To the sounds of birdsong and rushing water, we hike to Slap Rinka, a waterfall, where wildflowers brighten the grassy banks. It’s like being in a fairy tale. “Slovenia looks no different today than it did when I was a girl,” Marjana’s mother-in-law tells us later. “When you come back, we’ll make sure it hasn’t changed.”
At Ločnikar, our last farm, perched high on a hill overlooking valleys and pine forests, the garlands of peppers drying in the sun under the eaves of the barn tell us that Hungary isn’t far away. In the cheerful parlor, a curled black-and-white photo of Neil Armstrong in his space suit sits on a shelf next to an old Czech-made Tesla radio. A huge woodburning furnace covered with thick-glazed tiles is the room’s centerpiece. The owner, Marica Ločnikar, dresses the table with doilies and serves us homemade blueberry schnapps. Then she brings in white wine with salami, smoked ham, cheese, pickles, and bread; everything comes from the property, which is an organic farm. “The fields are too steep for machinery,” she explains, “and the ground is so rich we don’t need chemical fertilizers here.”
Behind the house, there’s a pretty chapel with a painting of the Madonna and Child, and lacy stencils brightening the lime-painted walls. Just off the kitchen are a thriving vegetable garden and several of the neighbors’ beehives. Chickens peck at the ground, and in the barn are cows and pigs. Marica’s husband and son are working a log with a two-handled saw.
Wild-mushroom soup starts the meal. “I picked and dried the mushrooms last fall,” Marica says. “If you come back in September, you can help me.” Garnished with feathery sprigs of dill, a platter of Backhendl (Viennese-style fried chicken) follows, with egg noodles, broad beans, and rich onion gravy. It’s farm food for a special occasion—the kind of meal that’s been served here for a hundred, even two hundred years.
In the morning, the scent of yeast and toasted cornmeal rouses us from our beds—Marica is baking bread in the woodburning oven. And breakfast has been laid out—pale farmhouse butter tasting of cream; sour curds of farmer cheese; plum jam; cheese; špek (streaky bacon); soft-boiled eggs; and warm bread. “Grüss Gott,” Marica says (echoing the standard Austrian greeting) before telling us to head to the city of Ptuj “if you want to understand Slovenia.”
Ptuj is pure Offenbach, a place where the scales bounce from tragedy to hilarity and back again in seconds. We head up an ancient zigzagging cobbled lane to the city’s famed castle. The façades below are painted the edible colors of the Hapsburg dominions (ham pink, pistachio, caramel, chocolate), and the wealth, manners, and rituals of a vanished empire inform everything, from the courtliness of its people to the grand houses on the main street, Presernova Ulica, to the way coffee is served (with light cream, heavy cream, or whipped cream). This city on the Drava River has changed allegiances often enough to know such ties are not only worthless but dangerous. So their loyalty goes first to family, then to town and region, then to others who share their language, and finally to country, with the awareness that that entity could shatter on the floor like a dropped dinner plate.
“Ptuj is beautiful, but maybe it also scared you a little,” Marica says when we return, perhaps implying that as the indulged children of the New World, we might be unhinged by the specter of unrest that haunts Mitteleuropa. She’s not only a wonderful cook but a very perceptive woman. She can certainly also perceive that we’d rather be sitting at her table with her than packing our things to go. If it’s sad to leave one farm for another, it’s heartwrenching to leave the country altogether. Marica clasps our hands and tucks bottles of her schnapps into the backseat of our car, “for the road,” and we know that it will be a long time before we’re cared for—mothered, really—in just this way again.
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