PUTTING THE LOVE IN SLOVENIA Keith Bain falls for a tall man in a tiny land

Putting the love in Slovenia

Keith Bain falls for a tall man in a tiny land.

“Pit-ooey,“ said Zlatan. “Bless you,“ I replied. “No, no. Pit-ooey,“ he repeated. It sounded like a cartoon character spitting. “Huh?“ I frowned, prompting Zlatan to write the word on a napkin: ’Ptuj.’ “You see? Pit-oo-eee!“ he said, underscoring the Slovenian love of dispensing with unnecessary vowels.

We were eating at Ljubljana Castle, up on the hill in the middle of one of the world’s smallest capitals, in the heart of one of Europe’s tiniest – and youngest – nations. Zlatan, the tall, ridiculously good-looking man I’d bumped into the previous day, had spent the day showing me his hometown, a handsome city beset by handsome people.

Unlike other Soviet Bloc countries, communism left Slovenia mostly unscathed and its historic towns and villages intact. On either side of the Ljubljanica River, Ljubljana’s quaint cobbled lanes were lined with medieval town houses. Colourful Baroque, Secessionist and Art Nouveau buildings loomed above public squares enlivened with statues and fountains, and every so often we’d spot the avant-garde architecture of the city’s beloved Jože Plečnik. I’d met Zlatan in front of one of Plečnik’s best-loved buildings – the university library, whose red-brick façade was studded with rocks that looked as if they were sliding upwards, towards the sky.

We’d met innocently enough. I’d been staring at the front of the building and Zlatan had walked out of the library, where he’d been working, and coolly asked me if I was a tourist. His

Maribor

name, he said, meant ’golden,’ and I imagined his parents had named him for the blonde mop of beautiful hair on top of his perfectly-shaped head, which rose up at the end of his tall, trim body. He was not your average librarian.

Zlatan took me on a tour of museums and galleries, and we ventured through Metelkova, an edgy cultural precinct carved out of the old Yugoslav army headquarters. Here we found the odd gay bar and a few places where absolutely anything goes. Zlatan explained that despite its small size, Ljubljana was one of the most accepting and progressive cities in Europe and actually hosts the oldest gay and lesbian film festival in Europe.

We strolled through the city’s busy market – another of Plečnik’s designs – where farmers sold plump vegetables on upturned carts alongside food stalls dispensing horse pâté and other Slovene specialities. Lunch was at a tavern-style gostilna cluttered with wine barrels, hunting trophies and accordion music. We ate medallions of deer with cherry sauce cooked to a recipe belonging to someone’s grandmother, and then we washed it down with beer from the in-house microbrewery.

Towards sunset, a funicular took us up Castle Hill where we climbed a watchtower and stared beyond the city towards the soaring ragged mountains in the distance. In the castle’s courtyard restaurant, we sat beneath the stars and ordered refined versions of classic Slovenian farm food – salads made with dandelion and slivers of calf’s liver flavoured with fennel. What caught my attention was the wine list of local vintages with unrecognisable names.

“We have at least 28 000 wineries producing 80 million litres of wine each year,“ said Zlatan in his gorgeous accent and husky voice. “Celtic and Illyrian tribes were producing wine here long before the Romans introduced winemaking to France, Germany or Spain.“

Which is how we ended up in Pit-ooey.

Ptuj was in fact an ancient town in eastern Slovenia, close to some of the country’s best-know wine routes. Founded in 977, the vowel-loving Romans called it Poetovio, grew its population to 40 000, and transformed it into one of the largest provinces in their Empire. We drove there in the morning to peek into its underground wine cellars and explore its quiet, medieval maze of one-way cobbled streets lined with Gothic-era buildings. We followed a steep path up to Ptuj’s castle museum for views of the surrounding winelands – vast swathes of manicured vineyards radiated outwards across an undulating landscape dotted with farmhouses shaped like small castles, their red spires visible amidst clusters of tall trees. We spent the night in a lovely hotel filled with antiques and creaky floors, squashed together in a bed that we never got round to sleeping in.

From Ptuj, a short drive east took us to Ormož, where we turned north onto bucolic backroads that threaded through terraced wine farms draped across hills straight out of The Sound of Music. We stopped in Kog, a speck of a town near the Croatian border to sample local cultivars like laški rizling, muškat otonel, traminec, and a smooth, dry white made from a varietal called šipon. Zlatan explained that the local name Festively Illuminated City

Lake Bled

Ljublaja postman

derived from a linguistic misunderstanding. When Napoleon’s soldiers occupied the area, they praised the wine, saying “C’est bon! C’est si bon!“ Locals, as ignorant of French as I was of Slovenian, heard “Šipon! Šipon!“ and the name stuck. Across the border, in Hungary, they call it something else.

From Kog, we hopped onto the Jeruzalem Wine Road, centred around a hilltop village supposedly named by crusaders who stopped there en route to Jerusalem in the 12th century. Finding good food and sublime wine, they promptly abandoned their journey and settled down, declaring “This is our Jerusalem!”

We stopped, too, repeatedly – often it was simply to stare in awe at the steep vine-covered hills.

At Ljutomer, just north of Jerusalem, we turned west and drove to Dveri-Pax, a wine estate outside Jarenina village. “Benedictine monks from Admont Monastery in Austria started making wine here as early as 1139,“ said the guide as we were escorted down a chestnut avenue to the renovated 14thcentury tasting cellar. The monks had reclaimed their land after denationalisation and after many long years were once again producing world class vintages from naturally-grown, handpicked grapes, and storing up 300 thousand litres of the stuff

Ljubljana Bled dawn

in their new state-of-the-art cellar, said to be Slovenia’s most sophisticated.

Slovenia’s second-biggest city, Maribor, was a few minutes away. Backed by the green-sloped Pohorje Mountains and garlanded by more wine-growing hills, it evolved as a prosperous market town in the 13th century, and even after the Second World War clung on as a stronghold of old, wealthy Slovenian families who had flourished under Habsburg rule. It was a pretty town on the surface, but got really interesting below ground. Behind Maribor’s castle was the entrance to the Vinag wine cellars, situated seven metres beneath the city where they provided storage for up to five-and-a-half million litres of wine. They stretched for two-and-a-half kilometres and were cool, dank and covered in black mould which the guide said was an indicator that both temperature and humidity were at their optimum.

We headed for Lent, Maribor’s riverside promenade, bristling with sociable bars and cafés and home to the world’s oldest living grape-producing vine, purported to have lived more than 400 years.

Dinner was at Toti Rotovž, a restaurant in the former city hall with a massive subterranean cellar through which Hitler once escaped from a mob of enraged locals. We feasted on wild boar and sour cherry strudel washed down with a feisty bottle of Jeruzalem-grown šipon, and then raced to our hotel where we exhausted ourselves in another all-night outpouring of affection.

“Where to next?“ I asked Zlatan in the morning.

Ljubljana Central Market

Dunking Devils “Bled,“ he said.

Astonishingly, Bled was pronounced precisely the way it’s written, but the name hardly encapsulated its beauty. In the morning, a two-hour drive northwest ended on the shores of enchanted Lake Bled, around which spread a small resort town. Reflected in the lake’s mirrored surface were the craggy, snowcapped peaks of the Karavanke Mountains and Julian Alps. Swans drifted across it while oarsmen ferried awed tourists in flat-bottom pletna boats. Overlooking the lake on a high rock was a thousand-year-old castle, and in the centre of the lake was a tiny teardrop-shaped island with a church bell tower poking through the trees. Presernov Square Dreznica Paolo Petrignani

Cobblers Bridge

We parked and wandered down to the water’s edge where Zlatan promptly stripped down to his shorts, revealing the tall, toned, beautiful torso that had filled me with such desire these last few days. “Now we swim to the island and ring the bell,“ he said, tossing his clothes in a heap alongside a sign that expressly forbade swimming across the lake.

“Are you sure?“ I asked, tentatively unbuttoning my shirt as I squinted towards the distant island, and pointed at the sign.

“Pit-ooey!“ he said, this time letting an exaggerated spitting sound roll off his tongue as he waded in. “That warning is only for straight people. Get in.“

So I did.