Old Vines and Swallows’ Tails: A Trip to Maribor

[Jubal]

Old Vines and Swallows' Tails: A Trip to Maribor



The train, my fourth of the day, pulled into the sunlight of the train station. I had, rail by rail, watched the hills of Austria wind by, the crags of the Semmering pass and the orchards of Steiermark. I could in some ways have been forgiven, in the last part of the journey, for wondering if I had left: for the rolling hills and orchards were still familiar, the woods and valleys just as green. In a certain historic sense, I had not left Styria at all. But the signs at the station were in a Slavic, not a Germanic language, and the feel of the city just that little bit more relaxed, less neatly put together, than I might have found an hour or two northwards. I was in South Styria now, in Slovenia, and I had just arrived in Maribor.

Whilst Andrej Sapowski used the name in the Witcher setting as the second city of Temeria and home of the sorceress Triss Merrigold, the very much real Maribor is the second city of Slovenia. Its links to the marks and marches of the south-eastern Frankish empire, and later the Habsburgs, are betrayed by its original name of Marchburg. Maribor is a nineteenth century romantic Slovenisation, one that only really took off after being given a reverse etymology of mar i bor (to care and to fight for) in a song by prominent Slovene nationalist Lovro Toman.

Baby swallows in a willow-tree by the Drava river

The way into central Maribor from the station passes the charmingly retro-futuristic bus station and a few more modern blocks before one emerges into the almost-familiar streets in the style of many a former Habsburg provincial centre. Upon finding my accommodation, one of the first things I noticed was that the building's outer hallway had numerous piece of paper taped to the floor. Then I noticed that said pieces of paper were covered in bird droppings. Looking upwards, the unmistakeable neat round shapes of swallows' nests were huddled in the corners.

I did not have to wait long to see the nests' inhabitants either: walking down to the river Drava, the branch of a weeping willow was laden with the shiny blue coats of fledglings awaiting food, calling loudly for their parents to return from looping flights across the water. I have never been in a place quite so full of swallows and their cousins: the centre of Maribor has house-martin nests under many a building overhang, whilst over the river and up in the vineyards the barn swallows themselves dance and loop. It is perhaps strange that watching swallows should be so restful – they are, after all, in constant motion – but perhaps the illusion of calm in ever-whirling movement is part of the trick.

The river-side area of town, known as Lent, offers a pretty tiled-roof sweep of views up into town, and the wide Drava beside. A road and some parking cuts between the front of shops and cafes and the river itself, so besides the old water tower (on which more later) and one restaurant actually located on a boat (which I didn't try this time) there is mostly a gap between the 'waterfront' locations and any actual water, which is arguably a pity. Some waterfront buildings used to exist but were damaged after the 1967 damming of the river – perhaps most notably the Maribor Venice, one of the main landmark pubs on the shoreline that awaited timber rafters in years past. The area is still beautiful despite the waterfront having taken a long step back from the water, and the cafés and bars here seem to have no shortage of business. Here, too, is one of the main tourist attractions of Maribor, the world record holding oldest grapevine which grows up the front of the Old Vine House, now a small museum and wine shop.

Maribor Cathedral, dedicated to St. John the Baptist

Looping round through the middle of town, I headed by the main square and up to briefly poke my head through the door of the cathedral, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, patron of the city. Slovenia, along with Croatia, is at the Catholic end of the Balkans, with the influence of its former Habsburg masters returning it to that fold despite a brief outburst of Protestantism at the end of the sixteenth century. Dvorec Betnava, a manor house now on Maribor's southern outskirts which I didn't get to during this trip, was the centre of Maribor's Protestantism, with its then-owner Wolf Herberstein supporting the construction of a chapel and school for the Protestants starting in 1587. The counter-reformation ultimately caught up, and the Catholic cathedral outlasted its challengers sufficiently well that Betnava itself is now owned by the local archbishopric.

The cathedral building itself was started in the 12th century, and is a somewhat plain building for a Catholic cathedral of its size, far more appealing to my sensibilities than the over-complex decoration and finery of many larger Austrian churches. It stands across a small shaded park from the central building of Maribor's university, the old cemetery around the cathedral being remembered only by a pillar with a sixteenth century lamp atop it. In the park stands a statue of Anton Slomšek, a now-beatified bishop who is buried in the cathedral: he took up the cultural cause of the Slovenian language in the 19th century and pushed for the bishopric to be reassigned to Maribor rather than Lavant in eastern Carinthia, which it was in 1859. He was also a passionate supporter of ecumenism and dialogue with the Orthodox Church, founding the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius as an organisation for improving dialogue between the two faiths. In Vienna, one can often imagine the non-Catholic world is a distant thing: but Maribor, connected further into the Balkans by river, has the ties and uncertainties of a city more used to being on the edge of worlds.

Passing the pretty white-painted walls of Maribor castle for the first time, I headed up to Mestni park, rounding various trees and ponds and meeting the inevitable population of painted tortoises who had, like their cousins in almost every major city in Europe, probably spread there in the 1990s. The park stretches close into the city and from there up into a valley between the hills: it is created in homage to an English country park style, moving from pavilions and open walkways to large open ponds flanked by wooded hillsides and the beat of dragonflies' wings.

I cut up through the forest from the park towards Pyramid Hill: besides the main marked route there are numerous small trails through the trees, eventually emerging to a dry meadow that, according to the signage, boasts an impressive three hundred butterfly species. This was too dry and late in summer for most of them – their most notable species, the exceptionally pretty Southern Festoon, is a springtime butterfly – but some whites and small fritillaries still lazily moved between the dry grass-stems, and views out beyond the city showed rolling hills and small houses and vineyards nestled between them. There were still enough insects left for spotted flycatchers to be sitting in the trees, which I passed under again to emerge soon thereafter at the peak.

The vineyards on Pyramid Hill

Pyramid hill itself is named for a pyramid-like obelisk that was placed there in the 1790s, a rather brief feature in the landscape but one that has stuck in the nomeclature. This hilltop was, perhaps more notably, the location of Maribor's first castle, the burg for which the city is named and in the shadow of which the town first grew. Built in the eleventh century as part of defence systems to stall Hungarian raids and passing through a kaleidoscope of families, fires, and redevelopments, the castle's thick wall foundations can still be seen crowning the hilltop alongside a Marian shrine from the 1820s. Unlike the more modern castle, a squat building in the centre of town designed to withstand early modern cannon-fire, the old castle would have offered stunning views of the valley for better visibility and control. To this day, the viewing point still provides some of the best views available out across the city. The sweep of the river cuts across the middle of the landscape, with hazy hillsides and peaks stretching out beyond the eye's grasp. Maribor itself is not the most dramatic city from above, for most of its buildings are not overly tall and have tiled rooves, meaning there are few real overhead landmarks. The sight is pretty, all the same, and the undramatic appearance might almost be calculated for a vista of peace and simplicity.

Coming down from Pyramid Hill, steep and overgrown vineyards cling to the sunlit slopes, looking too overgrown to be easily harvestable but providing the walk with a particular charm. The fact that Maribor has not attempted to cash in on the association with Sapowski's fictional world struck me again as surprising – the scene would not have felt too out of place in his Beauclair, and another of his characters besides Triss sprang to mind, through Ciri's deep association with the swallows that did deep fighter-pilot runs between the vines. If anyone feels like opening the Rosemary and Thyme Inn in Maribor, one can't help feeling there may be a market.

Food in the evening proved a little less fairytale: I had hoped to go to Romani Kafenava, a well-reviewed restaurant a little way out of the centre run by the local Romani community, but found it closed, presumably for a summer break – it will definitely be on my list if I return to the city, but was not to be this time. I eventually went to a grill place by the river and got a large bap with some characteristic Balkan cevapcici, a grilled mixed meat dish. The place was friendly enough and the food plentiful, though I was too tired to correct them when they double-charged me for four drinks rather than the two that I'd actually imbibed. It felt a successful day nonetheless.



The second day started with a trip to the old Maribor synagogue. It is a squat late medieval building, used today as an exhibition space for displays on the history of the Jews of central Europe. The current exhibition was an excursion into the life of Hedy Lamarr, most famous as an actress but also notable as an inventor and Viennese in origin. It is interesting, perhaps, that she is still thus seen as part of a sphere that includes Maribor: the Slovenian national project has not undermined a certain Habsburg heritage and alignment for a town whose very buildings on a certain level cannot help but turn their faces north to their old provincial and imperial metropolises in Graz and Vienna. One should not think, for a second, that this makes the area any less Slovene. Hitler's fascists explicitly attempted to Germanise Maribor during the 1940s, and conducted several massacres in the face of bitter opposition by Slovenian partisans. Rather, I think, Maribor is a city that holds many roots tangled in its heart, and has chosen, in a slow and careful way, to work out if they can still grow a vine worth having.

Maribor's town square, including the old town hall and plague monument

As for the Jews of Maribor, the thriving community that built the synagogue was already torn asunder at the close of the medieval period, with Maximilian I decreeing the Jews' expulsion in 1496. The building spent many years from 1501 onwards as the church of All Saints, before becoming an exhibition centre and then a museum in the later 20th century. The old Synagogue includes a replica (the original is in the Castle Museum) of the 1379 gravestone of a rabbi called Abraham. Whilst the main Jewish cemetery in the city is no longer extant, the square between the Synagogue and the nearby tower that was once part of the old walls used to be a garden which may have had burials of prominent members of the community. Today the square is quiet, and paved, and looks out over the river: a place still, perhaps, to remember.

Breakfast was next – a slow affair in which the tea I ordered was cold by the time the milk for it arrived, and drunk by the time the food appeared. The café had a friendly atmosphere, nonetheless, and there are certainly worse fates than cold tea in the sunlit central square of Maribor. After that it seemed time to head for the castle, whose museum covers the history of the region from prehistory to the twentieth century, from mammoth tusks to marquetry and glaives to gramophones. It is a pretty building, as much of Maribor is, looking out over squares to the front and side. In front of its entranceway stands a monument to Saint Florian, patron saint of preventing fires and floods: it was erected after the seventeenth century saw five major fires in the city, including three in five years between 1645 and 1650, after which no doubt some divine intervention was felt necessary. 

Not just the museum but also the late fifteenth century castle walls themselves stand testament to the fact Maribor has long perched on the edge of worlds. These rolling mountains were Roman, once, gaining a Slavic character in the early medieval period as villas gave way to hilltop fortresses. Slavic raiding gave way to Hungarian raiding as the region perched on the edge of the Frankish world, and then in the late medieval and early modern periods Ottoman expansionism put Maribor on the defensive lines protecting the Habsburgs' domains. Between the fires and the front lines, one almost wonders if the carefully relaxed feel of the city today is actually that of a place that has rarely had a moment to exhale.

Some of the green hills visible on a walk up the Drava valley

Having gone around the castle, I'd awkwardly managed to do it at about the same rate as a pair of other travellers, who I felt seemed to be giving me a couple of odd looks – concerned that they may have been worried about being followed, not an unreasonable caution especially for younger women when travelling, I decided it might be time to be elsewhere. I absented myself from the centre of town, stopped by a bakery, and had lunch under a willow tree by the river. Bakeries are quite a good bet for lunches in Maribor: far quicker than a café, and the town has little shortage of pleasant places to sit. After the rolling expanse of history – perhaps because of the rolling expanse of history – the quiet of sitting with the ducks under a willow-tree by the river was more than welcome.

After lunch, I briefly stopped by Slovenia's smallest museum, dedicated to the local fire service and located in an old kiosk by the far end of the main bridge, just large enough for a single sign, one friendly guide behind a desk, and a few shelves of old pumps and other such artefacts. It's a quirky little building, and probably easy to miss if one doesn't know it's there, but worth going into if one is passing. The bridge is worth crossing regardless, for the views along the river are well worth seeing, both looking down to Lent below and along the riverbanks to the wide green hills of the skyline.

The day's afternoon was dominated by that walk upriver along the Drava, a flat route which quickly develops into pretty views of rolling forests and hills. I had hoped to ultimately walk around a large island in the river, but it appeared to be dominated by a paid-entry swimming area pumping out painfully loud music so I satisfied myself with the riverbanks. Here, even in the heat of the afternoon, were. Wall lizards, surprisingly absent from the stone walls of the dry vineyards the day before, were very much in evidence, as were several snakes (I sadly cannot report on which species, the views never being good enough, and indeed put a hole in my trousers trying to get a photograph to work it out from). Besides the continual blue glint of branches laden with decorative fledgling swallows, there were small birds such as nuthatches and spotted flycatchers, and numerous butterflies, too. A lesser purple emperor lazily floated between tree-branches just above my head and, as I tried to get a better picture, managed to land in one of the most photographically inconvenient places possible, not that I was complaining – sitting first on my hand, then briefly on my head, before flying up into higher branches again.

A local Slovenian recipe: some štruklji at Fudo

Along the route were a range of signs and artefacts of lumber rafting, historically one of the area's core industries until the Drava was dammed upstream from the city. Rafts came down from Villach, stopping at Maribor on their way downriver laden with logs: the upper part of the river, with its fast rapids, was the hardest part of the journey, and Maribor must have been a welcome sight to those undertaking the journey in centuries past. A few large rafts in the old style still sit in inlets, and one even passed me by, with its cargo some of wine-sipping Polish and Italian tourists, with a band and a Slovenian tour guide sufficiently excitable that she was fully audible from the shore. She addressed her guests in English, of course – the lingua franca of this part of the world is tending to slip away from being German, as is happening across much of Europe.

I was surprised not to see any herons or kingfishers around Maribor. The Drava is certainly not short of fish, and nor are the lakes in Mestni park. I did, however, see some fish-eating birds that I had expected far less, on my way back to the city centre: a pair of female goosander, most of whose fellows migrate northwards to the Baltic in the summer months but who seemed to be quite happily making use of the Drava's ample fish stocks.

This was the evening when I finally cracked the puzzle of how to get good food in Maribor, by going to Fudo, a restaurant on the main square, which ran straight to my must-visit list for anyone else passing through the city. The late day slipped towards dusk, and the ground-level fountains in the main square were lit in bright colours as small children played in them; whilst I tend to prefer water-side places, the town square is very pretty in its own right. The dish I went for was štruklji, a Slovenian variety of dumpling in which filling is spread on a flat dough before being rolled up and then rolls then boiled to cook them. The oldest known recipe for them is for a tarragon-filled version written down in Graz in 1589, and these similarly included that herb in the recipe. The wine was a white, a Sylvaner from northern Slovenia, and like the food excellent, a very large cut above the previous night's rather over-scented Muscat. Fudo is definitely the strong recommendation for a place to eat in the city, and well worth the visit.

The heavy white walls of Maribor castle

I began the last morning by briefly meeting up with one of Maribor's newer residents over a late breakfast and another appallingly bad cup of tea (this one at least came promptly and with a very good bagel). I should note that I remain open to claims that there is somewhere in Maribor that one can get a drinkable cup of tea, but am yet to see any primary evidence. In any case, having left Ukraine earlier this year with the war encroaching, she had first gone to Slovakia before deciding that Slovenia, its taxes low and its economy in no bad shape, seemed like a better bet. Maribor, the eternal borderland in centuries past, is in an increasingly connected world still no stranger to change. It was protests in Maribor against an exceptionally corrupt former mayor that ultimately ballooned into the fall of Slovenia's right-wing prime minister Janesz Jansa in 2013: he briefly made a return more recently, taking advantage of divisions in the whirling array of personnel among the Slovenian centre and left of politics, before once again being defeated by the new green-liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob, who seems to have at least for the time being united Slovenia's Europhile liberals behind his new Freedom Movement.

We walked through the streets, passing the castle and, beside it, the war memorial. Maribor's war memorial, to the hundreds of partisans who died fighting the Nazis, is a strange object, black and forbidding, a central globe wrapped in something between a helmet and the embrace of a colossal cephalopod. In the middle of such a delicately Habsburg city, it is jarring – and indeed in a way it should be jarring. There is something to be said for not having the horrors of times past fade into the background, and a realisation that this was something stark, and strange, and different, something those of us who have never lived through war will never quite be able to empathise with. To say I like it as an object would be the wrong term, but I think it matters, and that is perhaps more important.

Alone again once my brief companion had headed off to deal with some bureaucracy at the city offices, I spent the middle of the day back in Mestni Park. The heat of the day caused birds and insects to flock to the remaining ditches and trickles of water: birds on offer included a marsh tit, tree sparrows, a serin, and a buzzard wheeling high overhead. Stopping for a drink at the water was a particularly beautiful sight – a scarce swallowtail butterfly, its long white-tipped tail streamers held out as it sipped from the half-dry stream.

A scarce swallowtail butterfly in Mestni park

The far end of the park offered a young song-thrush hopping along by the path, some spectacular smaller butterflies and fritillaries, and an interesting modern stone monument with a variety of different stone-carved roundels representing connections between humanity and the earth, especially places across the heart of Europe. "Maribor and its fairy beings", one of the roundel explanations notes, "hold in their hands the key to the elemental heart of Europe and thus its creative forces". I am not so sure any place can make such a claim, but if I had the key to the elemental heart of Europe in my possession, I think I could do worse than give it to the fairy folk of this little city that has drawn tranquillity from centuries of borderland conflict and kept vines growing from its oft-burned earth. I think they would look after it as well as anyone.

My last stops in Maribor – I got lunch at a bakery again – were the museum at the Old Vine House, a small exhibition but with some very pretty art of different grape varieties and some charmingly fashioned old wine jars. I have accumulated some knowledge of wine over the years, but it always bemuses me a little to find that, apparently, there is an entire order of knighthood dedicated to it (whose Slovenian chapter have a section at the Old Vine House displays). The vine outside is only exceptional if one knows its past: but its charm, like that of Maribor as a whole, does not rely on its exceptionality, but rather the extent to which it has a sense of timelessness, cultivated as carefully as the Old Vine itself. Leaving both museum and vine behind, I wound up at last at the old water tower.

The water tower is undoubtedly one of my recommendations for travellers to the city: it is a very pretty sixteenth century building, pentagonal in shape, squatting on the riverside outside the walls below the old synagogue. It contains a small wine bar, has good shade and outdoor seating, and is one of the only places on the river side of the road. It is a calm place from which to watch the birds over the water, drink dry white wine, and think on things: and if all I have seen of this planet has taught me anything, it may be that there are too few such places in the world.



All pauses in life are, in a way, illusions. Time never ceases, vines never stop growing, and the swallows never stop whirling across the Drava in summertime. That the little breaks in time are imagined makes them no less important, and in some ways no less real: and the labour and art behind a seeming stillness is never-ending. Maribor's very name is a reinvention, from the blunt naming of a borderland fortress to a nineteenth century Slovene's ideas about what the city should be, a name half the age of the city's most famous plant and yet now rooted and blood-watered into what this place represents. Maribor treats its past, I think, less as a museum and more as a garden, a vineyard in which, knowingly, the illusion of a moment can meet the illusion of forever. And overhead, gone in a moment and yet present through eternities – the swallows learn, once again, to dance.

[medievalfantasyqueen]

A very welcome read for my mind and body recovering from two separate illnesses, surely! I could see, feel and smell everything you described, and Slovenia is surely added to my list of "must see countries". I too, am surprised that Maribor did not seem to capitalise much on The Witcher, but I wonder if it has got anything to do with maybe Sapowski not giving them permission? He can be quite a bit like Tolkien when it comes to being possessive of his world, and maybe he doesn't want people to be thinking about the game when they make associations to his books, or something else along those lines. But perhaps, as the Netflix series gains more ground and more fans, we may perhaps see something in the coming years?

And that is a curious observation about the tea. You can have one bad experience with tea, but twice seems a little too much for just Maribor. Hmm.

And yes to all the lovely creatures! I remember the gossanders and the swallowtail when you shared them with me!

[Jubal]

Sapowski can't copyright the Rosemary and Thyme though, not least because the name's pulled out of a folk song My impression was that he was a lot less possessive than Tolkien too - certainly he's seemed quite relaxed about how the games and TV adaptations have played with his work from what I've seen.

And yes, I could share some additional wildlife and place photos if there's interest? There are only so many illustrations one can fit around 4000 words of text!

[Glaurung]

More photos would definitely be of interest - yes please!

[Jubal]

Right, here's (selections from) the rest of the photo album Three days plus a wildlife album, photos inside the spoiler tags:

DAY ONE

Spoiler

The wine bar at the old water tower.	The main bridge in the centre of town.
The Old Vine itself, on the frotn of the eponymous building	Another shot of the Lent waterfront area.
The main university building that's opposite the Cathedral	The grim and rather alien war memorial
A view up to Pyramid Hill from Mestni park	One of the Mestni park lakes - this one had many painted turtles in it
Into the woods on the other side of the road from Mestni park	The dry grassland at the hilltop behind Pyramid Hill's viewing point
Along the valley upriver, from Pyramid hill	The old castle ruins
Along the river from Pyramid Hill	Down to the city from Pyramid Hill

DAY TWO

Spoiler

The Synagogue	An upper floor walkway in the castle
View from the castle to the war memorial	Knights' Room in the castle. This was a cinema for a while in the mid C20th!
The exit staircase of the castle. It's very pink.	The smallest museum in Slovenia
View upriver along the Drava	An old style logging raft, but in this case kitted out for tourist trips down the river
The Helm's Deep looking Drava Dam	The town square from Fudo, with lit up water jets

DAY THREE

Spoiler

The Plague Monument	Fudo, in the daylight
The stone roundels monument, Mestni Park	Another of the Mestni Park lakes
A drink at the Water Tower	The bus station, on the way to the rail station

WILDLIFE

Spoiler

An incredibly delicate looking wood white butterfly	Some sort of fritillary on the dry meadoy of Pyramid Hill, couldn't identify this one
An awkward young blackbird, looking a bit odd due to its moult/feather change stage	Just a mallard, but a prettily framed photo all the same
A little wall lizard by the river	This could be solid swallows here, but I'm trying to be sparing. This one naturally framed by fig leaves was nice.
Peacock butterflies were fairly common by the Drava	This silverwashed fritillary is also not uncommon in this part of Europe, but very pretty
Nuthatches are a common bird across this part of Europe, but very pretty	You can see the silver-white comma mark that gives this comma butterfly its name clearly here
A rarer sight - you can just about see the indigo shimmer that gives this Lesser Purple Emperor its name here	A brief fairytale princess moment for me!
A kestrel watches over an orchard carefully	You didn't think we'd run out of swallows, did you?
A goosander pulls a fish out of the Drava river	GULP
A baby spotted flycatcher, in Mestni park	Adult spotted flycatcher
A baby songthrush, Mestni park	A fritillary - possibly marsh fritillary. Was really pleased with this photo.
One of Mestni Park's many painted turtles	Some of the fish in Mestni Park's lakes were big. That is a full sized mallard duck on the surface, for scale.
A buzzard wheels overhead	Baby house martins peer out from under the eaves of a town-centre roof

[Glaurung]

Wow - these are excellent! Many thanks. This confirms Maribor's place on the "re-visit" list

[Jubal]

I did get very good weather, which helped on the photographic front