A pocket Adriatic state keeps Europe’s oldest wooden wheel
Slovenia, a mostly mountainous and forested Central European country of about 2.1 million, touches Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, with a 46.6-kilometre Adriatic coast. Slavic ancestors arrived in the fifth century AD; pile dwellings over 4,500 years old in Ljubljana Marsh hold what is claimed as the world’s oldest wooden wheel.
The country covers 20,271 square kilometres, mostly mountain and forest, and its climate is mostly temperate continental, though the coast and the Julian Alps differ. Ljubljana, both capital and biggest city, lies close to the middle of the country; Maribor, Celje, Kranj and the port of Koper are other urban hubs. Slovene is the official language, and the country belongs to the EU and NATO.
Humans were present some 250,000 years ago. A cave-bear bone with holes in it, recovered in 1995 in Divje Babe cave, dated to about 43,100 years ago, is thought to be a flute and possibly the oldest musical instrument known. The Ljubljana Marsh wheel shows that wooden wheels appeared in Europe at about the same time as in Mesopotamia. Hallstatt-era bronze buckets called situlas gave Novo Mesto its nickname, Town of Situlas. Rome founded Emona, Poetovio and Celeia, today's Ljubljana, Ptuj and Celje, and in 394 Theodosius I won the Battle of the Frigidus in the Vipava Valley.
Slavs moved into the Eastern Alps after the Lombards left in 568, joined Samo's kingdom and then formed Carantania and Carniola. Christianised largely by Irish missionaries such as Modestus, the Carantanians became the first Slavic people to adopt the faith. Most of the land passed to the Habsburgs in 1335 and stayed with them into the twentieth century; the rival Counts of Celje died out in 1456. Ottoman raids, a peasant revolt in 1515 and a Croatian-Slovenian uprising in 1572–73 marked the late medieval centuries.
Between 1880 and 1910 some 300,000 Slovenes, one in six, emigrated. Over 30,000 conscripts died in the First World War, many in the twelve Battles of the Isonzo, and the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo left around 327,000 Slovenes inside Italy to face Fascist Italianization. Slovenia declared independence in June 1991 and secured it after the Ten-Day War.
Source: Slovenia
