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photograph by Hallie Cohen |
Bled was the site of one of
Marshall Tito’s summer
residences. Tito is looked back on with fondness by some Slovenians to the
extent that he was the twentieth century iteration of the benevolent despot, a
Frederick the Great of the cold war who adhered to the pleasure principle. From a political point of view, he was an irredentist who
created a form of nationalism that brought formerly warring Bosnians, Serbs,
Croats, Montenegrans and Slovenians together under one banner. It was not jingoism,
but an attempt to subsume the parts to the whole for the sake of peace.
Unfortunately, his legacy did not live on. The mansion on the enchanting lake,
which faces a castle carved into a dramatic rock cliff, is now the
Vila Bled and if you are lucky you will be assigned one of the rooms formerly
occupied by party apparachniks whose large conference rooms adjacent to living
quarters are still decorated in the functional socialist realist interior
design--the one thing that Yugoslavian Communists truly had in common
with their Soviet bedfellows. Slovenia is a thriving country today. It was immune
to most of the conflicts which affected Bosnia and Croatia in the 90’s. Bled is not bleeding by any means. Lake Bled’s beaches are packed with
vacationing Slovenians, Italians and even some American tourists in the summer
and the onion domes on the churches and the crowds of sun worshippers reflect the rich
mixture of Bavarian, Slavic, and Austro-Hungarian influences that characterize the region.
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