A 50-year period in the 16th century that had a profound impact on Slovenehood is to be remembered on Tuesday as the country observes Reformation Day. A ceremony is to be held in Ljubljana on Monday evening, featuring Education Minister Milan Zver as the keynote speaker, to mark the bank holiday.
It all began on 31 October 1517 when priest Martin Luther hammered on a church door in Germany's Wittenberg 95 theses that ushered in a time of reform and of the emergence of new groups within Christianity. With the advent of the printing press his ideas spread quickly around Germany and the rest of Europe. They were brought to Slovenia by travelling students, craftsmen and priests.
Important for Slovenia is that Protestantism, which grew out of this reform movement and its new ethics, reached well beyond Germany and that it promoted the idea that the worship of God should be conducted in the mother tongue of the worshipers.
This in turn yielded ideas of an organised form of education - the Protestant faith could not be spread unless people learned how to read - and paved the pay for the language of ordinary people to, for the first time, take on the form of written language.
During the second half of the 16th century Reformation ideas flourished in the lands that make up the Slovenia of today. Culminating in the first ever Slovenian-language book and a translation of the Holy Bible, "Protestantism" left a deep mark on the predominantly Roman Catholic Slovenia.
The movement in Slovenia came to be epitomised by Primoz Trubar (1508-1586), a Protestant priest who wanted to write books in a language which could easily be understood by all Slovenians. His "Abecedarium" spelling-book and "Catechism", published in 1550, gave Slovenians the first books in their own language.
As Marko Kersevan of the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts explained for STA, the achievements of the Reformation had significant cultural and national consequences in Europe, especially for small nations like the Slovenians, as well as the Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians and of course the Scandinavian countries, which became predominantly Protestant.
Sociologist of religion Kersevan sees the remembrance of Reformation Day in Slovenia as a way of preserving the cultural memory of a newly-obtained Slovenian confidence.
He recaped that the Reformation movement and the central figures connected to it - notably Trubar, Jurij Dalmatin and Adam Bohoric - gave Slovenia its written language, the first grammar, dictionaries, the first translation of the Bible and language-related public institutions.
Kersevan moreover believes the fact that the introduction of the day as a holiday in 1992 coincided with Slovenia's independence is an acknowledgment of the Reformation as a cornerstone of Slovenian identity and the country's integration in the wider European context.
Around 1580, the majority of townspeople and noblefolk in the predominantly Slovenian provinces of the Holy Roman Empire - Carniola, Styria and Carinthia - considered themselves Protestant, while peasants remained largely Catholic to express their opposition to the feudal lords.
Protestantism only acquired a large peasant following in Prekmurje, NE - the region which was part of the Hungarian empire, where, unlike in Austria in 1606, Protestantism was not banned.
Prekmurje is also the region with the strongest Protestant community in the country at the present. According to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Slovenia, their numbers stand at around 20,000.
Meanwhile, other Slovenian regions fell under the ban as part of which the Habsburg lords and the Catholic Church suppressed the "Protestant heresy" by the Inquisition, persecution and by burning books. No Slovenian-language book was published from 1615 to 1675.
Nevertheless, the period did see the Church being reformed. An important role was played in Slovenia by the Jesuits, who were tasked to consolidate faith and recruit new educated people, a reason for which an education system started to develop.
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