Modern Maribor

Plus a few notes on the decay of European culture

I’ve been to Maribor, Slovenia, in the past couple of days—and it was very nice to be here. Streets are safe, there’s a lot of building and upgrading going on, but I noticed quite high prices, especially for gasoline, which is more expensive here than, say, in Norway.

Be that as it may, the strangest moment came when I casually strolled across the city’s main square, which features the unavoidable seasonal absurdity, incl. a rave DJ, Coca Cola Santa Clauses, and, believe it or not, not a single, well, Christmas-related thing.

It’s all booze, huts offering junk food, and vendors selling cheap plastic stuff. It was, frankly, unbelievable, but it’s also a testament to the ongoing hyper-materialisation of public “culture”.

I doubt I’ll ever get used to this kind of trivialisation and junk-ification of otherwise nice traditions.

Hence, I’ll post a few postcards from Cold War Maribor to overcome my irritation, and I hope you’ll like them, too.

Modern Maribor

Behold the main sights on these “Greetings from Maribor”, mailed in 1983:

In some ways, not a whole lot had changed from 1959, as the postcard below shows:

Of course, not everything about the late 1950s and early 1960s was as brightly coloured, as the below example also shows:

Yet the lasting impact of Socialist Yugoslavia is clearly visible, if only in greyscale:

Still, some sights never change, including the below postcard from around 1960s, which shows a view of the old town’s main square—it has now been fully renovated and look quite nice (once more):

With my best wishes from—right now—Amsterdam airport.