Tag: Slovenian

A pioneer of modern apiculture is Slovenian

Bees are very important to Slovenians. In the last decade, the number of registered beekeepers has increased from around 8,000 to more than 12,000 in 2020. The front sides of Slovenian beehives are by tradition painted in colours, showing sceenes of daily life or stories.

The first beekeeping teacher in the Habsburg Empire (German: Habsburgermonarchie) was of Slovenian origin: Anton Janša (1734—1773). He was a pioneer of modern apiculture in Central Europe. When the Empress  Maria  Theresia  founded  the  beekeeping  school (Oekonomie-Gesellschaft) in  Augarten (Wienna) in  1769, she soon appointed Anton Janša as the first teacher of apiculture. He learnt the art of beekeeping from his ancestors, as Carniola was known by good yield of honey and special Carniolan bees, the meekest animals among bees. His natural intelligence made him a good zoologist and an expert, whose knowledge the Empress ordered to share after his death in all schools of the empire. His methods and hives are still used today all over the world. Since 2018, his birth day, 20 of May is celebrated globally as a World Bee Day.

Anton Janša was a simple young man from Carniola  who  attended  the  school  for  copper  engraving  and  painting  in  Vienna. Anton Janša originated from  Upper  Carniola  in  Slovenia,  from  the  environment  where  beekeeping  was  very  developed, advanced, and also profitable. Prof Dr Šalehar noticed that Janša’s beekeeping method was based on the knowledge of Upper Carniolan  beekeepers. Janša lectured that the bees must not be killed, he advocated moving hives to bee pastures, he rejected the belief that  the  drones  are  water  carriers  and  lectured  that  a  queen  bee  is  inseminated  by  the  drones  in mid-air, the fact that the old Upper Carniolan beekeepers were the first in the world to discover. He wrote  two  books  on  beekeeping  in  German  language: Abhandlung vom Schwärmen der Bienen (in Wien 1771, reprinted: Wien, 1774; Grätz, 1775; Berlin, 1927) and  Des Anton Janscha … hinterlassene vollständige Lehre von der Bienenzucht (Wien, 1775; Prag, 1777; Prag, 1789 [?]; Wien, 1790, etc., issued after his death). 

Božidar Jakac (1973): Anton Janša

Partial pedigree of the Janša family has been known from several authors. Dr Ksenija Rozman first completed the family history. Anton originates on the father’s and mother’s side from solid Slovene farmhouses. Already his father had over one hundred bee hives himself. By tradition, neighbouring farmers would gather at the village and discuss farming and bee-keeping. In 1769, Anton began to work full-time as a bee-keeper at the Habsburg court in Vienna and a year later became the first royally appointed teacher of apiculture for all Austrian lands. Anton Janša is known as a pioneer of modern apiculture and a great expert in the field. He was educated as a painter, just like two other brothers: Valentin and Lovro, who were both painters in Vienna, Lovro even a professor at Painting Academy in Vienna.

The genealogy data are gathered from the registers of the Radovljica parish, which included the villages of origin of Anton Janša ancestors:

– Hraše, where Anton’s grandfather Andrej had the double-farm homestead (Grundbesitzer) and where the Anton’s father Matija was born;

– Breznica, where Anton’s father Matija moved to and made his home and where Anton was also born;

– Dvorska vas, where mother Lucija Debelak was born as a landowner’s daughter and where the eldest beekeeper’s sister Neža was born. 

There were nine children in the family of father Matija (1683 –1752) and mother Lucija (1705–1781): Neža (1729), Polona (1732), Anton (1734), Uršula (1734), Janez (1738), Jakob (1741), Marija (1744), Valentin (1747) and Lovrenc (1749). Unfortunatelly, there are no known living descendants of this family.

As parents both originated from well situated agricultural families, they could buy their own land, built a house with barns and lived also out of selling honey and other apiculture products. This was quite an advantage, as in this period of feudalism a majority of farmers were still not owners of the land, but peasants working on the landlord’s land and may not freely move anywhere. 

When in 1752 the father Matija died, his eldest son Anton (18 years old) took care over his beehives and helped his mother in raising the family. They kept painting in the barn, until Anton Janša and his brother Lorenz went to Vienna in 1766. Anton brought with him 16 hives with Carniolan bees, which served as initial population for later dissemination all over Austria and Hungary. 

Sources:

Rozman,  Ksenija (1973) Rodovnik čebelarja in slikarja Antona Janše.- Slovenski čebelar 75(1973)3, s. 67-72.

anton_jansa_pedigreeDownload

Source: Šalehar, Andrej (2017) Anton Janša [Elektronski vir] : biografski in bibliografski mejniki.- monografija Rodica : samozal., dLib

Slovenian Historic Records in Latin and Old German

Despite Slovenians got their state already after the First World War (1918) in the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, Slovenia was not independent state until 1991, after her split from Yugoslavia. As Vatican was one of the first states that internationally recognized the newly created independent state of Slovenia in 1992, Slovenians will forever remember the Pope’s words in Slovenian at the occasion of his visit in 1996: “Papež ‘ma vas rad!” (“The pope loves you!”). Pope’s John Paul II visit was devoted to celebration of the gained independence of the Slovenian state and to commemorate the 1250th anniversary of Christianity among the Slovenians.

In 8th Century Slovene people start loosing their independance first under Franks, then under the German Holly Roman Empire. This influenced also the culture, including the langugae use. The Freising Manuscripts are known as the earliest document of Slovenian culture, created in 10th Century. These prayers are the earliest preserved writings in Slovenian, as well as the earliest Slavic texts, written in the Latin alphabet. ‘Monumenta Frisingensia‘ (can be listen and read online in translation from early Slovenian into five languages, including modern Slovenian) have documented the use of Slovenian langugae in Christian liturgy in Upper Carinthia, which belonged to the Freising diocese. Later the liturgy was hold everywhere in Latin as this was the official European langugae.

This means that general public still spoke Slovenian langugae, but official languge of nobles and the rulers became first Latin and from 12th century the German. Dictionarium quatuor linguarum is a 16th-century book by the German polymath Hieronymus Megiser that includes a multilingual dictionary with German, Latin, Slovenian and Italian vocabulary. While a large part of Europe in the 16th century adopted a humanistic cursive (“Latin” script, antiqua) as the dominant font, the duality between the “German” and “Latin” fonts was maintained in Central Europe until the begining of 20th century. So the archive documents could be found in Latin and German also for Slovenian origin. While the Latin records are easy to read, a German handwriting is more demanding and requires skilled genealogyst or translator. In both cases basic vocabulary needs to be learnt to understand written information, for example an occupation.

Despite all these historic records in German, and information at the imigration documents, that passanger’s state of origin was Austria, your ancestor may be of Slovenian origin. If you start discovering this by your genetic matches in Slovenia, do not hesitate to contact them – in every family you will find somebody, who speaks English.

Many Americans imagine Slovenia as an eastern communistic country, close to Russia. Which is far from truth. Firstly, Slovenia has a Central European geographical position, and secondly, her communistic party split from Russian policy soon after Second World War. As Slovenia was one of the six Yugoslav republics, certain level of self-governement was retained. For example, Slovenia got her first constitution in 1947. Nowadays we can read legislation and use Slovenian langugae in all official procedures not only in the Republic of Slovenia, but also in the institutions of the European Union. Whether this is a guarantee that a language spoken by 2 million of people will survive in globalised world or not, we can not say.

What is worth mentioning, the Slovenian origin means ethnicities rooted in the geographic regions in Central Europe, where Slovenian speaking people have lived in the past millennium and have been using various Slovenian dialects (Ramovš, 1931).

slovensko-poreklo-grboslovje

Territory of Central Europe in Austria-Hungary Empire with Slovenian names of counties and towns.