Yesterday, we had an appointment with the national police in Ljubljana to get fingerprinted - the last step in getting our official visa to be here in Slovenia. The wheels of government have been turning especially slowly during the pandemic shut down. Along with the appointment, we got official permission to travel for one day, which would ordinarily ("ordinary" during the shutdown) be prohibited.
We have young missionaries in Ljubljana and Celje, and it is one of our duties to inspect their apartments regularly. So we took advantage of our travel permission to do that, and while we were with the sisters in Ljubljana we had a birthday party for one of them. Liz had prepared a wonderful cake, streamers, candles, presents, balloons, etc. so it was fun. The apartments were in good shape and quite clean, but we are learning, too, and we discovered how to solve the ubiquitous problem of the refrigerators accumulating condensation water. The drain tubes get stopped up with gunk of various sorts, and then the water flows down to the bottom drawer. We simply poked the top of the tube and freed it up.
We also pulled out the grease filters from stove hoods and encouraged all of them to put those in the dishwasher to get them renewed.
It was a fairly long day for two old people, but we had promised to take the Maribor Sisters to the cemetery to see the lights, so we did that after we got back.
It was dark, but the moon was full, and there were lights everywhere. Perfect Halloween weather, even if it was a day or two late. We were absolutely stunned at how many graves had fresh flowers. Mounds of them! And so many lights.
This is the view down one of the rows. This cemetery is huge, probably 300 acres or so, and there were lights on the graves all over it. Photography doesn't catch the vista of the small lights stretching off into the distance. We walked along looking at them and just didn't want to leave.
The history of this cemetery is interesting. Maribor is a medieval city and over the years it had several cemeteries. By the 1800's, the many had been combined into a Catholic cemetery, a protestant cemetery and a non-affiliated with an attached section for suicides and criminals. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the property was full, so they moved all the graves to the current location, and built a soccer field on the property (now the home of the National Team of Maribor) where the old one was. It is still divided, but only into two: Catholic and non-Catholic. They are about the same size: huge. And they are about full, so there is another section just being completed. I don't know if it will be sectioned off - people here aren't as divided over religion as they used to be.
We came to one that was very interesting. Sadly, I didn't get a photograph of it, but it is for Catholic nuns. It took up the space of three normal graves and an immense headstone had three sections. In the middle were the names of about a dozen M.M. nuns (Mothers Superior?). Then, on each side was a sign with a single line for each of the S.M. nuns (I assume ordinary nuns). The most interesting thing was the dates. They only had the death year, but at the top there were a couple of names per year, varying of course. As it went down to later years there were fewer and fewer, until now they are 5-10 years apart. This, of course, reflects declining interest and power of the Catholic Church with declining numbers of nuns. In Slovenia today, there just isn't much interest in religion. We are trying to change that.
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