Slovenia Links
I found this letter I had typed to someone, here I have edited it and posted it for what its worth.
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5/29/97
Tonight I called a Slovenian Research Center there on Eddy Rd, I thought I would get a machine listing it's services but instead a woman answered. She put her husband on the phone and we talked for 90 minutes, mainly he talked. He was a professor in New York for 23 years and finally came to Ohio and taught at Ohio State, he has also written several books on Slovenia. anyway, he told me that the name Gerbic is really spelled Grbec in Slovenia, and that the name originally meant "hunchback". he also told me that there are many famous Grbecs still in Slovenia, several entertainers and a famous physician. This one doctor was the physician to the German Keiser.
He also gave me a long list of books to read, and a phone number to call for the Slovenian Woman's Union. Boy, there is a lot of information out there. He explained that in the years of 1912-1935 many famous American writers were writing very bad things about the Slov. people, depicting them as almost not human. One of the authors was called Fairchild. This was another reason why we lost so much of our culture, as people were ashamed to mention it. The Austrian govt. tried very hard to Germanize our people, changing name spellings and name places, to more German sounding names.
He explained that the Slovenian language can be a difficult one to learn, but once you master it, it sets the foundation for so many other languages.
The name Antone is often called Tone with a accent on the E. When you want to call an Anton by a affectionate term you say Toncek which means "little Tony". I seem to remember my Father telling me that was his nickname.
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Very interesting site on Slovenia
http://www.ce-review.org/01/6/pozun6.html
For the bulk of its history, the Italian port of Trieste was an incontestable part of Central Europe as the Slovene center called Trst, within the Austrian empire. After changing hands several times in the past century, the city fell firmly under Italian control in 1954, though it remains home to a sizable Slovene minority.
Until relatively recently, this corner of Italy was decidedly Slovene, not Italian. The 1911 census showed that almost 30 percent of the population of the city of Trieste was Slovene, while almost 95 percent of the rural areas surrounding the city were inhabited by Slovenes. In fact, at this point, Trieste was home to the largest urban Slovene community in the world, far ahead of Ljubljana and Cleveland (United States), the second and third largest communities.
Today, the total population in the north-eastern Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region of Italy is 500,000, and only 20 percent is ethnically Slovene. In the much more urban province of Trieste, Slovenes number just 49,000 out of a total population of 300,000.
In the past, the minority has been able to use the relative strength of Yugoslavia as leverage against Rome, but since Slovene independence, the situation has been much more precarious. Slovenia alone is no match for the strength of the former Yugoslavia on the international level, but the country has been doing all it can to support the minority
http://www.slovenia-tourism.si