My Willage

I mentioned, I think, in an earlier post before the trip, that after a little research, and some help from my mom, I found that the village my great great grandmother emigrated from is a tiny little one just a bit south of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Not that my family ancestry is Slovenian, mind you - rather it's a complicated story of a German settlement in present-day Slovenia, in existence since the 1400's. Then, Nazi racial policy intervened, and they decided this German community would need to be resettled to a more acceptable location within Slovenia. In doing so, they displaced and killed 46,000 Slovenes, and effectively moved the little German community to a place where they were suspicious to the local population, persecuted, and also eventually killed. There's really no good in the story for anyone, and what was once the German-speaking parish of Ebental is now the Slovene village Polom.

We set out to find Polom, which looked so tiny on Google maps that I wasn't sure our GPS (his nickname is "Daniel") would be able to find it. But Daniel was a champ today - he led us directly there.

Here's Daniel leading us across the Croatian/Slovenian border

We wound through more of the beautiful scenery that we'd seen earlier in Slovenia - alpine meadows, little ponds, cows, fields of wild flowers all around. Here's the road to Polom, complete with a little hand-painted map to show th

Pokey and I on the road

We slowly came around a curve, and suddenly there was the sign, a few houses, and not much else. I thought that was going to be it, so Erin I. (always a completely willing helper) took a little video while I drove:





As you can see from the end of the video, I was excited to find that there was a little church, so we pulled over to take a look.

It turned out that house #13 was right across the road:

where lived an older gentleman who didn't speak English but understood that we wanted to see the church, and walked us over there to open up:


It was pretty amazing to know that this building, from 1638, was the parish church where my great great grandmother would have worshipped - a place she would certainly have been in many times. We let the little old man lock up the church, and headed to the tiny cemetery across the way. I had low hopes that we'd find any gravestone with the family name Gliebe, especially after all that happened. Erin and I were searching the oldest ones, at the fringes of the little plot, when I found this:

Walking down the road from the church to the graveyard

Apparently a Franziska Gliebe lived nearby until 1993....hopefully Erin I.'s friend in Berlin can help translate and I can get the rest of the story!

It was very exciting to find and strange as well...for someone who grew up with no sense of coming from somewhere else, however far back...very exciting.