Euroshareholders and WFIC will be holding their annual meetings in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September 2012.
Ljubljana, the capital city, is the cultural, educational, economic, political and administrative centre of Slovenia.
Enjoy Slovenia... Slovenia is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an independent nation this year. Since the Middle Ages, the land of the Slovene people has been repeatedly absorbed by empires and dictatorships — the mercantile Venetians (hence the Italian influence), the Austrian (and later Austro-Hungarian) Empire and finally Yugoslavia, from which the Slovenes separated themselves in 1991 after a 10-day war with the Yugoslav army.
The intervening years have seen a full charge toward European integration. Slovenia was admitted to the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007. Its international airport, just outside the capital city of Ljubljana, is in the midst of a 10-year expansion that will further reveal this often overlooked Slavic country to the world. Ljubljana, a city that brims with faded Hapsburg glory, with cobbled lanes lined with medieval town houses, Baroque churches, and stately 19th-century edifices are a sharp contract to the concrete eyesores left over from decades of Yugoslav Socialism.
Though only 280,000 Slovenes inhabit their capital — including some 50,000 students — the city is full of personal and cultural energy. Posters trumpet new spaces like Kino Siska, a former cinema transformed into a performance hall and the new Museum of Contemporary Art.
A two-hour trip through a landscape of pine forests and distant jagged hills leads you to one of Slovenia's best-kept secrets on the horizon: the boundless blue of the Adriatic. Only about 30 miles long, Slovenia's coast lies between the seaside expanses of Italy above and Croatia below. During the centuries that the Austrians were occupying the rest of Slovenia, the wily Venetians were running a lucrative salt trade in Prian, using the profits to build one of the loveliest settlements on the Adriatic with townhouses that radiate with sherbet colors — peach, lime, strawberry.
Pastel townhouses disappear, replaced by stolid Hapsburg buildings with orange tile roofs in tiny Maribor, a quaint stone-and-wood city near the Austrian border. Behind them loom the green Pohorje Mountains, grooved with ski runs awaiting winter snows. Beyond those, hills and fields bloom with grapes. As the region's wine makers have emerged from slumber, Maribor's cobbled streets have begun to fill with wine restaurants and tasting rooms.
Plan on spending time exploring the wonders of Slovenia next September. |