(Be sure to watch the video.)
May 15, 1987.
In early evening I returned to the train station in Trieste, slightly flushed with the side effects of garlicky clam sauce and budget-friendly Italian table wine, and abruptly suffering a blow to an otherwise sanguine seaside mood.
Rounding the litter-strewn corner to an isolated side platform, there reposed a rusted, elemental Yugoslav train waiting for the ride through the karst to Ljubljana. There were only three passenger cars, and they had no frills left to give.
In 1985, my first brief glimpse of communism had come from the vantage point of a sleek Finnish tour bus bound for Leningrad. Now this unadorned vintage Balkan rolling stock hinted at what was to come during the next few weeks spent roaming the southeastern expanses of red-starred Europe.
A port and border city, Trieste’s geographical resting place was much in dispute following World War II. Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito (Josip Broz, a Croat by birth) eventually yielded, and Trieste remained Italian, which it had been for only three decades after forcible detachment from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of the previous war.
Consequently, a sizable population of ethnic Slovenes living in Trieste’s suburbs and hinterlands became Italian citizens overnight. Their friends and relatives landed on the other side of the border. Whether my fellow outbound passengers were Italian or Yugoslav was yet to be seen, although little Italian was being spoken.
They began boarding the so-called “express,” many encumbered with multiple bags, bundles and boxes. It was almost as though the dilapidated Trieste rail siding was an extension of Yugoslav sovereign territory.
The train finally began rumbling slowly to the east. We lurched toward the border, into the mountains for which the Balkans are both celebrated and feared. The rocky heights grew smudgy as the sun set, and then darkness.
At the nearby border, my passport merited little more than a glance. The visa inside was duly stamped by the youthful, uniformed guard with the rifle slung over his shoulder. It all seemed unusually relaxed, a condition not always to be repeated in the East Bloc during my journeys to follow.
The locals had it somewhat harder, and their packages were inspected closely. Once inside Yugoslavia, the train began emptying as we stopped in one small town after another. After three and a half hours, just shy of 22:30, the express that never once broke into a trot shuddered to a halt at Ljubljana’s central station.
Excited, I bounded down the worn metal steps into a warm and humid night, hoisted my pack, turned to follow the crowd, and was greeted by a full-scale reprise of an Animal House bacchanal, minus Dean Wormer and the togas.
Unsteady chorus lines of drunken young men were chugging bottled beer, the liquid streaming down their faces as they stumbled across the rails singing verses of unknown songs, with nary a female in sight.
To my right, a group of them were merrily urinating on a rail yard wall. Some were shirtless, half-heartedly wrestling. Other were projectile vomiting. Although obviously harried by the mayhem, train station personnel looked upon it with remarkably equanimity, as though they’d seen the performance many times before.
And so they had.
Later, while in route to Zagreb aboard a better grade of train, a chatty seismologist from Skopje explained that what I’d witnessed was a semi-regular occurrence throughout Yugoslavia. The revelers were the latest cohort of military draftees, celebrating their final night of freedom before shipping out to serve the motherland for two years.
Upon arrival in Ljubljana, I didn’t know any of this. Rather, standing on the platform transfixed and appalled, watching the crazy party, a pertinent question occurred to me.
Why the hell had I come here?
As throngs of thoroughly inebriated future Yugoslav soldiers milled through the debris in Ljubljana’s otherwise unoccupied train station, I found myself an object of curiosity and attention, perhaps the lone western backpacker.
It must be said that the scrutiny wasn’t threatening, and the general mood remained one of revelry. One of them sized me up and formed words that verged on the coherent: “Magic Johnson LA Lakers.”
Gingerly picking my way through the ranks of the fallen, while taking care to avoid evil smelling puddles, I scanned the strange directional signs in an effort to locate a safe path into the station’s nerve center. Two of them stood out: “Informacija” (information) and a faded pictogram of bank notes and coins.
Money was the first priority, as I’d passed from lira to dinars. In pre-Euro times, every border crossing required exchanging the previous nation’s currency into the next. In 1987, there were few ATMs even in Western Europe, much less the East Bloc. Similarly, the credit card in my neck pouch would be almost useless in socialist locales outside of special “hard currency” shops.
Back then, you changed money the old-fashioned way, with actual dollars or American Express traveler’s checks. The man behind the only populated window miraculously spoke a bare minimum of English, and was able to answer my questions.
Yes, he would cash a traveler’s check.
No, he could not help me find accommodations.
No (gesturing at the cacophony), the baggage check room was quite full.
Bureaucratic scribblings followed, and he began slapping down those one hundred dinar notes, again and again, until the pile was at least two fingers high.
Not a bad exchange rate: $100 per inch.
Public transportation had shut down, and so my search for lodgings commenced on foot. There was a chronic scarcity of streetlights, but I managed to navigate a half-mile to the first university-affiliated youth hostel listed in the guidebook.
There were cobwebbed padlocks on the door.
The second hostel defied all efforts at navigation. It was dark, the streets were deserted, I was soaked with sweat and it was well after midnight. Reversing course back toward the train station area, I made for the first standard hotel.
The night clerk eventually responded to repeated buzzing, sleepily offering non-negotiable terms of a single-bedded room for roughly a quarter-inch of my hard-earned dinar wad, or three times the rate I expected to pay in a hostel. Exhausted, I was cheered by notions of showers and linen. It was a splurge—and also a done deal.
On Saturday morning, flooded by blessed daylight, the youth and student travel bureau was easily located, and an inexpensive bunk quickly booked in a three-bed student hostel toward the city center. The weekend was free for exploring Ljubljana—sister city of Cleveland, Ohio—and drinking a few tasty Union golden lagers.
Union was more than serviceable, a malty and balanced example of Yugoslav’s beery wares. As I was to learn, so were Laško (Slovenia), Karlovačko (Croatia) and Nikšićko (Montenegro). What’s more, these examples of honest Yugoslav lagers were firmly hopped.
After all, Slovenia grows hops.
Attempts to grow hops in Slovenia date back to 1844. Saaz hops and Bavarian hops were brought to the region but did not grow well. A British hop, mislabeled “Golding,” was imported instead, and it flourished. The resulting hops, now known as Styrian Golding, are probably a derivation of Fuggle, not English Golding. Still, they have become the cultivar that is most closely associated with Slovenia. Some Styrian Golding is also cultivated across the border from Slovenia in neighboring Austria. Another uniquely Slovenian cultivar is Bačka. It has a murky background, but is probably of central European origin. Bačka was one of the primary hops of the region through much of the 20th century. Today, Slovenia has a large variety of bitter and aroma hops to offer, most of which are produced from local breeding programs.
In 1987 I quickly found the Union brewery in Ljubljana walking, but there was no program in place for tours or sampling. Instead, I bought bottles of Union, bread and salami in a shop for next to nothing, and found a park bench to host my picnic.
It has been 35 years since this lone visit to the former Yugoslavia. From May 15 through May 31 in 1987, I visited five Yugoslav “republics” that exist as independent countries today: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.
The sixth republic, Montenegro, wasn’t on my 1987 itinerary and neither was Kosovo (ethnically Albanian but part of Serbia at the time). However, during a day spent in the city of Ohrid, the presence of Albania could be vividly sensed, lying twelve miles away across the waters of Lake Ohrid.
Other Yugoslav cities I visited were Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar, Kardeljevo (now Ploče), Dubrovnik, Belgrade and Skopje. I exited Yugoslavia on the Bulgarian border, somewhere around Gyueshevo.
Even for those with a moderate grounding in European history, these place names still appear mysterious. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic country made up of Christians (Catholic and Orthodox), Muslims and Jews, and speaking a half-dozen languages in two alphabets. Over the centuries, the inhabitants of these regions were the subjects of many foreign empires, including Rome, Venice, Hungary, the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks.
The cultural kaleidoscope was calculated for sensory overload, and looking back, my time in Yugoslavia seems almost otherworldly. Naturally I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and yet I’m fully aware of how much was missed or only partially digested. In truth, I was still in travel training, learning the ropes.
However, one thing about Yugoslavia has always stuck with me. The people I met there were amazingly hospitable, unfailingly friendly and invariably helpful to this flailing American in spite of the many language and cultural barriers.
These pleasant memories made it all the sadder for me during the 1990s, amid the murderous, decade-long Yugoslav civil war, when numerous barroom discussions began or ended with someone asking me if I could see the conflagration coming, all the way back in ’87, when I was there.
No, I didn’t. Not at all.
But those men and women who’d been so nice to me—what had become of them? And the soldiers in Ljubljana, many of whom would have been called back to service? I didn’t know then, and still don’t.
It’s a melancholy feeling, indeed.
In 2019, there came a long overdue return to Ljubljana. Serendipitously, the hotel chosen by my wife for our stay proved to be only 100 yards from the hostel I booked in 1987.
It’s impossible to overstate the immensity of the change in Ljubljana; even if the city was widely regarded as well-to-do in the defunct Yugoslav context (as with Slovenia as a whole), there’s simply no comparison with the level of prosperity today.
The Union brewery abides, although it is no longer independent. Union’s major domestic brewing rival, Laško, purchased it in 2005, and then in 2015 Laško was in turn acquired by Heineken. Trying the two Slovene market leaders in 2019, it struck me that in terms of character, a Czech lager analogy is apt: Laško is Pilsner Urquell to Union’s Budvar…but in Triple AAA ball.
It’s hard to argue with Heineken’s deep pockets when you’re seated inside Union’s erstwhile malthouse, which has been converted into the Union Pivnica, a first-rate restaurant and pub, with a small attached brewing system produces new styles (from IPA to Schwarzbier) for drinking on premise.
There’s also a comprehensive brewery tour. Diana and I were the only persons to take it at 4:00 p.m. on the day of our visit, but our friendly and enthusiastic guide didn’t alter the usual 1.5 hour presentation in the least. It was informative, exhaustive, and yes, samples were included.
Dear reader, you may be wondering why, seemingly out of nowhere, the beer columnist found himself transported to such a locale as Ljubljana, long ago and far away, and became inspired to conjure the narrative.
It’s a valid question, and one I cannot fully answer, although this particular dream sequence was brought to you by a social media “on this day” reminder.
Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald from his novel This Side of Paradise: “I don’t want to repeat my beer innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
Roger Baylor is an educator, entrepreneur and innovator with 40 years of hands-on experience and expertise as a beer seller, restaurateur and commentator. As the co-founder of New Albany’s Sportstime Pizza/Rich O’s Public House (which later became New Albanian Brewing Company) in the 1990s and early 2000s, Baylor played a seminal role in Louisville’s craft beer renaissance. Currently he is the beer director at Pints&union in New Albany and Common Haus Hall in Jeffersonville. Baylor’s “Hip Hops” columns on beer-related subjects have been a fixture in F&D since 2005, and he was named the magazine’s digital editor in 2019.
