Town and Places of Memory: the Case of Idrija

Abstract

The evolution of Idrija, the oldest mining town in Slovenia, has always been affiliated with the extraction of mercury-rich ore, which is why the settlement was shaped as an agglomeration alongside the mining shafts and objects. The extraction of mercury also brought about the flow of knowledge. Knowledge, as well as attitudes towards it, gained great importance in the town, being considered a technological capital, and one of the founding characteristics of the Idrija habitus, which also encompasses a wide spectrum of the town’s imaginarium. Parts of this are definitely the heritage of mining, architectural heritage, and non-material (living) heritage, represented primarily by Idrija lace, the Miners’ Brass Band, and culinary specialties (žlikrofi). The characteristics and achievements of the mining activity, local culture and community are all listed on the UNESCO world heritage list. The most important places of the imaginarium of the town are the restored individual important objects and machinery, and certain places which held an important historical memory and thus became the founding identity of the network. Everything that was left out, and remained unrestored, dislocated from the visual field, is slowly fading from the consciousness of the community, despite the fact that some of these places held an important historical value, and thus they are losing an identifying role and symbolic meaning to the community. The image of the town has, for centuries, been dual: the mining and bourgeois bottom of the valley and the miners’ dwellings in the margins. Such a memory of the town is slowly fading away, although individual exceptional buildings and devices, in which the heritage of the town and mining are concentrated, still stand out.