Politicalness of a Tree: Planting of Memorial Trees and Political Treescape in Slovenia between 1879 and 2021

Project code: Z6-70204

Description: Trees are not only decoration and raw material for processing wood, but throughout history they have also been a symbolic place to which mystical and religious roles have been attributed. Since the French Revolution, a new, political significance of trees has been established in Europe. They began to be planted in honor and glory of political leaders, important nation-building events and common values ​​promoted by the states. In today’s Slovenia, despite numerous political upheavals in the 20th century, it is possible to observe the continuity of the initiatives of ritual planting of memorial trees. The roots of the initiatives extend from the trees in honor of the Habsburg monarchs under Austria-Hungary and continue to the interwar parallel planting of commemorative linden trees in memory of the Yugoslav king Aleksandar Karađorđević and the brother of the Italian duce Benito Mussolini. During the time of socialist Yugoslavia, there was a large-scale nationwide campaign to plant groups of 88 trees in memory of Josip Broz – Tito, and after Slovenian independence, linden trees were planted en masse across the country as a Slovenian symbol. The planted trees form a branched network that marks the Slovenian landscape to this day.

Project goals:

1. Documenting and preparing a list of political memorial trees in Slovenia from Austria-Hungary to independent Slovenia, between 1879 and 2021.
2. Placing the planting of political memorial trees in the wider Central and South-Eastern European context with the aim of conducting a comparative study of the general common characteristics and peculiarities of Slovenian memorial trees.
3. Analysis of the characteristics of ceremonies at the planting of memorial trees and the organizers of these events, with an emphasis on the question of whether the planting was a phenomenon organized “from above” or initiated “from below”.
4. An attempt to reconstruct the attitudes that the public had towards commemorative trees, with an emphasis on tree vandalism as a form of political protest.
5. Review of the (dis)continuity of the public memory of existing and removed memorial trees with an emphasis on preserving the memory through several state formations and political ruptures in the 20th century.