Slovenia Declares Independence: June 25, 1991
1991 · event
On a June evening in Ljubljana, a nation of two million declared its independence. Ten days of war followed, brief, but real, with real names on the memorial stones. Every Slovenian family remembers where they were that summer.
The declaration came in the evening; by morning, the tanks were on the roads. The war that followed lasted ten days and cost seventy-six lives, short enough that the world barely noticed, real enough that every Slovenian town has a plaque.
On the night of 26 June 1991, on Republic Square in Ljubljana, the new flag rose while the poet's words from Zdravljica, written 143 years earlier, became the anthem of a state Prešeren never lived to see.