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Vasko Simoniti (born 23 March 1951) is a Slovenian historian and politician. Between 2004 and 2008, he served as the Minister of Culture of Slovenia, being reappointed in 2020. He is an active member of the Slovenian Democratic Party.
Simoniti was born in Ljubljana as the son of the renowned composer and choir leader Rado Simoniti who had moved to the Slovenian capital from the Goriška region in the 1930s in order to escape the violent policies of Fascist Italianization in the Julian March. Vasko attended the Classical Lyceum of Ljubljana. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, graduating with a degree in history in 1977. [1] After a short period of work in the public administration of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, he started teaching at the Ljubljana University in 1981. In 1989 he obtained his PhD at the same university and started teaching history, specializing in Slovenian history from the 16th to the 18th century. [2]
As a historian, he dedicated himself mostly to the history of Slovene Lands in the early modern period, especially the relations of the Slovene Lands and the Ottoman Empire. He has also written on problems of methodology and epistemology in historical sciences. In the late 1990s, he was the co-author, together with the writer and public intellectual Drago Jančar and journalist and historian Alenka Puhar, of the exhibition "The Dark Side of the Moon" (Slovene : Temna stran meseca) on the authoritarian and totalitarian elements of the Communist dictatorship in the former Yugoslavia, with an emphasis on Slovenia.
He first became actively involved in politics in the parliamentary elections of 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully for the Slovenian National Assembly on the list of the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia (now known as the Slovenian Democratic Party). In the presidential elections of 2002, he served as the chief advisor of the centre-right candidate Barbara Brezigar who eventually lost against the centre-left candidate Janez Drnovšek. In 2004, he was among the co-founders of the liberal conservative civic platform Rally for the Republic (Slovene : Zbor za republiko). Later in the same year, he became the Minister for Culture in the centre-right government led by prime minister Janez Janša. After the victory of the left-wing coalition in 2008, he was replaced by Majda Širca. In 2020, he was reappointed as Minister for Culture. [3]
He is married to the journalist and TV host Alenka Zor Simoniti. He is the brother of the diplomat Iztok Simoniti and cousin of the philologist and translator Primož Simoniti. [2]
Besides Slovene, he is fluent in English, German, French, Italian and Serbo-Croatian.
The history of Slovenia chronicles the period of the Slovenian territory from the 5th century BC to the present. In the Early Bronze Age, Proto-Illyrian tribes settled an area stretching from present-day Albania to the city of Trieste. The Slovenian territory was part of the Roman Empire, and it was devastated by the Migration Period's incursions during late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The main route from the Pannonian plain to Italy ran through present-day Slovenia. Alpine Slavs, ancestors of modern-day Slovenians, settled the area in the late 6th Century AD. The Holy Roman Empire controlled the land for nearly 1,000 years, and between the mid-14th century and 1918 most of Slovenia was under Habsburg rule. In 1918, Slovenes formed Yugoslavia along with Serbs and Croats, while a minority came under Italy. The state of Slovenia was created in 1945 as part of federal Yugoslavia. Slovenia gained its independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991, and is today a member of the European Union and NATO.
The Social Democrats is a centre-left and pro-European social-democratic political party in Slovenia led by Tanja Fajon. From 1993 until 2005, the party was known as the United List of Social Democrats. It is the successor of the League of Communists of Slovenia. As of 2022, the party is a member of a three-party coalition government with Robert Golob's Freedom Movement alongside The Left, as well as a full member of the Party of European Socialists and Progressive Alliance.
Ljubo Sirc CBE was a British-Slovene economist and prominent dissident from Yugoslavia.
Zoran Janković is a Serbian-Slovenian businessman and politician. He came to prominence in 1997 as the president of the Slovenian retail company Mercator. From October 2006 to December 2011, he was mayor of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. In October 2011, he established the Positive Slovenia party, which won the plurality of votes at the early Slovenian 2011 parliamentary election. His function as a mayor ceased on 21 December 2011, when he became a deputy in the National Assembly. After he failed to be elected as the prime minister in the National Assembly, he was re-elected as the mayor of Ljubljana and retook the position on 11 April 2012. He is the first mayor of Ljubljana to have served two terms since the end of World War II.
The Slovene lands or Slovenian lands is the historical denomination for the territories in Central and Southern Europe where people primarily spoke Slovene. The Slovene lands were part of the Illyrian provinces, the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary. They encompassed Carniola, southern part of Carinthia, southern part of Styria, Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca, Trieste, and Prekmurje. Their territory more or less corresponds to modern Slovenia and the adjacent territories in Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, where autochthonous Slovene minorities live. In the areas where present-day Slovenia borders to neighboring countries, they were never homogeneously ethnically Slovene.
Alenka Puhar is a Slovenian journalist, author, translator, and historian. In 1982, she wrote a groundbreaking psychohistory-inspired book "The Primal Text of Life" about the 19th century social history of early childhood in Slovene Lands, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book was in 2010 the subject of a television documentary that was in 2010 televised on the national RTV Slovenija. Her grandfather was the photographer and inventor Janez Puhar, who invented a process for photography on glass.
Peter Vodopivec is a Slovenian historian and public intellectual.
Peter Štih is a Slovenian historian, specialising in medieval history.
Matjaž Šinkovec is a Slovenian diplomat, politician, translator, journalist and science fiction writer. He was one of the co-founders of the Slovenian Democratic Party.
Gregor Virant is a Slovenian politician and public servant. Between 2004 and 2008, he served as Minister of Public Administration in Janez Janša's first government, between 2011–2013 he was Speaker of the National Assembly of Slovenia. He also served as Minister of the Interior and Public Administration in the government of Alenka Bratušek between 2013 and 2014.
Gregor Tomc also known as Grega Tomc is a Slovenian sociologist, musician and activist. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he was the founder and member of the Slovenian punk rock band Pankrti.
Barbara Brezigar is a Slovenian lawyer and politician. She currently serves as Secretary General at the Ministry of the Interior of Slovenia.
Karel Dežman, also known as Dragotin Dežman and Karl Deschmann, was a Carniolan liberal politician and natural scientist. He was one of the most prominent personalities of the political, cultural, and scientific developments in the 19th-century Duchy of Carniola. He is considered one of the fathers of modern archeology in what is today Slovenia. He also made important contributions in botany, zoology, mineralogy, geology and mineralogy. He was the first director of the Provincial Museum of Carniola, now the National Museum of Slovenia. Due to his switch from Slovene liberal nationalism to Austrian centralism and pro-German cultural stances, he became a symbol of national renegadism.
Tobia Lionelli was a Slovene–Italian preacher and writer in the Baroque period. His sermons had a crucial role in the affirmation of Slovene as a language. He is also known by his monastic name John Baptist of Sveti Križ in Vipava.
Majda Širca Ravnikar is a Slovenian art historian, journalist and politician. She served as Minister of Culture in the government of Borut Pahor.
Nova revija is a Slovene language literary magazine published in Slovenia.
The 8th Government of Slovenia led by Prime Minister Janez Janša was announced on 3 December 2004. The government was formed after the 2004 Slovenian parliamentary election. It was the first government of Janez Janša, and third centre-right government in the history of the Republic of Slovenia. Slovenian Democratic Party won on the elections 29% of the votes and so became the strongest parliamentary party in the National Assembly. The party nominated Janez Janša as the candidate for the mandatary, who was confirmed by the president Janez Drnovšek. It was one of the most stable governments of Slovenia, which ruled in the times of the greatest economical boom. In 2004–2006, the economy grew on average by nearly 5% a year in Slovenia; in 2007, it expanded by almost 7%. The growth surge was fuelled by debt, particularly among firms, and especially in construction. The price for a boom that veered out of control has been paid in years from 2009 onwards.
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