Valerija Skrinjar Tvrz (1928 - 2023)

The writer Valerija Skrinjar Tvrz was born on 8th November, 1928, in a mining family in Zagorje ob Savi, in a time characterised by severe economic hardships and crises. She was significantly affected by her mother’s death when she was still a child. As a resistance activist, she joined the Partisan movement when she was not even sixteen years old. Among other roles, she served as a Partisan teacher and later as a coder at the operational command of Šlander and Zidanšek brigades, under commander Franc Sever – Franta. There, she also witnessed the horrors of battles at Menina planina, where five hundred fighters escaped from being surrounded by several thousand men of the 14th SS division.

After the war she travelled across the Former Yugoslavia as a correspondent for the then national press agency Tanjug, and later, she fled from Sarajevo to Slovenia as a refugee during the War in Bosnia.

She wrote more than thirty books for young and adult audiences as well as several radio plays. She was also an active translator. For her work, she received several awards. Her trilogy Zmajeva kri (Dragon’s Blood) is a historical recollection of memories of the Zagorje’s, Zasavje’s and Slovenia’s first energy source, which triggered the transportational and industrial revolution in Slovenia in the 18th century. During those primal times of Zagorje, when Valvasor’s dragon’s blood alone, even with all its might, still was not able to launch the development of the Zagorje Brown Coal Mine, it was the mainly muscles that contributed the first “watts” of physical and spiritual energy for the town, and the people started to dig up the first remnants of solar energy from the charred trunks of submerged Oligocene swamps, held in outcroppings of the first discovered strata in and around Zagorje.

In the Zmajeva kri trilogy, the writer depicted the history of coal mining in the Zagorje coal basin in a Romanised form, and she designed her work in such a comprehensive way that it constitutes a real “mining saga”, as its narrative arc spans from the early 18th century all the way to The Second World War and even further, to the shutdown of the mine.

Valerija Skrinjar Tvrz died on 16th July, 2023.

Source: bukla.si, Dnevnik

Photo: Lidija Markelj, Dolenjski list