What made the market town of Bela Peč in the northwesternmost part of Carniola, today in Italy (Fusine in Valromana), unique was that it developed from a settlement of ironmakers in the late-established territorial princely seigniory and that, being the only ironmaking centre in Carniola, it possessed the title as well as all elements of a full market town: the stratum of full-fledged burghers, the market town council and the elected market town judge, subordinated to the administrator of the seigniory of Bela Peč. The population of this relatively small market town first appeared in written sources at the end of the Middle Ages, in 1499, after which another few decades had to pass until it came to be considered a market town. Bela Peč therefore functioned in the same manner as any other market town with a well-developed autonomy and likewise retained its autonomous bodies until the French occupation in the early 19th century. The remaining ironmaking centres, on the other hand, fell under the jurisdiction of the higher mining judge for Carniola.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40558381
Matevž Režen (1665–1722), a serf’s son from Sorško Polje in Upper Carniola, attained an extraordinary social rise through trade, which had already been something of a traditional family business. He first became a so-called freeholder and then a citizen of Škofja Loka; in 1705 he was elevated to nobility by imperial decree and was, upon purchasing an extensive seigniory of Bela Peč in 1715, granted Carniolan provincial rights and privileges as a new member of the land estates. His social rise also entailed changes in his identity. After he had moved to the urban environment, his trading ties with Italy led him to change his family name into Italian Segalla; the emperor bestowed upon him the predicate von Segalla zum Winklern. The new social position enabled Režen to take as his third wife a young woman from an old Carniolan noble family. He also married his three daughters to noblemen, one of them to a baron. The von Segalla family, whose plebeian origin has until recently been unknown, died out on the male side already in the second generation and passed almost completely into oblivion.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40558637
The chapter in the monograph reflects on the topic of demobilization after the First World War from the point of view of the Slovenian remembrance if the war. It is focused on the position in role of the Slovenian veterans, the former soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army, in the framework of the new Yugoslav State. Its unifying history was based on the narration of the victor of the war and there was no place for the veterans of the enemy’s and defeated army. The memory and the struggle of the Slovenian veterans for a proper State’s recognition of their war effort proved the difficult integration of the veteran’s community into a new social and state reality and also a very difficult situation of the war widows and war orphans, due to very low pensions. These were the result of unsettled and discordant legislation, as well as discriminatory social welfare of the veterans.
COBISS.SI-ID: 39828013