Culture : Slovenia Abuzz Over Its Unique Beehive Art : Efforts to preserve the paintings get the government stirred up over nationalism.

When Josip Virient returned from America in 1920 with plans to revolutionize Slovenia’s beekeeping industry with big, modern hives, he probably had no idea he was killing one of the most distinctive features of Slovene culture.

For almost two centuries, Slovenian beekeepers had been the patrons of a unique art form. They had paid itinerant artists in the southernmost reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to paint the front boards of their drawer-like Kranjic hives with colorful scenes from the Bible, folk tales and history.

But once the gentlemen farmers of the region switched to the larger and more productive hives that Virient had seen across the Atlantic, the practice of front board painting went the way of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“You don’t find these anywhere else in the world. They may be the only thing that is truly Slovenian, as our culture has always been influenced by those who ruled us,” said Ida Gnilsak, curator of the apicultural museum in this town that for centuries was at the center of the empire’s beekeeping crafts.

True, the architecture throughout Slovenia is definitively Hapsburg, with traces of Italian influence on the coast and plenty of the box-like concrete structures that are a legacy of the Communist era. The Slovenian language is closely related to other Slavic tongues in Eastern Europe. Even the people descend from the same 6th-Century migration that brought Serbs and Croats to the Balkans.

Why Slovenes took to painting the covers of beehives more than 200 years ago remains a mystery here, even among the handful of people who have made preservation of the folk art their lives’ work.

“Some people think the beekeepers wanted to make sure their bees could identify their own hives, but that doesn’t make sense since bees had known for centuries before the painting started how to find their way home,” said Gnilsak. “I think people living here just wanted them for aesthetic reasons. They also painted their furniture at that time.”

The oldest example of embellished beehive doors dates to 1758 and depicts the Madonna and child.

Biblical scenes were prevalent during the first decades of the short-lived art, with most boards from the late 18th Century recounting stories of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Last Supper and the lives of saints. Later, in what is considered the golden age of apiary art (1820-1880), humor and folk tales dominated.

Several expressions of the “upside-down world” parody the relationship between animals and man. One front board displayed at the apiculture museum shows a cocky band of animals carrying off a trussed hunter as they smoke and banter on their way home from the kill. In another, the famous Huntsman’s Funeral, a fox weeps and deer solemnly march with candles as a bear prepares to bury their human tormentor.

One of apiary art’s most important contributions, according to Ethnographic Museum director Gorazd Makarovic, is that it provides a physical representation of folk tales otherwise passed down only through oral stories and songs.

Those unfamiliar with Slovenian folklore scratch their heads at scenes involving men’s pant being boiled for soup, fought over in a tug of war or dangled before pretty maidens. A Slovenian folk tale holds that a young girl on her death bed recovered after touching a pair of men’s pants, and thus ascribes curative powers to certain types of suspendered breeches.

Toward the end of the 19th Century, morality became a prominent theme for the front boards. Women were often depicted hauling their husbands out of bars by the hair or upbraiding their laziness as the men lay asleep in the fields.

Few of the front boards were painted by the beekeepers themselves, according to Gnilsak. Instead, artists who found themselves unsuited to the confines of the protocol-bound Hapsburg court would take to the road, roaming the rural reaches of the empire and exchanging their talent for stipends or simply room and board.

Slovenes put the traveling painters to work on their beehives, encouraging a few of the artists to specialize in the odd art form. Among the most notable was Leopold Layer of nearby Kranj, a nobleman whose penchant for gambling led him to counterfeiting and a term in jail before he found his niche as a front board painter.

Ethnographic records show that the practice of painting front boards was ubiquitous throughout what is now Slovenia, with any self-respecting beekeeper having commissioned the decoration of each of his hives. Some also hired sculptors to fashion special hives out of wood. The Radovljica museum houses several carved figures, including a Turkish soldier and a likeness of Napoleon.

The art of decorating beehives died abruptly after World War I, when Slovenia became part of Yugoslavia and lost its role as imperial honey producer. At this time, Virient introduced other apiculturists to the more efficient Western hives. A similar model subsequently developed here remains popular today with both professional and amateur beekeepers.

Apiary art drew no attention until its practice became extinct, largely because Austrian administrators regarded the painted front boards as primitive.

Today, with little more than a thousand of the naive front board paintings surviving in a handful of Slovenian museums and in the homes of private collectors, art historians are tangling with politicians over how to preserve and present their endangered cultural species.

Historians want a prominent venue for apiary art and other ethnographic exhibits, while officials in the capital of Ljubljana are wary of devoting precious resources to a museum some see as a potentially worrisome nationalist attempt to forge a Slovenian identity.

The Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana currently has none of its inventory of nearly 500 painted front boards on display because it has the use of only two small rooms for exhibits.

“We’ve begun to publish our collections in books because of the lack of space,” complained exhibits director Inja Smerdel, brandishing a thick, glossy catalogue of the stored front boards and the history of Slovenian apiculture, titled “The Man and the Bee.”

Museum officials have been lobbying for years to get their own building, as the ethnographic displays are squeezed out by the national art gallery on the premises. But Parliament has rejected proposals to convert several centrally located buildings, vacated by the Yugoslav federal government after Slovenia’s 1991 secession, into an ethnographic museum.

“It’s as if they are afraid of showing too much,” Smerdel said of Slovenian officials, who have shown a determination to discourage the nationalism that afflicts much of the rest of the former Yugoslav federation. “We don’t want to make a museum of national identity. We just want to show the accumulated knowledge of our society.”

But, for the time being, the ethnographic history of Slovenia is viewable only at provincial museums, and the only sizable display of the apiary art that is unique to the Slovenes is in this humble mountain village an hour’s drive north of the capital.