Predmeja Village Women Interest Group

The winners of the SIAE Award for outstanding achievements in learning and enriching one's own knowledge, the interest group of the village women from Predmeja, has as many as twenty committed members. It is thanks to them that Predmeja now looks more beautiful than ever before, while its residents and visitors have the opportunity to find out what kinds of foods used to be cooked and eaten in these places, and how people dressed.

It all started within the framework of the project on Sustainable Rural Development and Village Renewal, when they were invited to a meeting by the group organiser and ethnologist Irena Velikonja, a local by birth, to present the programme to them. Irena initially brought together eight participants, but after the work had been organised within study groups, twelve more women joined in. They met every two weeks to study, and even more often to work and talk.

Together with the ethnologist Dr Marija Makarovič, the women studied the dress code in the their area in the 19th and 20th centuries, learned how to prepare individual dishes and about their meaning, held a workshop on landscape arrangement and more. Within the study group they arranged flower beds in the most exposed parts of the village. They participate in the events organised by the local society, and also in the maintenance of the tourist study route that circles the village, incorporating all the local tourist attractions: the group members show visitors lace-making, bakery and cheese-making. In order to be able to communicate with their guests from abroad, they even started learning Italian.

Coming together to study or perform community work has established strong bonds between them, developed a sense of solidarity and also boosted their creativity, generating ever new ideas and work plans for the future. Last year they set up a tourist welcome board and arranged wooden flower pots at the entrances to the village, decorated the village chapel and tidied up the area surrounding a village monument and an old vault. This year it is the turn of the nearby marshlands and they also looking forward to another study circle they are planning to establish: "The world at your doorstep."