The Pink House at Tržaška Road 34
The renovated house
with a pale pink exterior is a tribute
to the Notranjska region’s architecture
and the old construction techniques.
The original appearance of
the house, including the facade
colour, was taken into consideration
during the renovation works.
The pink house, and with it Postojna,
was inadvertently put on
the European literary map thanks
to the Austrian modernist writer
Robert Musil, who was staying in the
house, only a stone's throw from Grand
Hotel Adelsbergerhof, while carrying out
office work at the headquarters of General
Borojević's 5th Army in 1917. He wrote a
short story entitled Slovenian Village Funeral
(Slowenisches Dorfbegräbnis), while staying
there and sharing an apartment with two
teachers from Postojna; in it he masterly
described the funeral of Josipina Vičič, the
former mayor's widow. The funeral procession,
which Musil watched from a window
above the courtyard, made its way from
Josipina Vičič's house on the corner, which
today houses a bar, to the town cemetery.
If you happen to meet the owners in the courtyard,
ask them to show you around the house.
Tip: You can relive Musil's story by walking
from the pink house's courtyard, past
the yellow house on the corner across the
street, and all the way to the town cemetery
a few hundred metres further on, parallel
with Tržaška Road. Josipina Vičič's grave is
located immediately to the right as soon as
you come through the cemetery entrance.
During World War I, Robert Musil (1880-1942), Austrian writer and theatre critic born in
Klagenfurt, served as a reserve officer on Slovenian
soil, among other locations. He fled to Switzerland
following the Nazi occupation of Austria, where he
died. He was educated both in technical sciences
and humanities, but came to fame as a modernist
writer, and is regarded a literary giant alongside the
likes of Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Marcel Proust.
»This was the apartment I stood in as I
was watching the funeral; a fat woman
had died, the one that had lived diagonally
across from my windows on the
other side of a wide, here somewhat
bulging, thoroughfare. In the morning,
the carpenter's boys brought the coffin;
it was winter, and they brought it on
a little handsled, and because it was a
lovely morning, they briskly slid down
the street with their spiked shoes, and
the big black box behind them was
jumping from side to side. Everyone
watching thought what handsome boys
they were and waited expectantly to see
if the sled would topple over or not.«
Robert Musil, Slowenisches Dorfbegräbnis
(The English translation of the excerpt
by Peter Wortsman and Rosman I d.o.o..)