Jost Franko’s Disappearing Slovenia

In 2010, Jost Franko began photographing herders in Slovenia’s Velika Planina, a traditional community in the foothills of the Kamnik-Savinja Alps. At seventeen, Franko was not old enough to legally drive, so he rode with a friend from his home in Ljubljana to the settlement, which has existed for more than five hundred years and is considered one of the most well preserved herding communities in Europe. Each June, herdsmen lead their cattle on a seven-hour journey to the highland pastures from the valleys of the Kamnik region. They travel overnight, to keep the animals from overheating, and graze the livestock in Velika Planina until the early fall.

Franko visited the highland plateau each summer for four years. While his initial interest was purely artistic, he told me that he soon recognized the ways in which modernization was affecting even the most rural parts of Slovenia. In previous decades, as many as sixty families took their herds to Velika Planina, but by the time Franko finished the project, last year, only twenty-one families made the trip. “I knew this place had to be documented before it completely disappears,” he said.