25 YEARS OF "PRIJATELJ", THE FIRST SLOVENIAN HAIKU MAGAZINE

It is now 25 years as I founded the first Slovenian haiku magazine Prijatelj (Friend, 友 Tomo in Japanese). It was hand-made publication, done in the way as Japanese magazin Azami, from Osaka, edited by my late friend Ikkoku Santo. It was still time of splitting Yugoslavia, the wars caused by nationalists-communist coalition were not yet finished but Prijatelj succeed to link poets from all warring sides and also to link Balkans' haiku poets with the world haiku scene. From 1996 to 1998 I published 7 issues with about 37 authors in each issue. In sum it was published 747 haiku, 29 articles, 10 renga poems (collective linked form) and about 100 haiga (drawings and aquarelles mostly).
At the time I was living in a small town Tolmin (western Slovenia, in the foots of Julian Alps by Soča river) without any personal document (like ID, or Passport) being one of 25.000 Slovenian Yugoslavs "erased" from official records (administrative ethnic cleansing). I "enjoyed" such "status" of living without papers 17 years. Prijatelj helped me much to stay alive, with some social function. It was very beginning of the haiku movement in Slovenia. After the last Prijatelj was issued, next year (1999), Jim Kacian and I started editing Knots, an anthology of Southeastern haiku poetry which was also one of great turning points in world's haiku movement, with the influence in connecting ex-Yugoslav poets. In that way Prijatelj was predecessor also of World Haiku Association founded in 2000 in Tolmin. I served as the very first WHA director about a year... Modest magazine with enormous impact. Unfortunately, it is mostly forgotten in today Slovenia.





Four issues of Prijatelj