A mass was held in front of the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows on both Friday and Sunday. Afterwards, the locals organized a fête in the herder's "Parliament" – an area of the settlement used as a dance floor. The pasture saw many visitors on all the three days, and the celebrations probably represented the peak of the summer season. On Friday, many of the visitors were from abroad, while Slovenian mountaineers predominated on Sunday.
Local herders and homemakers also offered various traditional specialties to visitors of the herders’ huts. Those visiting the Preskar Museum Cottage could also see how Trnič cheese is made. The cheese is an interesting specialty of Velika Planina – a dried hard cheese shaped into mounds that resemble women’s breasts.
The Trnič cheese was once made by the herders, who spent long months on the high-altitude pasture. They always made two cheeses and gave one to their sweethearts, while retaining the second one for themselves. Each Trnič is decorated with patterns imprinted with intricately designed wooden stick. The designs are known as “scripts.” Every herder carved out his own "script" pattern so that each cheese displayed the skill and the imagination of the author. The decorated "scripts" were then dried above open hearths in the herder’s cottages until they turned yellow-gold.
The girls who were given the Trnič cheeses accepted them as romantic gifts, but if the herder who gave them the gift meant little to them, they simply ate the cheese.
Because they are hard cheeses, they are particularly suitable to be eaten grated on various dishes. Tourist authorities form the town of Kamnik are trying to turn Trnič cheeses into a distinctive local souvenir and make the town well-known for its Trnič dishes. As part of this effort, restauranteurs from the Kamnik area have come up with several tasty dishes featuring the cheese. Visitors to the Herder’s Festival had the opportunity to shape and decorate Trnič cheese as the Preskar Cottage. They could also taste dishes flavored with the cheese in a variety of Kamnik restaurants.
Miro Štebe, TV Slovenija
Translated by J. B.
