The renovated pale pink homestead is a tribute to the interior architecture and old building techniques that inspired the range of solutions used in the renovation.
During the works, the original appearance of the house was taken into account, including the color of the facade. Thanks to the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil, the Pink House, and with it Postojna, inadvertently entered the European literary map. In fact, Musil was accommodated in it when in 1917, as an officer, he did clerical work in the command of General Borojević’s 5th Army, i.e. just a stone’s throw from the Grand Hotel Adelsbergerhof. In the pink house – he shared the apartment with two other teachers from Postojna – he wrote the short story “Slovenski vaški pogreb” (Slowenisches Dorfbegräbnis), in which he masterfully sketches the funeral of Josipina Vičič, the widow of the former mayor. The funeral, which he watched from the window above the yard, wound its way from the home on the corner, where there is a bar now, to the city cemetery.
If you manage to catch the very active homeowners in the yard, ask them to show you around the house.
TIP
relive Musil’s story through a walk from the yard of the pink house, past the yellow house on the corner, all the way to the city cemetery a few hundred meters ahead, parallel to Tržaška cesta. Josipina Vičič’s grave is immediately to the right of the cemetery entrance.
Robert Musil (1880–1942), Austrian writer and theater critic, who was born in Klagenfurt, was also a reserve officer in the Slovenian area during the First World War. During the Second World War, after the Nazi occupation of Austria, he fled to Switzerland, where he died. Musil was trained in both technical and humanist studies, but he became famous as a modernist writer, placing him alongside literary giants such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Marcel Proust.
