Art historian and best-selling author / American

Happy 25th birthday, Slovenia! In you I see a new home, chosen above any other country in Europe as a place for me to settle down and for my children to grow. I see a nation which retains the good aspects of its former socialism and has cast aside the bad: with healthcare, maternity care and early childhood education of a quality that holds foreigners in awe, and at prices which would make overpriced foreign firms blush with shame. I see the most geographical beautiful country on earth, and the most biologically diverse, per square mile. I see a land of fairytale beauty, with castle-capped hills, snow-peaked mountains, vertiginous caverns, crystalline lakes, resort beaches, clouded ski trails, electric blue rivers, jewel-box alpine towns and a cosmopolitan, pocket-sized capital. I see kind, hard-working, warm-hearted people speaking a secret language, so welcoming to us foreigners who have passed over the well-trodden cobbles of Paris, London and Rome in favor of a country that has so often been called a “hidden gem” that one can hardly believe that it still remains hidden. I’m proud to call Slovenia my home, proud of its path from independence to its admirable present, proud that my children are Slovene. Vse najboljse, moja Slovenija!